Waiting Your Turn
I wouldn’t have pegged Horsepower for the magical child archetype. That must mean Fighter is his animal guide somehow. Friggin’ homebrew man…
Anywho, what I want to talk about today has less to do with everyone’s favorite equine vigilante and more to do with the mooks. Just look at ’em there, all wide-eyed and full of wonder. They can’t help but bask in the glow of an awesome character moment, and Horsepower gets to feel like a badass because of it. We should all aspire to such mookitude.
I submit that it takes more than a powerful character build, cool backstory, and convincing accent to be a good gamer. That’s because your role at the table doesn’t end when you pass the initiative. In that moment you go from active player to eager audience member, and it is an important role to play. Those moments of supreme awesomeness where everyone leans into the table, breaths collectively bated, watching the fates turn as the die drops… They only happen when everyone is engaged. You guys already know how I feel about cell phones at the gaming table, but diving into your data plan is just the most malignant form of poor audienceship.
It’s not easy staying engaged for the duration of a four-hour session, but there is an undeniable energy that forms when you do. When you cheer you buddies’ crits, groan at their botches, and laugh when the dude across the table comes up with an awesome stunt, a feeling of excitement and anticipation builds. Boring combats become communal events, and the other gamers at the table can draw upon that energy, eager to outdo one another and build upon the scene.
This applies to exploration and character interaction just as much as combat. Find a way to become interested in what the other players are doing. When it’s your turn to take the spotlight, remember to make it entertaining for the other party members as well as yourself. Games are better when we remember to entertain one another, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to get into that mindset when your audience is properly appreciative.
So what about the rest of you gusy? Do you struggle with issues of audienceship at your tables? Do you find it tough to maintain excitement through the initiative pass? Have you ever been dispirited to see your buddies buried in their cell phones during your talky scenes? How do you deal with it? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Back when I used to play games with real live people around a table we were all pretty good at staying engaged. Even the occasional “that guys” in the group typically paid attention (even though we wished they wouldn’t). The only real times when people were notably not doing their job as part time audience members was one player in a long running Star Wars game a group of mine played because that person more often than not would fall asleep during the game.
As a dude that’s about to move across country and switch over to Roll 20, you have my interest. Is divided attention a major problem online?
Ho boy is it an issue, especially in games with longer individual turns in extended combats. But in general, the fact that people cannot be seen and can just start looking at Imgur is a big distraction waiting to happen. It kills me as a DM.
I feel I should additionally add that this is more a problem when people use text as their main medium, I suspect. If you miss something on voice, you don’t have a source to go back to other than talking with your friends and revealing you weren’t paying attention. If you miss something on text, you scroll up and read.
Any good fixes, or is it just endemic to the medium?
I’ve been using Roll20 for years know as a DM, and divided attention can definitely be a problem. There is a few ways to mitigate it, but just like anything else it largely depends on the players.
For my group, the mantra has always been, “Please for the love of any god you choose, be planning what you want to do on your turn before it’s actually your turn.” It feels exponentially damning on Roll20 to wait for a player figure out what they want to do, especially when they’ve forgotten what their own abilities do (but that is an entirely different matter). My group is a mix of optimizers and casual players with varying understanding of the rules, but I always make sure that they are trying to plan at the very least a turn ahead. As a DM, you pretty much just need to make sure that all the information on the “tabletop” is easily understood. Roll20 has a ton of useful tools to facilitate this, though all the absolute coolest stuff requires a Pro Subscription (such as dynamic lighting, premium tokens, and access to the API, which has a ton of cool community made scripts and tools for the game).
One thing that you may want to do is make use of the built-in audio/video chat in roll20, though my party just uses discord. The video portion of roll20 could be quite handy for you, especially with players with whom you are not super familiar.
Definitely make use of handouts as much as possible, as it gives the players something concrete to associate with in the game. I find myself going back through pictures of people they’ve met and fought, reminiscing about how I almost killed them right before the party bard quietly whispers “+2” to remind me that the party rogue or paladin actually DID hit the big bad and finish them off.
Also, no matter how much you like or don’t like them, USE MACROS. They make everything go so much smoother. It makes everything that is happening much clearer. Rather than just seeing “16” in chat, you see:
“Skraa is going all out!
[4]+13+5+1+1-4=20!”
There are a ton of stuff I’ve learned about Roll20 over the years, and would be glad to share it with you if you have any specific questions.
Well that’s extremely cool of you. I’m about halfway through the tutorial now, and I’m planning to have my Starfinder group bring in their devices so that we can all learn together in person before we have to use it from distance. I just don’t know enough yet to know what to ask.
I may hit you back in a couple of weeks after that first session happens. 🙂
As someone who not only runs online (almost exclusively) and has a group with a higher-than-normal percentage of ADD/ADHD players, I know all too well player focus can be an issue.
Step One- tell them when it becomes a problem. A simple “hey, can we please focus?” is 9 times out of 10 enough to get the problem to resolve itself.
Step Two- using discord for voice communication has a unique advantage: You can make a spam channel and a game channel. Or “an outlet for all the distraction-sharing that doesn’t get in the way of game”.
basically, losing focus is pretty much inevitable but there are ways to keep it from not impacting the game in a negative way.
I like the occasional bit of table talk. I think it’s part of the fun of the game. But it hadn’t occurred to me until just now that it’s a shitload harder to have side-conversations when you’re all on voice. This SPAM channel does indeed bear further consideration….
I play entirely play by post games now so the question of being distracted isn’t even relevant. The issue is more if people forget stuff, didn’t understand something, everyone is waiting on someone else to post, or someone has just flaked out of the game without saying anything to anyone because people are just super rude like that online for reasons I can’t comprehend.
How does that work anyway? Is there some kind of sample play by post game I could check out to get a sense of the style?
I don’t know about a “sample” game. You could check out many examples at the Giants in the Playground forum or Mythweavers and probably many other sites where games of the sort abound.
What are my search terms? “GITP play by post logs?”
Nobody keeps “logs” of games that are already text based as that would be pretty redundant.
Just any game in the Ongoing Games section. It should be pretty obvious to navigate if you click basically anything you get as a result of search for Giant in the Playground or yes probably even GITP.
I would suggest clicking on a thread with less than 50 pages as that’s about where threads split so you might wind up on thread 2 (or 5 or whatever) of a game and be rather confused as to why things seem to be starting mid-action.
Dude… Bro… Dudebro… Understand the degree to which I don’t know jack about play by post. I am already rather confused, lol.
I shall endeavor to utilize the googles. Wish me luck.
lol good luck.
I’m Ramsus over there too, so if you still are confused about stuff and make an account there, you can just PM me stuff.
After inevitably delaying the dms attempts to start by around 30 min every session around, everyone is usually fairly engaged. The occasional bit of non related cell phone usage or cat finding and petting occurs, but thats mostly during parts when some players dont do anything for a decently long while, and even then thats typically for short bits before returning. I also often just go and do something with the cat for a bit after my characters turns occasionally in high tension fights to help relieve a bit of that tension since otherwise i would just be pacing around the table which could get annoying.
There is a good bit of cell phone usage though to make jokes about our current situation or for some battle or theme music. This once led to a funny bit in a yuanti dungeon in the tomb of annhilation module with a decently high amojnt of sexual undertones, where everyone decided to find good villain music on their phones but me, leading to 2 things. One, the discovery that 2 different villain themes actually went amazingly together, though i forgot which. And two, i ended up doing the humming the harry potter theme for some reason, baffling everyone including myself cause thats not exactly epic villain music, leading everyone to decide that every upper tier baddy would just have there top non snake half be a naked exceedingly buff Daniel Radcliffe.
I am an chronic table pacer. I’ve been known to do a quick pull up or two on the basement’s I-beams to relieve mid-combat tension.
Also, I now demand bad shoops of buff Daniel Sankecliffe.
Unless I am truly invested in my character, I have a hard time remaining in-character during the game. To clarify, I don’t have my character say OOC stuff, but I have a hard time talking in-accent or even using more appropriate word choice / sentence structuring (Shakespearean or what-have-you).
I think subconsciously, I know that if I work to maintain the accents, word-choice, and sentence structure of the character, and they die, it becomes a wasted investment.
Naw man. I’m not talking about staying in-character. I’m talking about staying engaged in other people’s turns. Getting excited for their successes and groaning along with their failures. That out-of-character stuff can be every bit as important to the fun of the game as developing a persona.
See at my tables, if you want to do a magical girl transformation, you’d better have some distance between yourself and your enemies, or some buddies to run interference. The transformation itself is fine, but you’d better have a good tactical scenario for doing it.
Do you have many magical girl transformations at your table?
No, but we have had turn-long power-ups.
Action: Channel Divinity: Sacred Weapon. Bonus Action: Shield of Faith. Cue theme-song while said power-up happens.
Our GM is totally the type who would be down for MG transformations though.
What’s the theme music for that particular power-up?
Behold! (Or rather “Behear?”)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-UizAZQLL4
Although most of my Dwarven war-songs are re-worked sappy love songs. “There ain’t no mountain high enough to keep me from getting to you”
Also since we’re stuck in the Forgotten realms due to organized play, my character’s from Citadel Adbar. As such, his alternative theme is a re-work of Hulk Hogan’s “real American” entitled “real Adbarian”. Only one word is changed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b6CYHLWnyg
You can actually get the Transformation Sequence power as a Social Talent as any type of Vigilante as of Blood of the Beast. =P It’s not on the PFSRD for some reason, (I thought it used to be?) but it is on Archives of Nethys. You just need to cast spells or have spell-like abilities, but it doesn’t even need to be from the Vigilante class.
I allowed a bladebound magus in one of my games to gain dual identity as an arcana. I need to find a way to grant Transformation Sequence to his sword.
I have wide standards for ‘good audienceship.’ I don’t necessarily consider other players using their phones to text friends and relatives or even browse Facebook or Reddit to be bad audienceship, because TTRPGs are typically more of an audio experience anyway. There’s little VISUALLY engaging, it’s all in the descriptions, the minds. So I don’t feel like eyes have to be constantly on the table, or constantly on the player taking their turn or having a moment, and that generally works out fairly well for us. Some of us even work out of the home and are never really not ‘on the clock’ so there is that as well.
But you CAN easily go too far. It’s one thing to be looking at Facebook or Reddit. It’s another when, for example, during an online game, one player makes the other four wait for half an hour with nothing to do, then comes back and says, “Oh, it was my turn? Sorry, I was playing PUBG while you guys went, I didn’t expect it to get back to me so fast.” Twice. In every session. That player was definitely a problem, and one I wasn’t too sad to not invite back when that game was cancelled and we went on to a different one with someone else in the group DMing.
So even a relatively lax DM/player like me has limits. That was over them.
I’ll admit that I use devices to help with rules lookups myself. Many of my players use digital sheets. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s worth even that level of distraction though. I’m contemplating a “no devices allowed” session to see how the energy at the table changes. I’m willing to bet it will be a very different feel.
Ive been having a problem keeping my players from getting distracted since we play on roll20, i cant keep them from opening other tabs or pulling out their phones. Ive stated explicitly that everyone needs to pay attention but i often have to repeat myself because someone was on reddit or messaging someone. Any advice for keeping attention during an online game
Sadly, there’s not much chance to say “put your device in the basket by the door” when the game takes place on a device. If players aren’t willing to give those distractions up, and if you want to avoid the go-to solution of “find new players,” then I say to speed up the pace of your encounters. Include combats with a lower challenge rating so that they breeze by. Remind your players who’s “on deck.” Basically, all the stuff Colville said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/8odzjk/speeding_up_combat_running_the_game_59_matt/
If you keep the game as fast-paced as possible players will have less chance to get absorbed in other media.
Good luck out there, and happy gaming.
I actually homebrewed a magic item that allows transformation sequences.
Armor of Henshin. (Armor: Any)
Saying the armor’s first command phrase while worn causes it to recede into a set form, such as a staff, a scroll, or a tattoo somewhere on the user’s body. Striking a jaunty pose, presenting its’ non-armor form, and saying the armor’s second command phrase causes the armor to return to armor form worn by the user.
That sounds pretty neat! Kind of like those charm-bracelet weapons, but with armor. Nice. What’s your lore on the creation of Armor of Henshin?
“Henshin” is the term used to refer to Anime/Sentai transformation sequences.
Don’t really have much lore on it.
CALLED IT!!! I mean, on reddit… Still counts!
Lol. Go ahead and take a +2 circumstance bonus on your next comment as a reward.
I think you mean “Advantage”
Go ahead and take a -1 external penalty to your next dice pool.
I think you mean “Disadvantage”
And that’s a 50 dkp minus. Keep it up and we’ll start making sanity checks.
I think you mean “Fail a Death Save”
I think you mean, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
I think you mean “Ipso facto habeus corpus”.
Attention can be a problem, lucky for me i focus like… Oh, uh, shiny, i must go, post leter.
Squirrel!
How do you guys balance the attention vs metagaming thing?
I find that groups which are engaged are TERRIBLE about metagaming. And the more they’re invested, the worse the metagaming gets. As a GM I pretty much just let it slide at this point, but it does mean that there’s no such thing as a single-character challenge because the players all turn it into a group brainstorming session, which limits things a bit.
Then there are the nights when everyone shows up tired and exhausted and we only even agree to game anyhow because it’s understood that you can just chill when it’s not your ‘turn’, and when it’s your turn it’s your job to sum up what happened for the next person ‘in line’ as your last (out of character) action. Those are also the nights that the group ends up splitting often and oddly as people fall asleep. (Any other people out there with new parents in their groups? New parents are pretty difficult to keep awake. It’s like having a baby imposes a condition ‘fatigue’ on you and you don’t get to recover until years later…)
Anyhow.
Attention vs. Metagaming.
How do you guys balance it?
I touch on this a bit in this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/general-disarray
My first thought is that it’s on the GM to limit the metagaming. Engagement is great, but not when it turns into quarterbacking, you know?
I’ve been thinking about this over the last couple of days, and I realise that I have a real issue with keeping attention on other players’ turns. Not because I’m distracted by my phone or whatever else, but because I’m so busy planning my next turn. I’m reading and re-reading spell descriptions to see if they apply, checking for old abilities I may have forgotten about, and seeing if the duration on a potion of displacement if worth me spending my action this round to drink it (that last one was my monk last night, and it was totally worth it). And then I realise I’ve missed something cool one of the party has pulled off.
So my question is how do you strike a balance between wanting to be ready for your turn and paying attention to everyone else? Is this something that just comes with more familiarity with the rules of a given system, or is it something you have to work at? The last thing I want is for my turn to come and to need to spend 5 minutes checking rules, but I want to be a good audience for the other players too.
We’ll see if the script makes it past Laurel’s editing process, but this question deserves to be its own comic.
In the meantime, I’ll say that engaging in game-related stuff is generally better than derailing with cat pics.
My method has usually just been to maximize the pace of combat by having as many people taking turns at once as I can handle. If a player declares an attack, and then is going to spend the better part of a minute figuring out their numbers, might as well get someone else going.
Good call. I imagine you’ve got to hold off when the target’s survival will affect the next player’s shenanigans, but if you’re dealing with two players on opposite sides of the battlefield that’s all fair ball.
After reading the comments I’m wondering if the majority of GMs are earning their bread as teachers. No phones allowed. Don’t talk in class. Pay attention! No cheating, look on your own character sheet! In my experience this doesn’t help the overall atmosphere at the table.
What helps a lot is to speed things up. Like: roll that dice first.
Normal routine is:
What is the DC of the spell
Is it Will/Ref/Fort or Wis/Cha/Dex/…
What is my save bonus for that
Don’t forget the bard inspiration!
If people start looking that up in their pile of paper at the candle lit table that is easily a minute per player.
If you roll first then the result is totally clear 10% of the time. Roll a 1 or 20 and your stats become irrelevant.
I’d go so far as to state 2/3 of the time the outcome is clear and looking up the actual bonuses isn’t worth the time.
Damage is more complicated, as players won’t forgo any of their bonuses. But once the roll plus the obvious stuff has the enemy mook dead, the group can move on to the next action.
Keep the dice flying.