Players with low attention-spans

Nope, it backfires terribly. My trick is to allow and encourage people to do things like tap games, doodling, yarncraft, the news, and whatever else. Then let people shift their attention where they want it to go. They're not burning themselves trying to focus on parts they don't like that's going to hurt their focus later, I can visibly see who's engaged, how much, and when, and no one is wasting time arguing about it.

What if you have a player with actual diagnosed ADHD?

Replace them with a non-defective ones.
Players are dime a dozen.

If players can't start paying attention after one talking-to, then they probably don't care and it'd be an easier fix to just try your luck with some fresh blood.

You should also look into whether or not you're boring.

While I think you're more right than wrong, that's still a very binary view of people. I don't think you can necessarily go straight from "easily distracted" to "doesn't want to be there."

Paying attention is hard dude don't be an asshole

So, what about you as a DM. Are you keeping all the players at the table engaged, or are there like 30 minute segments where half the party has their dicks in their hands because of a party split or an encounter they can't find a way to contribute to?

Do you have more players than you can realistically devote attention to? Are there lots of party splits and single player side scenes the others have no investment it?

In the end, does the guy sitting at the table just rolling dice when prompted actually bring down your game somehow?

Some people are just ADD dipshits that cant peel their faces away from twitter or whatever, but some DMs are just shit, and some people are idiots and think they can wangle 8 person parties when they can't.

>Paying attention is hard dude
This is why whole education system decays. Spastics need to catch up or drop out. Lowering the bar to their standards solves nothing.

Find a doctor to give him or her the correct diagnosis: either "lazy" or "slow"

He's already diagnosed with autism so I dunno how much that'll help.

>distraction-free environment
>woman-free environment

That won't fly in 2016.

OP's webm sums me up as a GM.
>D&D is pretty fun to run
>Holy shit, I just found out about this other game that I wanna try running now!
>GM-less games seem interesting, I wanna try them!
>Attention keeps shifting back and forth between games
>Players just want me to go back to running regular D&D
>Meanwhile I'm buried under half-finished ideas and plots because I can't focus on one game at a time

>Would a distraction-free environment fix this?
A more interesting game usually does the trick.

>being distracted because there are women in the room
>being this much of a neckbeard
Holy shit you guys, she's not gonna suck your dick under the game table. Chill the fuck out

Literally me

I always make jokes and references out of character

I'm looking to have a fun time, don't be fucking autistic

>Playing at DM's house
>DM has young kids, a disabled wife, and his elderly father living with him
>has to get up every 5 minutes to do something

>Chill the fuck out

Clubs have been segregated by sex for millennia. They did it for a reason.

Wait till I roll my cha

Banning unnecessary phone use, playing something that doesn't have 3 minute turns. I'd recommend these even if you don't have a low attention-span player

To make it an all you can eat buffet for the gays?

Have you tried playing a better system? My group constantly got distracted during DnD, but when we played WoD or FATE turns were so much faster and there was so much more interaction that no one got bored.

>this mud tastes disgusting
>you should try dirt or gravel

>food analogies

Fuck off /v/

I make simple analogies when I speak with simple people.

>le ad hominem face

>Holy shit you guys, she's not gonna suck your dick under the game table. Chill the fuck out

No way, it'll totally happen after I rant about feminism and make sexually aggressive comments. Ladies can't resist my bitter desperation. Or my charming hat.

Yeah, so you could fuck butts without your wife finding out.

100%American.jpg

>blaming your players when they get bored during your shitty games

Sorry,
I run games for a group of engineering students and they are still distracted from time to time.
So might it be fair to assume "distracted=can't focus=shitting up the education system" to be false?

There's difference between being distracted (temporarily / occasionally) and being unable to pay attention (permanently).

>"You're sitting down with the Mayor's Wife in their manor as she's about to tell you about the quest."
>Nothing
>"Guys?..."
>"Alright guys roll initiative, the Mayor's wife was actually a Gnoll and Goblins just came out of the guy's cupboard."

>"Alright guys roll initiative, a bunch of armed goblins and a gnoll, all in ski masks and black armor, just smashed through the window. The gnoll barks an order to get revenge on the mayor and his family first."

It's not that hard to have combats that make sense.

I've actually found that providing some minor diversions can help. When I put little toys like slinkies and such out where my players can mess with them, it definitely helps keep things on track. Give them an outlet to blow off the excess energy without totally pulling them away from the game.

And you'll definitely never succeed in creating a distraction-free environment, because the biggest source of distraction is the other players. Usually what gets my group distracted is going off on tangents starting from something in/related to the game.

>missing the point this hard

>the biggest source of distraction is the other players

This. If you've ever seen a Monty Python Cascade you know that it's possible for anyone to get distracted. My group tends to get off track reenacting Baneposting in-game.

Unfortunately, as one such individual (not on purpose, mind, and I do try and stay involved as best as I can, just have my brain working against me more often), I can pretty much say distractions are everywhere. Sometimes it is even the game that may distract from the game-just changing trains of thought from related to it directly to tangent after tangent.

>My group tends to get off track reenacting Baneposting in-game.

You act like that's a good thing.

>48420892
You don't even deserve the (you).

Dude, I have a horrible attention span and memory, and even in the greatest of games, I get distracted and/or forget things

This. Even just allowing one person on their phone will take them out of any conversation and renders them out of it.
And especially during combat, when it gets even slower.

>Monty Python Cascade

I love this term. I am stealing it from you, and you cannot stop me.

>and you cannot stop me

Are you certain? I have access to a time machine.

My DM decides to have a total of seven players in our party. This is in a narrow dungeon, where we can only fit two side-by-side. He then decides to split us up, for no reason, and three people just leave. Also, one person is just that rolling armor from Dark Souls.

>allowing video games into your traditional games
Sounds like someone doesn't care about making and developing their own setting if reference content is allowed in.
>the BBEG is a hitler knock-off
>the BBEG is a trump knock-off
>the BBEG is some anime/vidja/movie character knock-off

It's all shit.

I play games with niece a lot and TV's a huge problem. If it's on I can keep her 3 year old sister from moving the cards around and stealing them from the table, but then she's distracted as hell too.

Is he? The point is that it's hard to throw combat into every situation, but usually not impossible. Ethereal filchers and teleporting and the like are probably handy in this regard, coming out of fucking nowhere to piss you off.

nope. if anything it'll make it worse. some distraction is fine, cross talk happens, people will take time to do math in combat and when they lvl their characters. just speak up and get their attention when it's time for them to listen.

I yell at my players like a damn drill sgt. they don't seem to mind.

such beautiful dumb dogs

I read that original post more as "the party doesn't care about any narrative, they just want to roll dice and kill things, so I'm destroying what I had planned so you can roll dice and kill things"

It's not about whether or not the combat fits into the narrative, it's that the party in question doesn't even care about the narrative. The Queen turning into goblins is just as good as Ethereal filchers to them, because either way they finally got to the combat.

>I use arbitrary combat to get my players to focus.
>I think that arbitrary combat doesn't work in every situation where players can lose focus.
>It's not that hard to have combats that make sense in different situations.
>You missed the point.
>The point is that it's hard to throw combat into every situation, but usually not impossible.
>It's not about whether or not the combat fits into the narrative, it's that the party in question doesn't even care about the narrative.

Actually you both missed the point.
The point is that he's an idiot for thinking arbitrary violence equals interest when it's merely self preservation.
Worse than being an idiot, he's employing the Michael Bay approach to GMing.