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Archives of Nethys

Archives of Nethys

Pathfinder RPG (1st Edition) Pathfinder RPG (2nd Edition) Starfinder RPG

Rules Index | GM Screen | Player's Guide
GM Core / Chapter 1: Running the Game / Running Encounters / Running the Encounter

Speed of Play

Source GM Core pg. 26 2.0
Encounters should move quickly, giving the PCs just enough time to savor successes and lament failures. This requires effort from everyone, but you can make it easier by running creatures and NPCs efficiently. First off, don’t worry too much about little mistakes you make when running encounters. If you forgot to apply a creature’s special bonus or didn’t take an action that would’ve prevented the creature from taking damage, it isn’t a big deal. Keep an eye on what you emphasize during the adventure as well. Be quick when describing a normal attack, but spend a little more time on a critical hit or a big spell. This all boils down to significance. It’s fine to slow down the game for something important, but it’s best to move briskly through anything less so. As you run the game, you’ll quickly develop a sense for what’s significant and what’s not.

Looking up Rules

Source GM Core pg. 26 2.0
One of the primary ways the game slows down is when you or another player needs to look up a rule. For something that isn’t too impactful, it’s better to just make a ruling on the spot and move on. Tell the player they can look it up when it isn’t their turn, and you’ll play it as written after that, but that the game needs to move on in the meantime. It’s okay to look up something that’s both significant and heavily rules-dependent, such as a spell description or the death and dying rules. Even then, reciting a full chunk of rules text can pull players out of the flow of play, so feel free to summarize. It also helps to train your players to look things up in advance if they think they’ll need them, so they’re ready to go when their turns come around. This can be tough as a GM since it’s essentially always your turn. However, you can ask a player to look something up for you, or, if you need to pause long enough to reference certain books, remind the players to plan for their next turns while you’re busy.

Rewinding

Source GM Core pg. 26 2.0
Though “rewinding” can happen in any mode of play, it’s usually most troublesome in encounters. Rewinding happens when a player forgot to add in a certain bonus or take a certain action, or wishes they’d used their actions in a different order, and wants to rewind to account for what they missed. The best policy is usually to let them rewind as needed within their own turn but stop them before they intrude into someone else’s. This keeps interruptions within reasonable bounds. You might find some adjustments are easy enough to make outside of a turn and can be allowed. For instance, if someone forgot to add the extra damage from a runic weapon spell to one of their hits, it’s pretty easy to reduce the monster’s HP on another turn, but if they realized their attack missed only because they forgot the bonus from bless, that could be too much of an interruption. Your ruling should stand on such matters. Try to be consistent about what kinds of things you’ll rewind for and when.

Complex Rolls

Source GM Core pg. 27 2.0
You'll often make multiple rolls at the same time, especially when attempting saving throws for multiple creatures against area or multi-target spells. This can sometimes take a considerable amount of time if you're resolving the result of each creature's save and then determining its degree of success. To do so quickly, you could use one of the following techniques. Each of the examples below uses a PC's spell as an example, but these recommendations also apply to similar rolls that aren't caused by spells.
  • Get the PC's Difficulty Class first, and have the player roll damage while you roll the saving throws.
  • Use separate colors of dice for the different types of foes, or arrange the dice in such a way that it's easier for you to tell which creatures or NPCs are which.
  • Go in order from the best enemy results (the highest total) to the worst. This means you'll need to ask for the results on a success only once, the damage on a failure once, and so on. It also means you only need to figure out when you're moving to a lower degree of success, rather than recalculating them each time.
This can be more of a challenge when asking for PC rolls. Make sure you get the attention of every player whose PC is affected. Have them all roll, but hold off on announcing their results. While they roll their saves, roll damage or other variable effects. Then, announce the DC. Say, “Who critically succeeded?” and “Who succeeded?” and so on down the line, so you only have to share the results for each category once. You can choose not to announce the DC if you want and ask for results by multiples of 10 instead, but it typically takes longer, and it's still possible that the players can determine or estimate the DC anyway.