It seems us NC folks are crowding up the thread. This may not bode well for the serious tone expected at the next NC Game Day.
Just last session I had a few of these moments. I was facing a somewhat larger problem: The Roleplaying Session. Once in a great while, we have an entire session that is focused on interaction with NPC's alone with no combats or other harrowing situations. I don't regard this as a bad thing at all and neither do the other players, but this session was a bit different.
This session had them split up and each meeting with various important NPC's. Normally in these types of situations where only one or two party members will be in on a meeting, I'll handle it outside the session via e-mail. But there were going to be several such meetings and these NPC's were way up there in terms of power and importance (High Priest of a church, Chancellors of the Wizard College, Chieftain of an entire tribe of barbarians, etc.).
The problem was that the people not involved with the meeting at hand tended to pay little attention, talk in the background or make out of character jokes about the situation in progress. Normally this sort of stuff doesn't bother me and it didn't for the majority of the session, but there were a couple times that I found myself getting annoyed and having to tell the others to be quiet.
Honestly, I'm not terribly pissed about it or anything. I do this type of stuff sometimes myself, even when I'm GMing. And I also realize that we game partially as a break from our daily work lives so there's no need to keep things too rigid. But I do find that my expectations as a GM that a particular event will be ominous or impressive clash with reality when it plays out with lots of jokes and laughter (even though this is frequently "gallows humor").
Ah well. The best laid plans of mice and GM's...
I take solace in the fact that I can kill their characters at will.
We eventually gave up on stopping the giggle fests and went out to eat.
