How do you organise playing different RPGs?

[Erekose]

A comment on one of the D&D Next threads about how playing Numenera would mean giving up another RPG to fit it in got me wondering how other people game.

For our group, we have two of us who referee - one of us has a preference for fantasy and the other for Sci-Fi (although this isn't always adhered to). We alternate between the two different campaigns (using different gaming systems) on an adventure by adventure basis.

My sense from reading what others say is that they have two concurrent campaigns that they're involved in (e.g. playing one every Thursday and the other every Sunday).

So, I'm just curious about the different ways people use to play a variety of games?

 

[Crothian]

We play one weekly campaign at a time. We just started Edge of Empire last night. Before that we did a d6 modern day conspiracy game, before that was DCC, and before that was Pathfinder APs of Kingmaker, Council of Thieves, and Serpents Skull.

To get in other games I go to conventions and Gamedays and participate in one shots.

 

[Umbran]

I run a Deadlands game first and third Tuesday evening of the month. On of my players is currently running a Spirit of the Century short campaign on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays. These groups overlap a bit, but aren't the same.

I also play in a Star Wars campaign that runs once or twice a month, usually on Sundays, but is not so strictly scheduled.

The weekday sessions, as you can imagine, are a little short. The weekend sessions tend to run much longer.

 

[delericho]

Someone in the group says, "hey, I want to run ___", sets up an event on the website, and people sign up if they're available and want to play. And that's it. We're lucky in that we have a wide enough pool that most people can probably find some sort of game whenever they want to play, and most GMs can probably find players for most games.

 

[scourger]

I wish I had the problem of more than one game to play. As it is, it seems that someone in our group runs a game into the ground and then we go to another one. I have tried to get a different dynamic, but it is hard to change. Most of the group prefers D&D which tires me quickly.

 

[Nytmare]

In my (mispent?) youth, games (including board and card games) were divvied up by night of the week, with weekends organized into noon to six and six to midnight slots.

Nowadays, I'd kill for even a single, set day of the week, but nothing seems to be able to survive to the "everyone make a character" or even the "everyone pick a night" stage. Heck, we couldn't even get a "everyone make one post a week to this mailing list" game off the ground.

 

[Stormonu]

I do a mix of different nights and switching systems between campaigns.

 

[Umbran]

We (the groups I play in) have found that setting a schedule is pretty key. My Deadlands game runs on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday, period. If people are absent, we play board games or have a movie night or something. The schedule is well known, and people can plan for it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The most variety I ever experienced in gaming was in a group hosted by Alan Hench in Austin, Tx., back in the early 1990s.

We had a lot of players, but we also had a lot of RW issues. Sometimes, the scheduled GM simply couldn't make it, and we'd play boardgames and watch NextGen.

Then we hit on a system: everyone would be responsible for running a campaign, and everyone had a PC for each campaign. Each week, 2 guys would be scheduled to run- one the Primary, the other, the Backup. Every week, everyone would bring 2 PCs and whatever gaming stuff they needed. The Primary would be- as you might expect- the guy who would be running that night's game...unless he couldn't show up, in which case the Backup stepped up. We had very few unscheduled boardgames & Trek gaming sessions after that.

Some guys never ran more than a couple of sessions. Some guys ran long campaigns. One guy ran at least a half-dozen+ campaigns in his search for the perfect "Mecha-centric" RPG.

All told, I played in excess of of 14 different systems in my 3 years in that group.

And they all started with, "Hey guys, I was thinking..."

 

[Michael Silverbane]

Right now, I am in three different groups, each of whom uses a pretty similar, if haphazard, method of game determination.

I am in one group that meets weekly on Tuesday mornings from 9 am to 1 pm. That group has two primary DMs. One DM prefers to run either Mutants and Masterminds 2e or Star Wars Saga Edition games. He runs short-ish campaigns, usually around 16 sessions or so. The other DM runs mostly Type 3 D&D, but makes occasional forays into other systems, such as Streetfighter, Deadlands, and so on. He intends to run longer campaigns, but that often does not work out. I have thus far refrained for running for this group for the last few years. Whichever DM feels like running on a particular day lets us all know on Monday what we'll be playing.

I play in another group that meets every other Saturday, with sessions running from noon to midnight. Of the eight players in that group, about six of us consistently run games. Most games are Type 3 D&D, with occasional forays into lots of other systems - including Mutants and Masterminds 2e, GURPS 4e, RIFTS, Star Wars Saga Edition, Old World of Darkness Games, Dark Conspiracy, Shadowrun 3, and so on. Campaign lengths and rates of success vary. Since the sessions are so long, we determine the DM and game in a (more or less) round robin style. Usually the decision for what to run one session happens at the end of the previous session.

In the final group, which alternates Saturdays with the previous group. Sessions run from about 1 pm to 5 pm. There are three of us who DM pretty consistently. Any two of us usually have an ongoing campaign in progress, and we alternate one game to the next from session to session. Games vary widely, from All Flesh Must be Eaten to XCrawl, Star Wars Saga Edition, RIFTS, GURPS, Pathfinder, Type 1 or 2 D&D, and so on.