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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chriskaballa" data-source="post: 18020" data-attributes="member: 2074">My group, their behavior, and our conditionsSince it may help, I'll give a little more information about my group.There are just three players, but in the beginning we had five. We lost two, picked up one, kicked out one, and finally picked up another one to get to our current player mix. There are 6 characters, since we decided to keep the old characters because I politely told them it would be a pain in the neck to get rid of them with something in line with the story just yet, other than pulling a stupid character kill that was completely out-of-game driven. The players agreed to run two characters each, in answer to my plea. (maybe it's this? The players, perhaps, may find it very difficult to handle 2 characters each, but they haven't told me anything.)I am usually prepared and on time to gaming sessions. I take fifteen minutes before the game to set up my area and check notes and make last-minute corrections to things I will need. The players almost always take this time to do as I do, to look over notes on their characters and see what this character wants to do in-game today. Once this period is over we recap on last session's occurrences and then go straight into the game. Many stupid jokes about the game arise while we are playing that cause the game to grind to a halt, but I curb this by simply saying, "It does not exist in my world," and going back to the last player that had something useful to ask me, tell me, or talk about with me or another player.Our gaming locations vary. When we go to the gaming store, the number of distractions is high- many other gamers are present and other games are going on around us. When we go to one of the players' houses or my house, there are usually few distractions, but there is the 'parent factor'- whenever a parent is present we have to stop what we are doing since there is frequent violence in the game, and because I have an excellent imagination, I describe it well. And then, there is our 30-minute dinner break we usually take in Hour 4.If the game degrades to an argument/fight/OT talk/etc. then I just roll a bunch of dice to make noise (that's my warning signal) then raise my hand above my head and count down from three to zero. This usually shuts them up, but not for long.Now, I don't wish to rid myself of the players, since they are my friends. I don't want to totally scrap the D&D game wither, since I have put about six months of work into it so far and the players have done a lot things to enhance the game, too. What's a young DM to do?-Chris</blockquote>

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