[Player Advice] How to keep the group focussed?

[SSquirrel]

The group I've been apart of since 97 generally does a rather horrid job of staying on topic with many a "Game on!" throughout the night. This was most likely due to long ass combats that dragged out much longer than they should have.

I jsut started playing with an alternate group I met thru meetup.com as well and what a difference. There's 7 of us, 8 if my wife joins up, and we just had our first session Saturday afternoon. The DM is an actor and realy wanted focuses on ROLE (not roll) playing and we had lots of really funny stuff happening and lots of good character development. Bunch of 1st level nobodies, but it was 7 straight hours with no big breaks in gameplay outside of the DM hitting the bathroom.

The group I mentioned above that has so many problems with staying on topic? When we switched systems away from familiarity they improved dramatically. Paranoia, Vampire and Aberrant one shots all ran quite well with everyone very focused on their characters and just having a good time WITHIN the game world. This may be a point to try to make with your friends. Have them come up with running jokes for the characters to share, do more RP intensive stuff that develops the characters and also keep everyone focused on the game.



Hagen

 

[Calico_Jack73]

2) I also instituted a system whereby the first person to verbally "tag" someone who had gone off topic took 25xp/level from the victim. This let the players police themselves (and me) and kept things flowing.

That sounds good too but there is the potential for abuse. My group is the type that would agree that everyone would at least once or twice get off subject so that each one of them in turn could cash in to the extra XP for the tag. What I might do instead (if I didn't use my award system I mentioned before) is go with your tag system but deduct the XP award from the player that was tagged.