Your goal as Game Master is to tell a fantastic story and immerse the players into your world. When something causes the game to halt - a dropped die, a phone call, or a rule clarification - the players are ripped away from the fantasy. Here are a few tools that you can use to mitigate common in-game time wasters:

Use Roll Boxes

One of the tasks of a great Gamemaster is the ability to keep the game moving, anything that unintentionally slows down the pace takes people out of the game. Anyone who's played a dice game without a roll box knows that dice always go flying off the table, which causes everything to come to a quick halt while the player searches for the die, tells everyone the roll, and then asks the GM if it counts - it's a lot of wasted time.

Roll boxes make it so that this whole process never happens. It may be a small amount of time you're saving, but for a dramatic scene or intense fight, it can make the difference between an awesome moment and a lagging storytelling exercise.

Remember to get one for yourself (the GM) and one for the players.

Use Name Lists

I'm currently running a game that takes place in the Pathfinder world, called Golarion, in a country called Cheliax.

Each country has names that are particular to that area, so coming up with them on the fly is another little time waster. One that you can resolve with a simple printout of names.

To create a list, I typed "Chelaxian name generator" into google and clicked on the first site. Then I put all the names into a word doc and printed it out.

As the players run through the game, they'll without a doubt, encounter some random Chelaxians, and I'll have this sheet handy to pull up a name.

After a session, I take note of who they met, where they met this person, and any particular qualities worth noting. I also cross the name off the list to be sure that I don't reuse it.

Additionally, I keep another sheet of international names just in case I want someone more exotic to show up.

Encourage players to use a program like Herolab.

More than anything, the managing of "stuff" that brings tabletop RPGs to a crawl.

Luckily, we live in an age of fantastic award-winning RPG programs like Herolab.

All of the players in my current game use this program to keep track of everything that happens to their characters. Spells, Weight, Abilities, Magic Items, Money -- descriptions, modifiers, and rolls are only a click away with these programs.

Since my players are new to the game, I don't have to go through explaining how to add up each roll - the program does it for them. If they want to know how the number is generated, they can just hover over the stats, and the math pops up.

For a DM you can also buy or build specific encounters and keep track of initiative by using the tactical interface.

If Herolab isn't for you because of the price, or because you're running game it doesn't support, there are plenty of free programs out there that may not be as complex, but will still speed up your game.

3 More Quick Timewaster Elimination Tips

• Have players use water bottles to avoid spills.
• Have players silence their cellphones and then place them somewhere off the table.
• Have the players keep only one set of dice on the table, not all the dice they own to create more space, and less time choosing new dice for every roll.

Thanks for reading,
Decimus

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