When, How and What Do You Play?

[Reynard]

Just out of curiosity, what do your game sessions look like from a purely logistical standpoint?

For example, I play 2 games per week plus another month game. We are playing a 5E campaign that started as a Rappan Athuk game I ran but has evolved into a rotating GM game (same characters, same setting, but not necessarily delving RA all the time anymore). I also run a Abomination Vaults Pathfinder 2E Remaster game with a different group. This is a "learning campaign" meant to familiarize ourselves with PF2ER. I don't actually expect to finish AV and will take the game out of the dungeon soon in order to test how how easy it is to create adventures using PF2ER. Both of these games are played via Fantasy Grounds and Discord.

My current monthly game is Fallout 2d20 played via Roll20, although we only really us it for the character sheets and dice rolling (no battle maps or other bells and whistles) and Discord again for communication both during and between sessions.

This Friday I am running the Daggerheart playtest. I have not figured out how yet, but I am guessing just via Discord. I have not found a VTT set up for it yet (unsurprisingly).

I would love to get back to a regular in person game, but so far it has been eluding me.

So, what are you playing? How often? Using what format or venue?

 

[billd91]

I play in two regular games right now.

1) Thursday nights, we play in person (with options for remote if illness hits since we have one player who has a compromised immune system), weekly. We had been alternating between two campaigns because we had a player who could only come on alternate weeks. But since he's currently on hiatus, we play a single campaign weekly. Six players, one DM. I'm currently that DM and I'm just starting Chapter 11 of Age of Worms tonight. The PCs are 18th level.

2) Saturday afternoon, we play remote on Discord + Roll20. This game started during the pandemic and has stayed online. It started as a chance to get some 2nd generation kids of ours playing D&D and other RPGs with some of us old fogies. We started with D&D, then Masks, then Call of Cthulhu, and are now back to D&D. I ran the first 3, my daughter is running now (specifically Curse of Strahd). We usually have 6-7 players and one GM on any given session. I have hopes that they might be amenable to playing Masks of Nyarlathotep some day...

 

[aco175]

I am playing a 5e game on Wednesdays after the scout meeting at the legion hall. We usually get 2-2.5 hours weekly. We just play D&D unless someone is not making the game and then we might play something else like a Marvel card game or regular cards like Cribbage or something.

I would like to gat into another group on a weekly basis, but I think that will wait until something happens with my group. My father plays and is is in his mid 70s so not sure how we have left and my son is in college so plays irregularly, but not sure where he will be once he graduates. My wife has no care to play. I suppose I could pick up something at the college I work at with the student group that plays. That might be best with playing in the school year leaving all my golf time in the summer.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

I DM a D&D 5e game once a week on Saturday for around 5-5:30 hours. We play using Discord for voice, text, and the sharing of pictures and documents, and we use Roll20 for dove and maps. It’s a homebrew campaign and world, with a lot of material from 3pp and homebrew material incorporated into it on both the player and DM side.

 

[Umbran]

So, what are you playing? How often? Using what format or venue?

I am currently running an in-person D&D 5e game twice a month in my home - running The Wild Beyond the Witchlight. This group has been around for 15+ years, I think, and we'll be moving on to something else after we are done with Witchlight.

I currently play in an online D&D game twice a month - through a chunk of the pandemic we played Rime of the Frostmaiden, and having completed that, we are now early in playing Humblewood.

I also play in an online Space: 1889 game, using Fate Accelerated rules. That story is coming near a close, and we are apt to switch over to some "weird west" stuff under the same rules.

I am currently working to put together a group to play Monte Cook's Old Gods of Appalachia RPG, the weeks I am not running Witchlight. That'll be in-person as well, likely hosting in my home, as the horror elements should play better in person, and I can play with some lighting and sound features at home as well.

So, this would be me running a game every week, and on average playing one game a week. The vagueries of scheduling so many adults, though, means that there's a fair number of cancellations. Also, my games typically run "1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month" style, while one of the online games runs 'every other week", and those aren't the same. So, that turns into my running one a week, but sometimes playing none, and sometimes playing two.

All these games are weeknight affairs. Weekend time is very precious, and I find folks don't generally want to commit long-term to RPGs on the weekends.

 

[Reynard]

The vagueries of scheduling so many adults, though, means that there's a fair number of cancellations.

The main reason I like "weekly" game sis because there is room for cancellations. If you are playing bi-weekly, cancellations make the game monthly or worse, which is too big a gap for me as GM or player.

 

[Umbran]

The main reason I like "weekly" game sis because there is room for cancellations. If you are playing bi-weekly, cancellations make the game monthly or worse, which is too big a gap for me as GM or player.

I totally get that. I wouldn't mind running weekly, but I have busy folks, some with kids, others have chronic health issues, and so on.

Having these four games all in flight, but scheduled so that they can't directly conflict, is a kind of defense, such that each week, something is likely to happen.

 

[billd91]

The main reason I like "weekly" game sis because there is room for cancellations. If you are playing bi-weekly, cancellations make the game monthly or worse, which is too big a gap for me as GM or player.

I like regularly scheduled, ideally weekly, games as well. The more regular you make it, the more people can plan around it and treat it like any other regular commitment like a bowling league or rec league softball. And if it's weekly and reasonable conflicts take out more than half the players, you're still queued up for the following week and it doesn't slide to monthly and then off the regular schedule...

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

At the moment I'm only doing a PBEM experiment with Traveller, which does major updates about once a week.

Up until the 2023 holidays I'd had a couple of years of steady once a week in-person gaming, playing in two Sentinel Comics supers games and running a third with the occasional one-off game in the cracks. That all fell apart at once as we'd been struggling with how character advancement was straining the system after that many sessions, and after some experimental fixes that didn't work out all three tables decided to take a breather and do other things for a while. I've got a standing offer to join a 5e D&D group that spawned off one of those tables but I'm not enthusiastic about the system so I've been putting it off.

 

[grimmgoose]

The main reason I like "weekly" game sis because there is room for cancellations. If you are playing bi-weekly, cancellations make the game monthly or worse, which is too big a gap for me as GM or player.

1,000% agree. I have never had a successful group that met bi-weekly. Each one flounders as people forget about it, it's not a priority, etc.

One of my groups started out playing every other Sunday. The amount of times we had to cancel was astronomical - which meant we basically never played. I made the decision to move to weekly sessions, and although there was some grumbling, cancellations almost completely stopped. The game became routine (Friday nights are D&D nights) and it also (seemingly) made everyone more engaged.

Obviously, it's a luxury not everybody has, but having played with multiple groups, I've never seen biweekly games work.