Combat Communication

As pointed out in this post, the tactical communication most groups of players go through during a combat is detrimental to much of the feel of the game. It moves them out of character and into tactician mode, with the group of them playing chess as best they can. Well, maybe it doesn't become quite that dry, but it is still far removed from playing in depth as your character would.

The disconnect from playing as your character in combat is understandable though. Having become attached to the character, the player wants to keep them alive, and so for combat, they become a group of arm chair tacticians instead of a team of people fighting for their lives.

So, to aid in bringing players back into character, I am going to propose a simple rule to them, which follows the constraints listed in the linked post. The rule is aimed only at dealing with over abundant communication during combat, in a more elegant way than how Pathfinder currently does, which is simply via DM discretion and means I need to act as the talking police, not a job I really want.

So the proposed rule,

"Per round of combat, a player may say no more than 3 sentences pertaining directly to the combat. They may bank 1 sentence from the previous round to use later"

So its a very simply rule, but alone it does not make combat more involved, it only makes players think longer on what they want to say, and deliver it more concisely. I do have a plan to augment this rule with others that will make the combat system hopefully more engaging. Nothing to do but try at this point.