Maybe I'm treating the question as more specific than it needs to be, but in your example it appears to me as though player 1's agency is being denied. Twice she stated her action clearly, and yet somehow she failed to get the results of that action back from you.
You don't have to wait until all players are agreed before allowing a player to act. Now, OK, you don't want the party to split unless really necessary, but until they're actually out of earshot of each other, let each player get on with what they want to do. Running through your example hopefully will show the principles I mean:
GM: Okay, you're standing on the edge of the forest.
Player 1: Okay, I ready my bow and start forward.
GM: fine
Player 2: Hold on, I'm still talking to this other guy.
GM: Player 1, are you scouting ahead alone?
Player 1: I'll take a look, I won't go far until the others catch up.
Player 3: Did we stock up on bread? I need to put on my night vision
goggles.
GM: If the bread's not on your equipment list then you didn't stock
up [or if that's not your style of game, "yes, you stocked up on usual provisions at the supermarket yesterday"]. You now have your goggles on.
Player 4: [Crazy roleplaying thing!]
GM: [Crazy roleplaying response]
GM: Okay, are you guys going into the forest?
Player 1: I am, yeah.
GM: You start to walking into the trees...
Player 2: One sec, I need to cast detect evil.
GM: No problem, but Player 1 was already doing this while you finished with the other guy and that roleplaying thing happened.
... the undergrowth is mostly pretty thick, but you easily find what
might be an animal trail. You'll be able to travel much faster along
the trail if you want to. Player 2, if you've finished your conversation with the other guy, you cast Detect Evil. Nothing in
range. I assume you maintain it as you start into the forest?
Player 2: of course
GM: You can't see exactly where player 1 is, but she can't have got far. Okay, actions from everybody else?
Principles:
- Stay in the conversation
- Respond to actions and requests for information as quickly as possible. But in the case of Player 1 setting off ahead alone, I think it's also reasonable to give the others an opportunity to react and for Player 1 to confirm before doing something that takes a little while and might be foolish. You don't want a conversation that goes, "1: I ready my bow and start into the forest, "2: hang on a sec...", "GM: 1, you fall in a spiked pit and get ambushed by 40 goblins", "1: well, actually, I didn't mean I'd leave the party, I was about to say I'd have waited when 2 said to hang on but you interrupted", "GM: Ah. I totally didn't get that from what you said".
- If something can happen, narrate it happening.
- You don't need to design the adventure specially to avoid delays. Once the players get used to the style, they can keep the action going just by acting. Or they can stop when they really need to, they're in control.
- Don't ask the players what's happening. Ask the players what they're doing, tell them what's happening.
Now, there's a whole other scenario you have to be able to deal with:
GM: Okay, you're standing on the edge of the forest.
Player 1: Okay, I ready my bow and start forward.
All other players: WAIT!!! We need to make a plan.
Player 2: Also, I'm still talking to this other guy
GM: Player 1, are you scouting ahead alone?
Player 1: No, I'll stick with the others until we have a plan.
All players: refuse to move while they spend 30 minutes arguing the
best tactics for hiking.
In this case you have mass analysis-paralysis. There are a few ways to break it:
Specifically tell the players that their precise plan doesn't matter. As soon as any encounter begins you will prompt them for their formation, and you will allow for sensible precautions. This doesn't suit all playing styles, but it saves a lot of time making preparations for things that never happen. The game style issue you want to resolve is, will the players be punished for acting without thorough explicit preparation? If so, then that might be why Player 3 is worried about bread, and it's the nature of a "10 foot pole to check for traps" game.
An extreme version of this is to run the game such that whatever the players suggest is considered reasonable. The world conforms to their expectations rather than the other way around. Then they don't need to plan at all, and the way to reach group agreement is not to wait until everyone agrees, it's to take turns to speak, and agree with and build on whatever the previous person said. They can improvise, they can take turns to contribute, and no matter how stupid what they do is, you will respond "yes, and...". Not "no, because" or "oh, this other thing first needs to happen first", or "you do that but you die because you never said you'd put your armour on". Again, this won't suit all styles, it's not very simulation-y. But they'll stop doing pointless boring things, because any interesting thing they think of is worth saying.
Guide the players through making the plan. You don't want to give them too much OOC information, but usually the characters have expertise that the players don't, and you can bolster their confidence by confirming their guesses and supplying general information at the right times. Confident people make decisions quicker:
GM: Okay, you're standing on the edge of the forest.
Player 1: Okay, I ready my bow and start forward.
Player 2: Hold on, I'm still talking to this other guy.
Player 3: Did we stock up on bread? I need to put on my night vision
goggles.
Player 4: [Crazy roleplaying thing!]
GM: Alright. Player 1, you're going to scout ahead, and you're ready
for trouble, that's sensible. Player 2, sorry, the other guy really
doesn't have anything else to say. Player 3, yes, you're fully
stocked, the night vision goggles will negate the darkness penalty
under the trees. Player 4, I like your style. Do you all fall into
formation behind player 1?
[In your transcript, at this point you said "are you guys going into the forest?". That is to say, you asked the group for a consensus before giving them any feedback on their individual issues. If you do that a lot, it's probably the main reason things get stalled.]
Player 2: One sec, I need to cast detect evil.
GM: I'm fine with that if Player 1 will wait?
Player 1: For one round? Sure.
Player 3: I'll stick close behind Player 1 since I have the best
sight.
GM: Good. 2, Results of Detect Evil are [whatever]. 4, once you're
done invoking the wrath of Gragnar on any fool who dares oppose you,
where are you in formation?
Player 4: Rear-guard, if everyone's happy with that. The Book of Gragnar commands us to, "Pity especially the fool who tries to sneak up you in a forest".
GM: Sounds good. Doing that thing you normally do when you're
rear-guard? That leaves player 2 in the middle. Onwards!
Design adventures so that the party doesn't have a lot of time to waste. You don't have to railroad, but make sure that there is always something happening to them. They can deal with it however they like, but they must act. After all, arguably if there's nothing happening to them and they're free to delay as much as they like then that's practically the definition of "downtime between sessions" ;-) So, players don't arrive at the edge of a forest at their own leisure, they arrive at the edge of a forest as a consequence of dealing with the previous problem:
GM: Okay, you're standing on the edge of the forest. You can hear those
enraged villagers with pitchforks approaching, but as you already know
they're very superstitious about the forest, and you suspect they
probably won't enter it this close to dark.
All players: start to plan
GM: [after a couple of minutes or so, representing the party's head start] The villagers have crested the hill behind you, and the front few break into a run. They're in missile range and will reach you in a minute or less, but then again you never thought much of their combat ability.
All players: No, we're not slaughtering the whole village! We get into the forest.
Finally, be aware that "keeping the game moving" doesn't need to mean physical activity or plot progression. If Player 4 goes off on a crazy roleplaying thing that the other players react to and enjoy, then it's irrelevant that it isn't part of your plan for the session. It's as much a part of the game as anything you invent. So encourage it to play out properly, and as long as it's not boring the forest can wait. Similarly, if the players just plain enjoy bickering in character over their plans, you can let that be part of what defines that particular campaign. Just build 20-30 minutes per significant group decision into your session plan. Less work for you!
To do this you need to get buy-in from the "more action-oriented players". If all they like is combat then that's pretty much a non-starter, you can't run a game this way for them. But otherwise you need to stop them tuning out by soliciting their responses, and making those responses matter in the conversation. A frustrated character who spends the whole argument saying, "we need to stop arguing about this and get into the forest" in 10 different ways is still an active player. One trick is to keep track of who is speaking, and if someone hasn't spoken for a while specifically ask them, "what do you think, what are you doing while this is going on?". That gives the player the freedom to take a turn in the conversation, or for that matter to wander off into trouble if they like. If you frequently find that you ask a player what they're doing and they say "nothing" and tune back out again, then you still have a problem and need to address personally with that player what they need from the game. Some players enjoy spectating for some of the time, and might look tuned out when they aren't, so you do need to ask.
There's an apparent paradox in character creation for an unfamiliar game: to effectively and confidently make a character requires knowing the game, but to know the game you have to already have made and played a character. It's not really a paradox, but it can feel like it when you have limited time to play and want to get started as soon as possible in order to get right into the fun of an ongoing campaign.
There's a simple solution that has worked well and consistently for me, but which requires trusting that patience pays off.
Play a demo session first
What has been successful for me across RPGs is to run a one-shot demo session using the new game before we make our real characters in our real campaign. This introduces the players to the moving parts of a character through hands-on playing experience, which gives them a basic understanding of what's important when making characters. This can also effectively introduce the players to the setting and playstyle that they will be making characters for later.
Whether the demo characters are pre-made or made by the players doesn't seem to matter. (If they know these are throw-away characters, they don't suffer nearly as much analysis paralysis in making their own.) What matters most is that the demo session gives them an experience that reflects the realities of play that should be informing their character creation choices.
For example, in a game where understanding the skill system is critical for character creation and evaluating character effectiveness (RuneQuest 6), I have run an "obstacle course" session where they made characters and then played through an in-setting coming-of-age trial that involved a lot of skill use (but no combat or risk of death). By the end, players had a visceral understanding of what was and wasn't a good skill rating — one player initially thought that 35% was a good skill and spread their points around to hit that number in as many skills as possible, and came out of the demo realising that she'd underestimated that by half and that choosing a few core skills to maximise first, before spreading the other points around, was key. They all also profited from the crash course in the cultural context they'd later be playing in.
In another game where the interplay of character creation choices and combat is a big deal (Savage Worlds), I had them make one-off characters and then threw them into a dungeon that I knew well enough to run on-the-fly. They had the freedom to go where they wished and test their characters in a variety of non-combat and combat situations. As a result, they got a good sense of how the game functions overall and in its combat, magic, opposed skill, and healing subsystems in a very short time, and were confident making characters for the longer-scale fantasy campaign we later kicked off. Notably, when we started that campaign we had a new player, who had a much harder time creating her character than the ones who had the demo session initiation.
In both these examples, taking the time to give the group early hands-on experience with characters and the system meant that the players were confident and quick in future character creation for the real game. The difference was like night and day: where before they were lost and stumbling through the options, afterwards they were focused and dove into the chargen process with clear goals in mind.
Best Answer
I favor very open, liberal character creation rules, in both the games I run and in the games I play. I chafe quickly at too many restrictions, and feel that some DMs who enforce too many are shooting themselves in the foot.
But even from that perspective, your rules are really very minimal. Even with my preferences, I still expect more rules than that—you really are being very open here. Allowing a player to play two PCs? That’s quite generous (but not so uncommon for small groups—I suggest offering the same to other players, though!). And wanting to know what the source of material they use is really pretty much a given for any DM. I’ll have to take your word for the balance problems of Yuan-ti purebloods and bugbears, but really nixing just two, obscure races for PCs is quite tame as far as a banlist goes.
Blocking the chaotic evil alignment bugs me slightly more, in that really any alignment can cause “My Guy” problems, and I feel like it is better to address that problem itself, but OK, new players, I can see it.
And that’s it, as far as requirements you’ve described. That’s really quite minimal: none of these requirements are too severe individually, nor is there overly many of them. Meets my preferences, personally, and with quite a lot of room to spare! What is OK to control and what isn’t is massively subjective (and depends on more than just the group, but also the setting, campaign, and so on), but I find it very hard to believe that anyone would feel you’ve gone overboard here.
The real issue, it seems to me, is that you have new players; they don’t know what is or isn’t expected. They seem to have real buy-in and enthusiasm, since they seem to be going online to find options (presumably where they found this homebrew, and quite likely also where at least some of the ideas of the two-character combo came from)—which is great. Except that they don’t know how to judge what they read online, and they don’t know how much of it is stuff they have to work with the DM on versus stuff they can reasonably just “expect” to be available.
This is why I tend to prefer to do character-creation with new players in person, together. Craft a party together, focusing more on story and character, with you and/or the books there to provide relevant rules for bringing that character to life. Even when you have to say “no,” it’s much better when you can do it immediately, rather than after the player has chosen something and gotten emotionally invested in the idea. In the future, that’s the approach I recommend.
In the meantime, I suggest that if your players resist any of these rules, you work with them to try to come to a method of representing their character that satisfies you both. If that means toning down the bugbear they had their heart set on, so be it. If that means finding analogous options to the homebrew they like within the official rules (including by “refluffing” the official options—teaching new players to not feel restricted by the characters described by the books is a great thing!), then OK. If that means allowing the CE character, replacing your ban with stern warnings about getting along with the party, well, like I said: it doesn’t have to be a problem, and any alignment can be a problem, so really, maybe it will work out (and if not, well, you did warn the player).
But don’t feel that you’re being overbearing! The only reason I suggest you work with these players at all is because they’re new, you don’t want to damage their excitement and enthusiasm, and the things they didn’t know have to be excused. If these players had been in even a single campaign before, I would instead be telling you that they should know better than to try to complain about these minimal rules, and recommending that you stay firm with them.