So, I have a 4-player game going on where I ran into the whole "everybody seems to be waiting for someone else to move" thing. And when that player did, it triggered a flurry of action that's sort of left one player out of the scene.

It sheds light on a conundrum. You don't want everyone to be waiting too long for someone to post, but it also sucks if you constantly get scooped by folks who can post more frequently than you can. It's not a laggard thing, it's just that some folks are busy and really need to wait for the weekend or whatever.

Hardcoding some sort of placeholder mechanic that locks out posting is undesirable, I think, because it kind of enslaves everyone to the pace of the slowest poster.

But what about a data-driven approach? What if everyone can see along the character portrait side of the screen how many moves each player has made in the scene?

As the narrator, having that data at hand would let me say stuff like, "Hey, guys, X hasn't had much of a chance to be present in the scene. Can we slow our roll until they've gotten a chance to establish themselves?"

Does that make sense?