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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lostingeneral" data-source="post: 5528322" data-attributes="member: 6674340">Thanks for the responses everyone, they've helped out lots.Yesterday was our first session with the new system, and we had 5 players present in addition to myself.It started off alright. The first encounter was reached almost instantly and it was a combat encounter, which turned out to be quite a long one, even by 4e standards (to be fair, this was driven in large part by our Purple Index Cards, which introduced very negative effects to prolong the battle).Things got progressively worse as time went on, though, and the amounts of casual side-conversations and smartphone usage were pretty much off the charts by the end. I'm accustomed to a bit of distraction, but this was crazy. The game culminated with a completion time two hours earlier than usual when half of my players wanted to leave and get food, then come back, instead of just getting takeout (like pizza or something). At this point, I just declared the session done.It might have been just an off night in general, but even with off nights at the dining room table it wasn't this out of control. I'm going to blame the couches and coffee table (read: giant piece of plywood) design, so I'm purchasing some office chairs (I still want it to be relatively comfortable, versus folding chairs or something) and a relative will be giving me a 6'x4' (almost exactly) table to play on, so hopefully I should be able to correct this for the next session. Also, the lighting was kind of dim and sleep-inducing, so I'm going to replace the old worn-down incandescents with productivity-friendly fluorescent light bulbs.In other words I'm taking a page from "Motivational Techniques for Cubicle Drones." If it's not a real book, it should be.</blockquote>

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