Energizing your players

[Rechan]

End the session on some sort of cliffhanger, or at least something to have high anticipation to it. So ending it right before a nasty combat, or leaving something very distinctly 'Wait til next time!'.

This will make the players look forward to the game, and be very eager to get started to find out what happens next.

 

[pukunui]

You know, I tried that once. One of my players complained that he hates cliffhangers and that is why he never watches TV (because he hates the idea of having to wait a whole week to find out what happens next). Can't please everybody, I guess ...

Also, we switch back and forth between a D&D 4e campaign and my Star Wars Saga Edition campaign each week, so the cliffhanger would have to be big enough to sustain interest for two weeks.

 

[kimble]

My groups always play Friday nights, 10 pm to 4 am. I always sleep at least an hour those days, before going to the game. Helps a lot.

 

[nedjer]

Before every episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert does a stand-up bit with the audience, plays peppy music, and dances around to energize them and get them used to cheering, laughing, and applauding.

I had a friend who started every session of his Conan game by playing this audio track:

YouTube - Prologue/Anvil of Crom - Conan the Barbarian Theme (Basil Poledouris)

By the time it was done, we were ready to crush our enemies, to see them driven before us, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

I'd have to favour this approach over all the healthy living 'balance your carbs' stuff. I'm all for healthy, but not at RPG time. I want to chat about the game, not how many calories I'm going to go through at halftime.

 

[Marius Delphus]

To be clear, I am not necessarily on about "healthy living 'balance your carbs' stuff." In point of fact, my diet is abominable. Instead I'm describing, from long experience, something that almost always saps my energy in an attempt (less than successful, it would seem) to help the OP with the presented problem.

Back on topic, taking a break (scheduled or unscheduled) sounds terrific as well.

 

[nedjer]

To be clear, I am not necessarily on about "healthy living 'balance your carbs' stuff." In point of fact, my diet is abominable. Instead I'm describing, from long experience, something that almost always saps my energy in an attempt (less than successful, it would seem) to help the OP with the presented problem.

Back on topic, taking a break (scheduled or unscheduled) sounds terrific as well.

Only kidding. Respect to your abominable diet

 

[HighTemplar]

Here are some thoughts:

1) Don't take more players than you can handle. This divides the attention and gaming time, it also divides the overall fun for a game session. 4players is the usual maximum unless you're highly skilled or have a very simple united game.

2) Make sure your players have a chance to roleplay between themselves when you're about to be busy with someone else, perhaps not all players are in the fight, if so, try to make sure the others have some issue to debate or solve in the meantime.

3) Try different plot hooks: If your game is always about rescuing someone, it gets recursive. There are so many different hooks: Traitors, Quests, Rescue, Exploration, Mystery or Riddles, Diplomacy or Seduction, etc. Try something different.

4) Make sure your players have something to gain, if the only thing they can hope for is some treasure and exp at the end of the game, this makes it uninteresting. To solve this, try mixing elements of some player's backgrounds into the midsts of your campaign. Maybe you're exploring some ruins in a region close to where someone grew up, perhaps they can meet someone interesting and related to hang out with on the way, which could be useful or even harmful later on depending on the PCs reaction towards her...

5) Give your players proper reward. I'm always having trouble with this one I tend to give a lot but to take even more from them haha. sometimes maybe you can try to stimulate them by giving them something unexpected, see what they do with it, and have it removed or better have them need to trade it for some higher purpose. That way your players will remember, and be talking about those "old days, when they used to wield this and that artifact(?)"

 

[pukunui]

1) Don't take more players than you can handle. This divides the attention and gaming time, it also divides the overall fun for a game session. 4players is the usual maximum unless you're highly skilled or have a very simple united game.

I've got 5 players at the moment, and so far we've almost always had one missing, so we've generally only actually had 4 players. That's the why I like it, too. We've had as many as 8 players in the past and it just gets too crazy. We've got 6 in our D&D game (which I'm not running), and that is a bit much.

2) Make sure your players have a chance to roleplay between themselves when you're about to be busy with someone else, perhaps not all players are in the fight, if so, try to make sure the others have some issue to debate or solve in the meantime.

Good idea.

3) Try different plot hooks: If your game is always about rescuing someone, it gets recursive. There are so many different hooks: Traitors, Quests, Rescue, Exploration, Mystery or Riddles, Diplomacy or Seduction, etc. Try something different.

This one shouldn't be an issue. I'm running the Star Wars: Dawn of Defiance series of adventures, which does a fairly good job of not only presenting a variety of plot hooks but also runs the gamut of the various playstyles possible (it was designed to show what all you can do with the SWSE rules).

4) Make sure your players have something to gain, if the only thing they can hope for is some treasure and exp at the end of the game, this makes it uninteresting. To solve this, try mixing elements of some player's backgrounds into the midsts of your campaign. Maybe you're exploring some ruins in a region close to where someone grew up, perhaps they can meet someone interesting and related to hang out with on the way, which could be useful or even harmful later on depending on the PCs reaction towards her...

Again, not a problem here. I don't bother with XP and I've been trying to disabuse my players of the notion that Star Wars is a "kill the bad guys and take their stuff" kind of game like D&D is. So instead I'm trying to make things more personal and give them loftier goals (DoD isn't about saving the galaxy; it's more about paving the way for the Rebellion).

5) Give your players proper reward. I'm always having trouble with this one I tend to give a lot but to take even more from them haha. sometimes maybe you can try to stimulate them by giving them something unexpected, see what they do with it, and have it removed or better have them need to trade it for some higher purpose. That way your players will remember, and be talking about those "old days, when they used to wield this and that artifact(?)"

This is good too. I had a great idea for a D&D campaign in which the players find an evil artifact that attaches itself to them, so they can't get rid of it without undertaking some sort of quest, but they don't necessarily realize it's evil right away ... but everywhere they go, bad stuff happens to other people. So if they stay a while in a particular village, crops start to fail, the cows' milk goes sour inexplicably, someone's newborn baby dies, etc. Eventually, people would put 2 and 2 together and realize that the PCs are somehow responsible. Anyway, I don't see why that sort of thing wouldn't work for Star Wars as well. I could just make it an ancient Sith artifact.

 

[Wolf1066]

Pukunui:
You're in New Zealand, so three words:

"Demon Energy Drink".

Caffeine, Taurine, Guarana - and in quantities that make Red Bull look like lolly-water. Big cans, too.

The trick is to get them to drink lots - caffeine is a natural diuretic plus plenty of fluid... hard to fall asleep when you've got to get up 'n' go to the dunny every few minutes...

 

[pukunui]

LOL. Then I'd have the opposite problem: getting them to sit still instead of getting them to stay awake.