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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ladyofdragons" data-source="post: 512951" data-attributes="member: 5718">I don't GM all that often myself, I prefer being a player.  My group doesn't have issues with off-color humor, we're generally self-monitoring and our average age is about 30 now, and finally I'm not the only female!However, as a relatively soft-spoken woman I've found a couple ways to handle GMing without slapping the group with an iron pan, which can make some players get really mad about their game being taken away from them, or feeling like they're being railroaded.  Also helps me because i don't particularly feel comfortable doing the whole iron pan thing.1) If your group gets sidetracked and you want to get it on track, be authoritative.  don't yell, just raise your voice like a teacher does when the class is being a bit too loud, just enough to cut through the chatter.  go around the table and ask each player one by one what their characters are doing at that moment, or what their next planned action is.  Sometimes follow that up immediately with a random encounter, just to keep them on their toes so they think you're asking because an encounter is about to start.2) if out-of-game chatter or inappropriate humor is ruining your game, try this trick we use as a house rule: a death die.  it's a silly little die with a skull as a 1 (though any odd die might be used).  anyone who uses inappropriate behavior rolls the death die, and a roll of one means that some encounter has just been added to the adventure that wasn't there before, generally something more challenging than the other encounters in the adventure, maybe something thats possibly more than a match for the group if they don't work together, if the misdeed that caused the death die throw was annoying enough.  Nothing like the threat of death to bring people in line (but not in a malicious way, they do bring it on themselves and certainly have the opportunity to try to combat whatever is added).  It also helps in that with this method, the party as a whole pays for one player's misdeeds, which means that they'll start helping you to keep him in line.Think of it as in-game karma.  every action has a reaction.  good deeds done in game get rewards (XP), nasty bits get appropriate reactions too.  Good luck in your future DMing.</blockquote>

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