Breaking a GM star pattern: d20 more ways

Is talking to your players like playing a game of verbal ping-pong? Is the table quiet unless you are speaking with one of them? Do you fill the silence? Then you may have fallen victim to one of the classic GM blunders! The most famous of which is, 'never use your friends as props to write a novel,' followed by 'expecting your players to notice something'...but only slightly less well-known is this: 'Never allow a GM star pattern when you are running a game!" The GM star pattern was first described by the blogger and Microscope creator Ben Robbins: "When I say 'star-pattern', I mean when the players all talk to the GM but don't talk to each other. Picture the table, and draw lines showing interactions: all the lines go from the GM, the center, out to the different players, like a starburst. There are few or no lines from player to player." Now, Ben spent an entire post laying out five potential fixes to the star pattern, including a player fix, a GM fix (the campfire challenge), and…