How Often Do You Cancel Sessions?

[WizarDru]

How many cancellations we have depends on your definition, I suppose. Last-minute game cancellations almost never happen for us. Barring things like icestorms and the like.

We have a dedicated mailing list and one of my players has created a google calendar. He polls everyone for the upcoming month and we decided on available Friday/Saturday dates. We used to play weekly, but that's become more and more difficult.

On average, we game twice-a-month. We may actually game more than that, but not our core D&D game. On nights when we're only down one man (out of six), we may continue playing. On nights when we're two down, we may make a boardgame or Rock Band night out of it.

On our last nights when only three players could attend, we played Gamma World (and my son got to play). Good times. Good times.

Generally speaking, no one is ever rude about cancellations. Sometimes things come up and a person needs to cancel within 24 hours. This happens. Occasionally someone needs to cancel that day. This happens. The only breach of etiquitte is to not inform anyone or wait until after the game has started to alert us, but this is super-rare.

 

[airwalkrr]

I have a hard time finding players these days for my home campaign what with having to compete with the RPGA and Living Pathfinder every weekend in the same time slots. So my personal campaign running 3.5 in the Eberron setting has had difficulty. I sometimes have only two players, which works (they have cohorts), but isn't always as fun. But I have resolved to keep sticking with it. Over the years I have developed a gaming philosophy that eschews a sense of realism in order to more fully integrate new players into the plot without plopping a brand new 10th level character into the game just because everyone else is 10th level.

My campaign is episodic, which means that each game session is a self-contained adventure with a beginning, middle, and end. A new player doesn't have to know a thing about the existing game to jump right in and start playing. Likewise, if you miss a session, you just miss an episode, but don't necessarily miss out on the entire plot of the game. I weave plots in between adventures but they are subtle and take backstage to the events of each week's exciting new plot.

It works very well. Just don't cancel the game. Even if only one player shows up, that's one player at least.

 

[karlindel]

For the 4e campaign I run, we plan about three months ahead, so we'll have about 6-8 sessions planned, and we'll usually have to cancel 1 or 2 as things come up, although we usually have plenty of notice and almost always reschedule the missed session on a different day or weekend.

I try not to cancel sessions, and fortunately my players only cancel if something important comes up.