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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1034405" data-attributes="member: 99">I had one more thing to add after doing some gaming this weekend.The group that met this weekend is my "pickup game" comprised of a fairly large group and we are running through RttToEE and meeting about once a month.  In many ways, this is a recipe for disaster, but we seem to be handling it ok so far.This game is set up in such a manner that when I've got a free weekend to play and there's an indication that several of the players do too, I send out an e-mail to the lot of them and whoever can make it comes and whoever can't doesn't.  If every single one of them came, I'd have 9 players.  So far, the most I've had is 7.  Saturday was one of those times.The way that this relates to your situation is that it is often a pretty large group that I'm dealing with and the fact is that it is almost impossible to keep everyone in the game at any given time.  When not in combat, they sometimes split up (though they keep it to a minimum) for social interactions, investigation and purchasing needed equipment.  When they are in combat, it is frequent that a party member is unconscious or incapacitated in some other manner (Hold Person or victims of a Bead of Force are two that have kept folks out of the combat for a goodly number of rounds).  It just happens.When it does happen, those people tend to focus on the combat for a few minutes but when it appears that they aren't going to be back in the action for a while, they tend to start chatting.  I don't blame them and as long as they keep it fairly quiet, I've got no problem with this.  But I think my tolerance for this situation would be much lower if it was a regular occurance in my weekly game.The group I game with on a weekly basis is just 4 members so we are running a party of 3.  If a party member is put unconscious or the victim of Hold Person, our lives are probably in great danger if we don't get that third of the party back in the fight very quickly so we tend to put our attention on it in a hurry.  More often than not, nobody is out of the fight for very long.I guess the point of all of this is that the spotlight is simply not big enough for 8 people in most cases.  When people are not the focus of the game, it takes a lot of effort for them to maintain interest in those that are the focus for more than a few minutes.  So I would posit that even if every member of your group is "there to play" and not merely for a social outlet, it would still be tough to stamp out the chatting simply because not all 8 of them are going to be directly involved in the game at any given time.I hope that sort of made sense.</blockquote>

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