Player Engagement is a precious thing. If you lose a player to an outside distraction it takes quite a while for that player to come back and be fully engaged. When players are bored they show it in a multitude of ways, from glancing at their phone, to planning out their next level, to looking up arcane uses of their current skill sets. The ability to be distracted gets heightened online when you have a browser in front of you, it’s so easy to slip over to twitter, to a chat room if you’re on Twitch or any number of other things the giant calculator can do.
There are several ways to combat players being disinterested enough to look somewhere else. Most of which involve talking to each character. Some players are quiet, some are trying to find out as much as they can before acting — at the table there are so many different personality types that it becomes an exercise in management.
There are two major phases of the game. The methods you use to keep people interested vary depending on which phase you are in.
Boredom is Never Okay
In combat it’s easy to get people to check out. Some groups do it with fixed initiatives and people at the table who don’t narrate what is going on. Others do it with slow moving combat and limiting a players available options to a saving throw at best before moving on to the next person acting.
Creating engagement in anything is showing people that they can have fun and that the small bits of fun they have flow over to the next part. This is the reason why anything can be amazingly boring if you’re just sitting about watching others play. It doesn’t matter if you’re taken out early in a game of Monopoly or if you have a paralyzing spell put on you that limits you to contributing only a saving throw for the next several rounds.
Having an extended period where you are watching the game and unable to participate leads to boredom and quickly thereafter leads to distraction. If the outcome of this round doesn’t matter and only the next round does, then the entirety of this round is meaningless to the one sitting it out. This rightfully leads to them doing something else, whether it’s checking Twitter, cracking open a book, or going to get dinner. The scaling of how long their time out of the action is determines what they might end up doing. If it’s a 10 minute round then they now have up to 20 minutes that they don’t have to care about the game even though as a GM you want them to.
At this point the game turns into theater. In theory, it’s theater that matters to the player because their character is in danger and they should care what is going on around their unacting or immobile character. Caring about the character relates to how in-flux the state of the character is. The assumption that the character is going to be dead in the next round leads to the player to start theorycrafting their next character before the current one is completely out of the picture. The assumption that the character is hard to hit and is able to take quite a few hits lends to almost the same irreverence, the player doesn’t need to worry because the character will still be there when they get back to it.
Socially Adept
In social situations I’ve found it harder to bring meaningful engagement to everyone at the table. While it’s normal for a group to have a lead for talking to NPCs it isn’t normal for the characters that aren’t talking to evaporate. While most are listening they are focused off on other things, rarely is it writing down the pertinent details of what the adventure holds.
In a short burst of talking to an NPC that has just one or two pieces of information to give it’s good and can keep the story moving along. In longer situations I try to use an improvised, and untracked, initiative system based around who starts trying to talk. If people are trying to get a large ‘infodump’ then how everyone is reacting should be involved in some way. This is great place for comedic acts, such as the Wookiee of the group to be inspecting differing items and accidentally dropping one loudly.
Before all is lost
As a player I find dead time boring which leads to me wanting to do simple other things that I can put down and return to the game when it starts up again. As has been discussed on potelbat, and in a previous article, I’ve had experience where this could have included short board games.
I do my best as a GM to keep the spot light moving from player to player, even if all they want to do is support the scene leader is doing. How do you as GMs keep your group focused? As a player are there any ways you work to help other players to be more active?
