Leaving (Ending) a Gaming Group Gracefully - Advice Needed

[Cadfan]

Talk to the DM. Be honest about the frustration and scheduling problems. Ask him to bring the campaign to a climax, and then end it.

There's no reason that the end of a campaign has to suck. Get some final, good memories out of it, and then exit.

Consider taking up eurogaming if you want to maintain contact with this group of people. Its much, much more able to accomodate varying attendance levels.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

...eurogaming...

You're going to have to explain this one to me. I've never even seen that term used before.

 

[Alan Shutko]

We've had this problem to some degree with both of the campaigns I'm currently in.

First thing we do is just call out to everyone and state the obvious: "Hey guys, I notice we're having a lot of trouble meeting regularly. Is this campaign not doing it for people? Or are we having scheduling problems?"

Once we know which the problem is, we start talking about whether we want to change things to fix it, and how we would fix it. If people are just losing interest in the campaign, we discuss the problems and how to get people excited again. If scheduling is the problem, we talk about changing that: moving the day, changing the way we schedule, reducing (or increasing) the frequency. For instance, in the one I ran we had huge problems because we'd only try to schedule a session or two out and tried for biweekly. This year, we fixed the schedule at the beginning of the year to first and third Saturdays, so everyone knew from the outset what the plan was.

Then, ask everyone to commit to working towards the solutions. Literally, say "Sounds like we have a plan. Is everyone committed to making this happen?" Maybe someone will say no. That input will let the whole group know whether this is going to happen.

I've found that when one member of the group is feeling something, odds are they aren't alone. It's a lot easier to fix stuff if it's all out in public. Note, these suggestions are completely different than if you just want to leave a group for your own reasons. In that case, I'd say talking to the DM and then the group saying "Hey guys, this just isn't working out for me right now, because the setting just isn't my bag/I have too many other commitments/etc. Let's keep in touch."

 

[Cadfan]

You're going to have to explain this one to me. I've never even seen that term used before.

Alright, in the world of boardgames, there's been a semi-recent rise of a new genre that's often called "eurogames" because it mostly began in europe and germany in particular. It covers games of strategy, and has certain stylistic tendencies towards simple rules that give rise to complex interaction between players. The flagship game during the rise of the eurogame revolution was Settlers of Catan, but at this point its a genre with literally hundreds of games published per year, its own conventions, and annual award shows.

Check out boardgamegeek.com, perhaps.

 

[Retreater]

After some back and forth emails (I chose to do emails because we couldn't even arrange a face-to-face meeting to break up the gaming group), ultimately we all decided that we would try to see if it was just the gaming system causing problems.

Maybe we could recruit new players if we tried a different system? Maybe a classless system would better accomodate sporadic attendance (so you're not relying on a cleric who's not there - for example)?

So we're going to try a rules lite system, with an episodic campaign structure - so those of us who want to game often can do so (even though it's just a small group right now) and those who can only come so often can come when they can.

We haven't tried the first session yet, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it would work. I've spent the last weekend reading "Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering", and I have to say there's a lot of good advice in there, hopefully helping me to create a campaign and GMing style that will address the needs of this very different gaming group.

Thanks everybody for the concern and advice. I'll keep you posted how it turns out.

Retreater