Yes, you can make players pre-plan. You nudge them.

No amount of nudging will make some players do anything. Some players are obstinate and frankly not very good, but honestly the solution to "this player won't stop looking at their phone and their turns take forever" may be to remove them from the group.

Why does it matter how much time everyone takes?

I don't want to wait 5 minutes for someone to dither and dither and finally decide "I attack"

https://archive.is/9kNLR

I just use archive.is for paywall breaking. Magic.

I didn't vote for him and neither did anyone I know :(

This was a weirdly aggressive comment.

The solution is the pre-planning, which does not need a timer, nor is it a guaranteed result of a timer.

You cannot make players pre-plan. The timer encourages pre-planning, or at least rapid decision making on the fly. Both have the desired result of the game moving at a quicker pace.

It also has the benefit of creating an impartial tool for measuring, instead of relying on subjective "You're taking a long time." It is harder to argue with a clock. This is an advantage.

There was a problem, and in trying to fix it, the DM created a second problem.

What is the second problem?

I'm pretty sure it's a pretty well known phenomenon that conspiracy theories funnel down into antisemitism

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/why-conspiracy-theorists-always-land-on-the-jews/671730/

I don't know what point you were trying to make

Anti-vaxxers have hurt many people, but maybe you didn't mean them when you said these people".

Flat-earth belief likely has secondary unwanted effects, like how all conspiracy theories eventually funnel into anti-semitism. It's also a huge opportunity cost.

The other day I was updating something and a test failed. I looked at it and saw I had written it, and left a comment that said like "{Coworker} says this test case is important". Welp. He was right. Was a subtle wrong that could've gone out to customers, but the wrong stayed just on my local thanks to that test.

This is a good post.

What we’re really getting boxed in by is the very idea of capitalist rent-seeking through the operation of a business. When you’re selling anything else, the rent-seeking is considered a value-generating profit motive of an entrepreneur. But as soon as what you’re selling involves sex worker’s services, we realize what we’re advocating is human trafficking.

This is a good point in particular. However, it slams into my go to hypothesis for why so many things are kind of bad: People are emotional first and sometimes exclusively so. It happens to all of us. But for most people, sex stuff feels bad in a way that rent-seeking doesn't. You could make as many points as you want with irrefutable logic, flow charts, and diagrams, and it won't get through the skittering heartbeat of "BUT IT FEELS BAD"

I don't really know how to fix this. Dismantle conservative power structures that are centered around placating fear and disgust maybe? If sex work was normalized, in a couple generations many people would probably feel fine about it.

I would have questions about how they work with a team and structure.

Are they going to be okay with planning work out two weeks ahead? Sometimes hobbyists do like 80% of a task and then wander off (it's me with some of my hobbies).

Are they going to be okay following existing code standards? I don't want to deal with someone coming in and trying to relitigate line lengths or other formatting stuff, or someone who's going to reject the idea of standards altogether.

Are they going to be okay giving and getting feedback from peers? Sometimes code review can be hard for people. I recently had a whole snafu at work where someone was trying to extend some existing code into something it wasn't meant to do*, and he got really upset when the PR was rejected.

Do they write tests? Good ones? I feel like a lot of self taught hobbyists don't. A lot of professionals don't. I don't want to deal with someone's 4000 line endpoint that has no tests but "just works see I manually tested it"

I've definitely had some coworkers that in retrospect we should not have hired. But I've also had people I was iffy on that turned out great. Hiring is hard.

I don't always run a timer, but it is a tool in my box.

Mostly it comes out when I feel like the players are spinning their wheels. Like, they know they need to get into the server room on the 10th floor. There's a front door with security, a back door with an alarm, etc. The players are just going round and round with ideas but not doing anything.

I'll say "I'm starting a five minute timer. If it hits zero, something interesting will happen".

If it hits zero and they're still stuck, then as foretold something interesting happens. A rival group rolls up and firebombs the entrance before heading inside. A security drone spots them and is calling the cops. Whatever. Something that forces them to act.

In combat rounds I sometimes do the same, but only if it feels like they're not making progress. Maybe it's a little rude sometimes, but I value keeping the scene moving forward. I don't want to keep spending three minutes on "should I move? How far can I move again? Is there a range penalty? What if I use a spell first can I still shoot?" stuff. Especially if it's rules minutia they should already know.

The amount of times I had to remind an old group's bard that yes, in DND 5e you can move AND take an action was too high.