Game Wish 12: Mood Maintenance

This week's WISH from Turn of a Friendly Die.

Sometimes in my games, I try to set a mood, only to have a joke or out-of-character chatter/commentary ruin it by going off on a tangent or breaking everyone into laughter, occasionally including me. I have pretty much given up on trying to get my players to be serious all the time - after all, when I'm on the other side of the screen, I'm not always serious either. Plus the game is a social, fun event, and people should not feel forced to be serious or in character all the time. (I'll save that for LARPers)

That said, how do you keep the mood? And once lost, how do you try to bring everyone back? Can you? Is it even possible?

And what do you do with that one player who is always the first one to crack a joke and break up the tension you've built to so carefully, no matter how many times you've asked/warned him/her not to do that?

A difficult one. I've GMed a game where the out-of-game chatter took up more time than the actual game, which was very frustrating, to say the least. The last time I played with that group we got the OOC chatter out of the way first, only trouble was that took up two entire days before we started gaming! Not ideal.

The games I've GMed have tended not to be highly mood-intensive anyway, perhaps that's my problem. A lot of the gaming I play is weekend-long sessions with people I only meet two or three times a year, where the purpose is as much social as gaming. And many games are ffairly light-hearted, comedy-style games in the first place.

One thing I have considered, though, is a pun box. Like a swearbox, but for puns. I hate bad puns.