Suggestions for speeding up play
Hey all. I have a campaign going with myself and 4 other players. For the most part, 3 or so players generally stay pretty engaged in the game each session. The other 2 though-- they show up for everywhere session, yes, but are often minimally engaged and I would like to keep them in it the whole time like the other players do. Yes, personalities are different and not everyone wants to be immersed. But as the game group organizer and GM, I want to make sure I'm doing what I can.
My suspicion is that the culprit is the game's pace. My one knock against Sentinels DE is that play is not simultaneous and therefore when playing in a group with a 1:1 hero/ player ratio, it can be a long time between plays. 2 players can stay pretty engaged as they manage the environment and villain but that leaves 3 hanging around. I've considered house ruling a simultaneous mechanic but there are so many things that would have to change about the game. Before I try that, I want to try to speed up the admin game so that time between turns is much reduced.
Does anyone have methods they use to quicken the pace in a multiplayer game?
Edit: Thank you for everyone's feedback. One person posted a comment and then deleted it about me having a "bad attitude" and being the problem. Look, I get how that can be read in my posts. There was really only one comment that basically said to do a different activity or get different friends. As a GM and organizer of other types of events, I simply disagree with the, even joking, notion that we abandon friends. If I am organizing something, it is my job to pay attention to the engagement of the people and figure out what I can do to make the experience better for people. That is true in games as it is in other areas of life. I can't make everyone happy, but I can certainly try and listen to why something may not be working for them. And if that means adjusting aspects of the game, well, we are smart people just like the designers of Sentinels and we are just as capable of designing and adjusting things and testing them out.
To that point, one of the players was happy to pilot the villain which helped for one. We put a little more of our "Role play" into the game and that also seemed to help. But I will be honest, the transition to simultaneous play isn't all that bad and also helped.
For anyone that wants to try it, here were the basic rules:
Proceed through phases together. You only move from phase to phase when all effects are over.
For effects that only modify your board state (e.g., "Draw 1 card", or playing a damage reduction ongoing) you can play those whenever.
For effects that affect the board state elsewhere (e.g., other heroes drawing cards, buffs and debuffs, damage, etc), you play out the card and then return to turn order just like the original design. So whichever Hero is first in turn order resolves those effects, then 2nd, etc. This preserves certain things about play sequencing that keep cards balance. For example, in sequential play, if the 3rd Hero allows people to draw cards, those cards would not be available for the 1st and 2nd Hero to play until the next play phase. If you ignore that inherent design, you kind of create a cascading effect where players can get card draw during play phases they might not otherwise have as immediate. So when it matters, you adopt turn order resolution.
This really only requires one errata-type effect: for buffs with durations, like Legacy's Galvanize, you have to change the wording. Basically, if Legacy resolves Galvanize during the power phase, then you wrap up the Hero joint turn, you only have environment and villain turns before the joint Hero start phase beings. Which means the Heroes would not be able to capitalize on the effect. So these powers essentially read as, "End Phase: Until your next End Phase, +1 damage for allies", or whatever the effect is. So you just bump back the timing a little bit.
And that's really it. We played a few games with different combos of Heroes and found it flows really well. The only downside is you no longer get your moment to shine. Some Heroes, like Alpha in our playgroup, tend to have big turns. And so you do lose a little bit of the "oh shit, here Alpha goes" moment because that activity is now interspersed with the activity of all the Heroes. But it does significantly increase the amount of time you are active in the game.