Action Pacing In Play

I really find long action scenes in play, to be tedious.  By which I mean, against a real clock by a real table in real life, and where a play session may only allow as much time playing as the time to watch a movie or two or a few binge episodes of some TV show... I don't want action to take more than the same five or ten minutes (at most) of those action scenes.

OK, so give a little extra room for verbal description, but really, the days in which a set-piece action scene takes two hours is just too long.

Gen Y and Millenials do a lot more gaming online in whatever, and lots of indie gamers do youtube play sessions to which they refer in discussion posts.  I really have only watched Wil Wheaton's Table Top episodes before, and they are genuinely entertaining, largely because of the magic of editing.  I decided to look at a youtube play session by one of the big names associated with Fate the other day.  I really like this guy's thoughtful essays on game play and game design, but I couldn't get through more than 10 minutes of his action scene, due to the pacing.

Now much like golf or tennis, playing is more interesting than watching.  But from that, I have several thoughts.

One of the attractive things is the open, free-form narrative nature of action.  I love that.  Codified formally as overcome or create advantage actions (and attack and defend), you can do everything that is otherwise made in really crunchy lists in, for instance, traditional D&D.  But I don't want to have to memorize lists, I just want to do whatever I can think of in context of the moment, and then want to forget it mechanically.  My favorite action scene in a game ever, was a fight in which I was mechanically outclassed by two opponents, and alone.  I had to think of creative ways to use my environment to tip the scales in my favor, which the rules did not explicitly address, but the GM was flexible and we made a great Jackie Chan kind of action scene.  Fate, with create advantage actions and aspects has this baked into the mechanics.

The problem arises when the rules are stated naked on top of the narrative.  Looking at the video play session, I see the thing that I want to avoid.  I think that he was doing this partly to demo and explain the mechanics, but I want a more seamless way to get past having to state "that sounds like you are being Forceful", or "that sounds like a a create an advantage".  Furthermore, it occurs to me that one thing that seems to be done in Fate games, is overtly making a logistical issue of writing out the aspects on a card, when in more traditional games such things are stated and otherwise just tracked and forgotten as required.  This is related to the same problem I have with the whole multiple die rolling resolution in whatever game, which is to say that it breaks rhythm and thus drags out pacing.  

I don't know how any of the core designers of Fate play at their tables, but other designers have put forward other alternatives like Jadepunk's quick duels method which is essentially a contest rather than a conflict mechanic.  However, Lenny Balsera did make this observation on the Fate G+ forum:

The most important of those is, having the GM roll dice actively increases the swinginess of a conflict scene, which a lot of people perceive as a feature. Having your opponent always present a static difficulty reduces a lot of the variability from round to round, makes outcomes and fate point spending more predictable, etc. So that's basically the trade you make there, added chaos and added handling time vs. less chaos and less handling time. My preference is, if we're gonna agree to engage a system specific to having conflicts, to push in the direction of more chaos.

Also, having the GM roll actively engages the GM in the same kind of economy management stuff as the players, and forces some of the same prioritization, and I think that tension is an important one in Fate play. There's more of a sense of being an equal participant—as the GM, you also have a limited number of FPs, and depending on how your rolls go, you're gonna have to make some decisions. How important is that opponent, really? Should I concede now and take my licks to build resources for the next scene? Etc.  

Which is interesting.  The important elements are 1) the swingy uncertainty of contested die rolls vs. a less swingy single roll bell curve; 2) the chaos of more rolls and thus more chances for a missed success; 3) the more active competition of the fate point economy on both the GM and player side. The cost of doing business this way, is more time on the play session clock.

So this equation is essentially: Uncertainty + Chaos + Balanced Competition = Fun (vis a vis Fate conflicts).

It seems to me that perhaps if the thrill of uncertainty, and the illusion of chaos (or a different kind of chaos), and the balanced competitive element can be mixed, perhaps by reducing the second, time on the clock can be reduced by simplifying mechanics.

...hmmm... how then to change the chaos, and yet reduce the mechanics?...

More precisely, how to shift the mechanics to some kind that does not actually require stopping in real time to manage the mechanical transaction in order to preserve the conversational narrative pace?

How can you get the chaos and pacing of say, the card game War, or Pit, or at very least Mau?