Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ForceUser" data-source="post: 227441" data-attributes="member: 2785">When I DM I try to create a mood. I have a vision in my head of the character's surrounding environment and the NPCs they are interacting with, and I'm trying my best to convey what I've imagined to my players.My players, for the most part, listen when I describe things, ask relevant questions to better comprehend the scene, and wait patiently while I fuddle through my notes. When I am interacting with them through NPCs they stay in character, however, some of my players have a habit of squeezing in metagame or off-topic comments if I am not specifically talking to their characters. For instance, sometimes when I'm roleplaying with characters A & B, the players of characters C & D will quietly talk to each other about a rule or a spell, or tell a joke, or discuss their next combat maneuver (even though their characters technically can't be having such a conversation), or even discuss something wildly OT (baseball comes up a lot). Oftentimes, when I am done talking to part of the group and ready to address the group as a whole, I have to wait for some players to stop talking before I can continue. Sometimes they are so engrossed in their whispered conversations that I have stood there for up to a minute before they realized I was waiting on them to shut up so we could continue the game. Over the course of a session this grates on my nerves. Now, the general player mentality among my friends is if their character is not in the scene, then they don't have to pay attention to the game, because they're not supposed to know what's going on anyway. My general goal, as DM, is to make the session interesting enough that everyone wants to pay attention just so they can find out what happens next, even if their character is missing, unconcious, or otherwise occupied. Is it unrealistic to expect everyone to pay attention all the time? Is it unrealistic to demand that players do not speak unless it's in character or are asking the DM a question? Our monthly sessions can last as long as eight hours with occassional breaks for food or leg-stretching. How do I encourage people to stay in character? Should I bother? Do you? Among my friends, it is tough to enforce staying in character. Players can end up resenting a particularly demanding DM who constantly tells players to stop talking unless it's in character (then again, the DM resents having to constantly enforce that players stay in character). Not to mention, we have a large group of knowledgable people familiar with the rules, and when there's a rules question everyone's first instinct is to debate it, and pull out rulebooks, and come to a consensus, nevermind that the DM might just want to arbitrate it off the cuff and find out the actual rule later. I'm as guilty as the rest. I am both a player and a DM among my friends, and the things I've described above happen across all three of our campaigns. As a player I try to stay in character at all times, but I often find myself frustrated with the other players (especially the ones who aren't DMs), and consequently find myself telling people to shush so the DM can talk, or telling people to talk about the ballgame later, or telling people to let the DM make a decision so we can get on with things. In short, I'm just as bad as everyone else, despite my good intentions. Does anyone have any suggestions to encourage people to stop table-talk, metagaming, and out-of-character conversations? More importantly, should they be encouraged to stop? Is this much ado about nothing, or a problem you struggle with too? Let's hear it.</blockquote>

Verification