Okay, you see the overstatements in there?
I have never had cigarette smoke set off a smoke alarm. Nor does the second-hand smoke from the few cigarettes my mom would smoke on a visit pose a real risk for cancer or addiction. Nor is the risk of "permanent damage" to furniture realistic in this instance - it isn't like her furniture at home was laced with cigarette burns. Noxious, however, I'll give you. The rest of those are non-issues in this case, that would be but rationalizations for the rule, rather than rational basis for the rule. It being noxious, however, we can agree upon.
My mother smoked for most of my life. I've
seen cigarettes set off smoke alarms (I understand that they're not supposed to, but I've witnessed it more than once). I've
seen them damage furniture (doesn't have to be burn - ash that accidentally falls off can be hell to get out of some materials) and/or quickly leave a stink that you can't get out without expensive cleaning. I'm told my lungs are likely damaged from exposure to second-hand smoke when I was growing up (no idea if this is true, doctor says so).
As for addictive, the issue is a real one - not that they will magically addict non-smokers, but they cause cravings in ex-smokers or "social" smokers (we have both in my group). I don't think it's an "overstatement", just something I needed to be clearer on.
I find incessant checking of Facebook while in company with others to be pretty noxious. Obnoxious, even.
Me too. I would never compare it to smoking, though, even in analogy. It's an entirely different kind of disruption, and one that anyone with any self-awareness is going to notice is causing a problem (I would think), really quickly.
Since when, in the history of the English language, does an analogy mean, "these things are precisely the same sort of thing,"?
Okay, put it this way, I think that's an awful analogy!
I played with - I wasn't running the game, so I didn't set the rules - someone who both smoked and had a serious laptop problem. She went outside to smoke, but didn't ever put her laptop away. The latter was more disruptive, for us. When she went out to smoke, we all just took a break, got drinks, and such. In an 8-our session, some breaks are called for anyway, so it was not a big deal. We couldn't all just take a break when she couldn't keep track of what was going on because of her messageboard, facebook, and corgi video habits.
Sounds like she smoked infrequently enough for that to work ("smoke as break"). I have two "current" smokers in my group. One is capable of going eight hours without smoking, and you often forget he even does. The other can barely make it an hour (esp. w/beer, for whatever reason), usually less. We usually do 3-4 hour sessions, and if we broke around Smokey Joe, who is not the world's swiftest smoker, we'd be wasting too much time, the group feels (though occasionally we have to).
And, since your personal experience hasn't happened to me, why should I take it as a relevant point? We aren't asking why you haven't instituted such a rule, you know. So why do I care what's happened to you in this matter? In fact, doesn't your non-experience mean you are inexperienced with this particular problem?
That's a fair point, but, if you check back in this and the other thread, you'll note that I have experienced problems, but didn't need to institute bans to deal with them, and felt that they were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, and that the benefits offered by tech outweighed them.
Specifically, every time a new communication tech has appeared, that's popular, it caused some disruption, initially, then the disruption died down over a period of months. At most I had to frown, "Seriously?", and grouse a bit. Examples (probably not in chronological order):
1) Wireless internet access! OMG INTERNETS ON MY LAPTOP IN YER HOUSE. I'm checking my email! Look at this Youtube! Died down rapidly, because it was obviously disruptive.
2) Text Messages! OMG BIG JIM JUST TEXTED ME ABOUT THE AWESOME GIG HE IS AT! People still send, check and receive these, but they've learned to prioritize them (one has to, in the modern world). When this shiz was new it was an issue, but a couple of years later? (Which is before they even became a thing in most of the US, I note) Etiquette was established.
3) Facebooks! Similar pattern - when this first got on mobile phones, this was an issue (not on laptops, oddly enough). I know at least one player still checks it very briefly about once an hour (or gets some kind of notifications from it), but I wouldn't call it disruptive these days, because people stopped being obsessed by it fairly quickly. It's not usually a fast-moving medium.
4) Twitter! Two of my players have some kind of phone app that means they see their respective SO's tweets/DMs. This actually never caused a disruption, and I've never even heard this mentioned outside of actual breaks.
One thing I should say is that laptops basically disappeared except for the host's one (which is usually used solely for DDI Compendium lookups, because the tablet/phone compendium apps universally blow goats), replaced by phones, phablets and tablets. Which pretty much everyone uses for some aspect of their gaming (except one guy).
With stuff like watching Youtube or making Facebook posts or the like, during a game, I don't really see those as tech problems - those seem more like personality issues to me. I don't mean that as some criticism, but rather the reason people don't do it in my group isn't because it isn't available, but rather because it would be as weird and rude to do that as to suddenly go over to the TV and start watching it or whatever, or to get out a book and start reading.
With texts and the like, I don't have a problem with people looking at them when/after they get them (so long as it's not their turn, but that goes without saying, doesn't it?), because it's not a disruption, and it's not continuous. It's not like they hold up their phone, awaiting more texts, and obviously they don't text back and forth constantly, because that'd be rude in a fairly obvious way.
One thing that might be an issue, though, and tell me if this is part of it for you (not just Umbran, others with the problems with electronics), is that I pretty much only play with friends. Not necessarily all "old friends", though most are, but people who I could happily hang out with doing other things, and who largely share my social mores and so on. If I was gaming with strangers who were of a different background and who might have different ideas about what was socially acceptable, maybe I'd have to say "Hey, no Facebook, keep the texts/twitter for breaks, please!", or something.
I suspect this is largely because this isn't really a discussion.
I don't know what your criteria for a "discussion" is. You seem to be keen to dismiss my experiences of smoking as "overstatement", for example, and to suggest I know nothing, generally, of the ills of tech at the table, even though I've had tech at the table since there was tech to be had. I'm pretty sure if there is no "discussion", it's not me alone causing the issue.
For either gender, if your SO is calling every 10 minutes asking when you're going to be home (I've seen it), you are losing points with the group. For a guy, the longer it persists, the more he is being views as exactly what I said. For a girl, it means she needs to dump her SO's butt after punching him in the junk for being a controlling, jealous twit. I don't think that's sexist. That's a bad relationship ruining the perception of the group.
I agree, but that's not what I'm describing, nor have I ever seen that. Short phonecall every 2-3 hours, I have seen. How do you rate that? Said SO is somewhat needy, but it's not like some sort of monitoring deal (rather an "I need reassurance" deal - I won't comment on my opinion of that
).
One thing I will note is, if he was, say, banned from taking these phonecalls, he basically wouldn't be able to play with us (because he'd have to do some alternate social activity where he could, as quite reasonably he values his relationship with his SO over gaming), which given he is a very keen player, great at getting everyone organised, and generally fun to be around, would be a huge loss.
Thus I see benefits outweighing disadvantages, there.
Also we can now have the hilarity of the "Cursed Dice-Rolling App" (one of my friends has about three of them as a result) or "Cursed Smartphone" to go along with "Cursed Dice"!
