What causes boredom in a game session?

[eris404]

Inspired by the bored on game day thread, I thought I'd run a poll about common pitfalls of gaming that cause the most boredom. In your experience, which of the options has been the worst offender? GMs wanna know.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

This really needs to be multiple choice-allowed.

 

[eris404]

Actually, I wanted to force people to choose one. It would be too easy to select all of them, because I know, I've had most of these be a problem at one point or another.

 

[Psion]

Of the two things that plague my game the most, I chose the one you listed: players take too long talking in character to NPCs.

Or let me put a finer point on it: SHOPPING.

My players are horrible at taking care of this sort of stuff out of game, but I don't have a real good way to deter it. I try to plant some campaign relevant stuff in there, but the non-involved players still get bored.


The other thing that plagues my game is getting started on time. I'm just too busy during the week and find myself scrambling to put together some last minute notes all the time while player are idly chit-chatting. (I usually manage to run a decent game anyways, but still, it vexes me.)

 

[eris404]

The other thing that plagues my game is getting started on time. I'm just too busy during the week and find myself scrambling to put together some last minute notes all the time while player are idly chit-chatting. (I usually manage to run a decent game anyways, but still, it vexes me.)

I resemble that remark. If I'm the DM, I'm always scrambling around at the last minute. If I'm a player, I can't seem to get to game on time (unless we're playing at my house). I'm horrible.

 

[farscapesg1]

I had to choose the off-topic option. My current group constantly goes into off-topic conversations, either related to gaming or not. I'm sorry, but I show up to game, not talk about new rules in this supplement or that, not to talk about the latest movie someone saw, etc.

Combat taking too long comes in at a close second. My god, can no one plan out any strategic actions? I try to "command" the group and give orders as a party leader, but it seems like everyone just wants to ignore them, causing the battles to stretch out over 30 minutes to an hour, just for one combat!!!!

 

[SBMC]

My two cents

I voted for players planning to much - though I am guilty of this myself. Last session we neded to "nab" an NPC; we spent near 2 hours planning it - with reason however as the last time we got smacked around when we went after the guy without planning well.

It went off without a hitch; because of the planning but then again we got little else done that session.

Shopping...

Our DM alleviates that with relative ease. He is a bit "realistic" about what a shop has and does nto ahve. Lots of low level "wahtever" items (whatever to PC's of the relevant level they are at that is). The "big" stuff such as more powerful magical weapons, armor and items are had to come by in a store. Sure you can have sombody make it; but that takes time.

Thus you can find plenty of Masterwork longswords but dan few +1 Longswords. You can find a number of items worth less than 1k gp but none more than that (and only a couple of those to boot!). You could find piles of Cure light wounds potions however.

In other words the "market" provides the appropiate "supply". Adventurers are not a "dime a dozen", though they may flock to certain cities (be it that most of them are still under 5th level easily), and thus how many expensive magic items does the market demand? A Wizard is not going to stock his stor with +5 Cloaks if he is going to sell one every 3 years or so.

 

[Umbran]

I think your poll is a bit too specific. To my mind, there seem to be two basic things that cvause boredom:

Events that are not inclusive to many of the players.

Events that take a great deal of player time, but which contain little relevant to the plot or action of the game.

Basically - people get bored whenever you center too much on a small subset of the party, or lots of time passes but nothing happens. Most boredome is variation on one or both of these themes.

 

[jcfiala]

Actually, I wanted to force people to choose one. It would be too easy to select all of them, because I know, I've had most of these be a problem at one point or another.

And thus, I choose 'Other'.

It's a lack of choice, at root. Either I can't make choices because my character has no choice (nothing to do), or no interesting choice (who cares), or the GM's concentrating on other characters, or so forth.

In one recent campaign it came down to play style - I wanted to play a martial artist monk/wizard, mixing it up in combat and using flashy spells - and he wanted to do this big army-level thing. But the army-level thing caused my character to suck, and so it didn't work for me.

 

[RedWick]

In this order: Combat taking too long and taking forever to decide on a course of action. Many has been the time that I've been caught up in the throes of combat for far longer than it should've lasted, and I've heard many stories about a single combat in the whole gamut of systems lasting for half the game session (and in some cases, lasting whole sessions or even multiple sessions).

Understandably, when I run a game, I tend to shy away from creating combat situations...