I've thought about instituting a 'one minute per turn' rule. I was pretty pokey myself yesterday when I had monsters on three different pages in the MM, but I'm worried that the two players I'm thinking of don't really enjoy the game in the first place. I'm trying to think of a nice way to say, "please consider what you're going to do on your next turn before it comes up."

BSG

I do have the nukes and can use them. I'm also worried about that heavy raider, how soon before it becomes a real threat for us?

BSG

It will take the heavy raider 2 activations to get on board before you jump. 20% of the Crisis Cards have a heavy raider activation.

BSG

The heavy raider doesn't fire but it does attempt to land a boarding party. I'm not positive but I think it can do that the next time raiders are activated. The boarding party then begins to advance along the boarding party track until someone moves to the armory and kills it by rolling a 7 or better. If the centurion gets to the end of the track the humans lose. This didn't come close to happening the last two games.

edit: or what billytea said.

BSG

Billytea, I know the nuke can take out additional raiders if they are in the same sector, can the nukes do collateral damage to friendlies too? I don't think so, but want to make sure before I fully suggest the idea. Kalshane and Sean, any input before I choose? I want to try and keep the game rolling, but value the group input.

There are different flavors of "never ready when their turn comes."

If the player isn't ready because he has questions, or because he wants to get validation and consensus, I don't mind, and everyone helps out.

If he's never ready because he's thumbing his iPhone or playing dolls with the minis, I start with loud reminders ("Hey! Your turn!"), then advance as needed through giving him a short window, running his character for him, throwing his toys into the trash, and disinviting him.

It's never gotten above DefCon DM-runs-the-character, as the other players REALLY don't like it when that happens and police their own.

As a sidebar, the DH ran a game once (Tomb of Horrors, 1e style) where every player was given a card at random with an Annoying Gamer Archetype on it.

You won if you met the conditions on your card. Like "The Dice Collector" had to wind up with a certain number of other players' dice. In this game, "The Distracted Gamer" won, by getting someone else to explain where the party was 5 times.

The one I find most annoying seems to just sit there & then where her turn comes up she starts looking at her character sheet to decide what to do. She very rarely joins in roleplay. I realized it was an issue when I was writing the session recap and her character's name only came up twice.

Plus we have a new guy who has taken over an NPC of mine and run with it like whoa. Before this session I wrote up some additional character background for him and I had some roleplay planned that revolved around his character but because the battle took so long we never got to it.

p.s. I totally want to steal your DH's idea, raq.

We used to have a guy who would wander off, or work on some craftsy thing at the table or, no shit, fall asleep.

We killed his character a couple of times. Then we just didn't call him anymore.