The 'beer and pretzels' approach sounds like a dream, compared to the 'smoker and angry girlfiend'-style of table discipline that my group is capable of. You see, there are four players at my table with very serious attention span issues, and once one of them breaks concentration, the rest follows within minutes as if some kind of social chain reaction is taking place.
The smoker is the most annoying. He can go for 30 minutes tops without itching for a smoke, and when he does he´ll just wander off. Seriously, last sunday he actually wandered off during his freaking turn in combat! First, he forgot the wording of the spell he attempted to cast, decided to look it up, and after leafing through 10 pages he just wandered off with the book and his damn cigarettes without a word. I was speechless! Normally I hate the smell of cigarette smoke with passion, but I can tolerate when people smoke at the table as long as it is not my home they are stinking up. However, as two of the party members are ex-smokers who avoid smoke at all costs in their efforts not to redevelop their taste for burnt tar and nicotine, and the other two party members have small children in their homes, the last smoker is usually forced to smoke outside.
As if the pathetic smoker was not enough disruption, several of the guys suffer from the angry-girlfiend-syndrome. A terrible affliction that causes the inability to turn off their cellphones when they ought to have their attention focused somewhere else, and thus every single session is broken up by phone calls of varying length and importance. Topics vary, but none of them sounds like they are important. Perhaps its just me, but in my mind calls that begins with the words "Your sons poop is brown and somewhat firm today! Isn't it amazing!?" or "*Sob!* I accidentally formatted my hard drive, how do I get my homework back!?" is not worth 30 minutes of time on the phone while my friends is waiting for me to grow a spine and pay attention, but meh. For this very reason, we used to play games saturday night when children and girlfiends were asleep, but apparently this made some girlfiends feel excluded (and very angry), and furthermore some fathers found it too difficult to stay awake past eight, so we started playing during the day instead. A very bad trade if you ask me.
The worst thing about growing old and boring is that your friends grow old and boring.
