The 2.6 seconds rule

[woodycanuck]

I know it's a joke, but I'm curious how this works in practice for everyone else. We played for the first time last weekend and we sort of made up the following pattern that worked for us:

Player flips door card, reads aloud. If monster, player attempts to gain the upper hand or asks around for help. Once player is ahead, he says something like "Ok, I'm combat level 12 I'm going to kill this level 10 monster now" and if nobody speaks up for a few seconds, it's done. Otherwise there can be sort of an arms race: someone curses player, someone uses a single-use on player, someone wanders a monster, someone commits to help, etc. Finally, there's a few seconds lull and player declares "ok, I win"

Is this how it generally goes? We found we had to force player to declare the combat levels otherwise we were each doing the math and it got too confusing.