Why is it so hard to get people together to play?

[TarionzCousin]

All you need is one hot, single nerdy woman in your group and the guys will show up every time.

 

[FreeXenon]

I'd say everyone else pretty well covered it.

Shorten your game time.
Have fewer campaigns
VTT

For me our DM and I just had our first kids recently.
I can tell you that has had an impact on our gaming schedule.

Before we were playing once a week, pretty much every week, and then our so's got pregnant and others in the group had other hobbies took precedence.

It is just life. Perhaps all you can do is accurately assess your situation and recreate your gaming schedule to take best advantage of what time and people are available.

I feel for ya.
Good luck!

 

[Dausuul]

All the suggestions so far are good ones, but I would add: Decide on a number of players that constitutes a "quorum." If that number of players can make it to the game, then game. For my group, it used to be 3 out of 4 players plus the DM; we recently added two new players, and now it's 4 out of 6. One thing I learned long ago is that you have to allow for a certain level of player absences or you'll never get a game going.

 

[Jhaelen]

All the suggestions so far are good ones, but I would add: Decide on a number of players that constitutes a "quorum." If that number of players can make it to the game, then game. For my group, it used to be 3 out of 4 players plus the DM; we recently added two new players, and now it's 4 out of 6. One thing I learned long ago is that you have to allow for a certain level of player absences or you'll never get a game going.

Seconded!

This was precisely the reason I decided to increase the number of players for my 3e game. Currently our quorum is 4 out of 9. Typically, six players show up for a session. We still only manage to meet about once a month, though. To make up for it we have rather long sessions (> 12h).

 

[Piratecat]

Even Sagiro's game of committed, excited players, a campaign that's been going for 16 years, didn't run for two months straight due to illness, absences, conflicts and holidays. Incredibly frustrating, but it happens.

We try to schedule on a consistent day (every other Thursday). That way people can plan far, far in advance. We get fewer hours of play in, less than three nowadays, but we pack a lot into it.

 

[Mercurius]

On one hand you have no sympathy from me - we play every other week and miss every third or fourth session, so we're lucky if we can play 20+ times a year, and this is the second year of this gaming group--in our first year we played once a month. We have one DM (me) and five players and obviously if I can't play--which happens every so often--we cancel, but the general rule of thumb is that we'll play if two or less people cancel. I would say that half of the time everyone can come and half of the time one, occasionally two, can't make it.

The reasons are as you say: busy lives, jobs, families, etc. Between six of us we have five wives and ten kids (with another on the way for one of them), plus various kinds of jobs. Meeting every other week for five hours is a significant sacrifice, so the fact that people show up means they really enjoy it (one person even has an hour and half commute from Boston). But we're all in the 35-45 range, all except one are married, and none of us are going out to bars or clubs on a regular basis, which cuts out one kind of distraction.

My suggestion would be to NOT have multiple campaigns going on. This may actually enable people not showing up. At some point you might want to create clear guidelines about attendance: ask people to re-commit to at least coming two out of three times, have an XP bonus for showing up (I give 5% of what is needed to get to the next level), etc. Not in a mean way but just is a bit of extra incentive. But to expect once a week, every week, is quite a lot, unless you're all single and with very little responsibilities. Once you hit the job/spouse/children mode, if you can play once a week you're lucky.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Many hobbies have a great deal of structure to them. For instance, an amateur sports league has membership fees, teams, and a schedule. This makes it socially easier to commit to showing up to the games to support the team. Many people with jobs and families are willing and able to make those committments.

D&D is in this sense closer to a guys (or girls) night out, relatively informal, more like a weekly poker game. It's much harder to justify why you "need" be there every week.

However, D&D plays better when you meet regularly and commit some serious time. The tension between life and hobby is for many people (myself included) unavoidable.

Personally, my group tries to meet weekly but doesn't, for reasons ranging from death in the family to a beach vacation. I wish we had more sessions, but I don't begrudge others for needing to be elsewhere. We used to run really long sessions (6-8 hrs) for a while but are now going shorter (~4 hrs) and trying to make the most of that time. I try to look at running D&D like running a TV show, which is also supposed to be weekly but frequently isn't. I plan the drama around breaks if I know they're coming.

 

[Troll Slayer]

Right now I'd murder for an every other week group. I'd say run two games each session if you have to. A short game for the irregulars and your core game either before or after the shorter game. This would work well if you have 2-3 players (yourself included) who are generally consistent.

At one point I had a consistent game group, with 2 GMs (myself and my roommate) and it was awesome. We'd play weekly, and if one GM needed an extra week to prep all he needed to do was knock on the other guy's door. There were a lot of shared perks to our living/gaming situations. Hell I'd often come up with something cool at work and call home to ask Mike who was there hanging out and might want to play when I get home. My best EVER Call of Cthulhu scenario happened like this.

Something that worked for us, which may work for you is the format for our Shadowrun game. My character was the star, and when he signed up for a run he'd call around and see if he could scrounge up a team for the job. This consisted of me actually calling our various player contacts and seeing if they were up for an impromptu Shadowrun game. It was a lot of fun.

You don't even have to live together to make this work, just have a GM and Player who consistently want to play more often, and a wide network of potential gamers who might want to play on a given night. That way you know you can find 2 or 3 more gamers with time to kill.

 

[Stalker0]

First, lemme say "Welcome to EN World!"

That being said, I think the way to get a solid game going is to set it for the same time, every week. And make it every WEEK. Players can quickly be trained to work around this designated game time - it's very easy for them to schedule "monday evenings off", for example.

Second, shorten your sessions. If you're trying to have one eight hour session every week, it might be difficult to schedule. But one four hour session a week (or maybe even two!) is probably doable.

Third, avoid weekends (with the exception of sunday). While some people may be able to schedule every friday off for the next year, a lot of people are not willing to do so. I can tell you right now, if you had a friday or a saturday night game, I'd probably only be there every other week, if that.

Fourth, make sure you work with everyone to set up a good time to game. And factor in all the prerequisites. If the game starts at six, after everyone's off work, make sure there's a way for everyone to get dinner. If Joe has to be home by ten for whatever reason, make sure your game ends at 9:30, no exceptions.

Fifth, don't get irritated. It can be annoying to have people bail on you, but getting irritated is not the way to go. If Joe doesn't show up and you complain to everyone there about Joe, than next week when Sam can't make it, he's going to remember just how damned irritate you got... and he might be afraid to show up the week after that. Us gamers can be a very sensitive lot at times.

Finally, have a backup plan. If you have five players and you get two no-shows, well, it happens. In my opinion, in these cases it's best to still do SOMETHING. Even if that something is just play a game of munchkin or turn on the hockey game.

This is word for word what my group has started doing. Reality is, when you get older life starts taking your free time.

Work, Significant Others, Kids...all of these things impose time constraints on you. Its not like in college when you can "study anytime". And its one thing when its one person in your group. When it starts happening to everyone in the group...it just sometimes seems impossible to get everyone together.


But yeah, we just started doing a weekly tuesday game, and we've adjusted our game, adventurers, and characters so that no character is critical if he's gone. We all know every week someone is probably not going to make it, but we have enough players that we can handle a few no shows every week.

 

[Herschel]

If you want to play with people who have a life, you need to deal with the fact they have a life.

And it's not a signle life, but however many of them there are in teh group. As others have said, a consistent date/time is good because it can be scheduled around. I know Thursday Night at 6:30 I have a game. I know the second Frday of the month I have a game at 6:30. I check Warhorn for LFR events in my schedule.