DM Tango's page

Hey all. Not quite sure if this is the correct forum to post this, but I wanted to share a resource that I modified/created for interviewing new players for campaign recruitment.

I have been fairly active on the Pathfinder RPG subreddit and on the Paizo forums for a while and have picked up on a lot of stories about horrible players, DMs, etc., and one of the best tools for vetting new players that I've come across is the "New Player Interview" by Carl Fowkes (Frieth). I am currently looking to take on a fresh group (see here if interested), and I took it upon myself to make the questions more thorough and organized.

Here it is. Feel free to use this in your own groups. Also feel free to modify or change it to your own needs, but please do leave the acknowledgements section at the end intact.

The questions are deliberately very general and aimed at "I want to DM a Paizo adventure path," but you could easily implement questions like "how do you feel about homebrew?", "how do you feel about x system?", "how do you feel about gestalt?", etc. Like I said, feel free to use, modify, and distribute.

I am open to suggestions for other questions that are important. Thanks in advance.

So I'm currently DMing for the first time and I'm running RotRL. It's been an awesome campaign so far, and I've personally had a lot of fun being on the other side of the screen.

Normally, the group is comprised of a group of friends, and because we're all student-aged, we've got friends who are returning home for the summer from their studies, a few of which have asked to play with us. I personally have no issue with it, and everyone in the group agreed that we didn't want to exclude anyone.

Now, the group has doubled from its usual four to eight. We recently had our first session with seven, and I have to say that it was a little hectic (not that we weren't expecting it to be), and unfortunately, some issues that existed beforehand within the group dynamic have now been amplified due to the strain of having more people in the room.

1. One of the players frequently browses the internet on his phone/laptop during the game and seems generally disinterested when it's not his turn in combat (which means he basically excludes himself from the in-between dialogue and RP altogether). We've tried adopting a "no laptops at the table except the DM" rule, but this is inconvenient because we frequently need to look up spells or rules, and I personally don't want to be the one to have to do this as I usually have statblocks and the like open on my screen. This generally leads to a huge lag whenever the player's turn comes around, as combat comes to a complete crawl because he hasn't been paying attention to who's done what or what's going on.

2. Player turns seem to take way too long overall. Some of our players can complete their turns in seconds, while others can take several minutes to figure out their abilities/stats/bonuses or otherwise don't know what they should be doing and wait until it's their turn to ask the other players.

3. Generally the table environment is pretty laid back, but chatter has become a noticeable issue with the amount of people that we have in the room at one time.

My overall question is this: how can I curb this behaviour and streamline combat without becoming a fascist dictator? I don't mind telling people to shut up at the table, but I feel like the table environment will quickly become hostile if I'm forced to do so on a constant basis.

Feedback from a DM/player who has been in this position before would be helpful, as well as any tips for making turns faster, keeping players focused, etc.