D&D General Scheduling Games (Herding Cats)

[Ralif Redhammer]

Thank you, everyone, for your responses. I ran the idea of a set game day by the group.

One of the players is convinced that a regular schedule won't work. Another player does factory work off and on on weekends and she doesn't have transportation, so we have to go get her (long story), and the DM seems to be content letting everyone else make a decision.

I give. I don't think it's worth the fight.

I appreciate it anyway.

That's a bummer. In my experience, if the players aren't willing to commit, it doesn't augur well for the long-term existence of the group anyway. More people say they want to play than actually want to show up to play.

 

[Brotton Goodfellow]

1. Play once month: Or don’t, if it works for your group. But for us, who are all adults with kids and jobs and busy lives, once a month is the sweet spot. Let’s us get ahead of the inevitable last minute changes.

2. I’m a big proponent of the DM offering dates that work for them as they are the person who is going to put the most work into the session. No DM, no game (I am the DM by the way).

3. Scheduling happens either immediately after the session or in chat with a survey. With the survey, I am the one who initiates it and takes responsibility for monitoring it. If someone hasn’t answered I’ll check in to see if they can make it.

4. Three or more players means we’re playing. I’ll adjust the session as a DM, or if I think it’s crucial for everyone to be there, I’ll run a different game. With only running once a month, cancelling because everyone can’t be there would mean death to the campaign.

That’s how I do it. Best of luck.

 

[delericho]

IME there are two ways to do it:

The best, usually, is to pick a fixed time and day and have a regular schedule ("every second Tuesday", or whatever). This works great, provided you have a group big enough that you can play even with some no-shows - I'd recommend a minimum of 6 people, with 8 being better.

Failing that, get everyone to bring an up-to-date calendar with them to the session, and schedule the next session before breaking up for the night (possibly even as your first order of business for the night, so it doesn't get forgotten when Bob has to run...). That's not as good, but if you're down to the bare bones in terms of numbers the regular schedule will lead to loads of cancellations.

Whatever method you use, though, the most important thing is that people at the table agree that it's a commitment as important as any other. I've had a number of players in the past for whom gaming was very much something they would do... unless they had anything else they could do instead. So they'd happily agree to a schedule, be really enthusiastic and definitely, definitely going to play... until the morning of the session arrived when something would almost inevitably come up.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

Yes, "want to play" in the sense of "have a strong desire to play and will take concrete steps of devoting time and energy to making that happen" is what you need to make a game happen. "Want to play" in the sense of "yeah, playing a game again would be fun, but I'm not going to try to prepare anything, try to sort out scheduling arrangements, or commit to a time once we sort out a schedule" is what they have and will lead to no-shows. People often treat those levels of 'want to play' as the same thing, but they're really not, and you've got to be willing to either filter out or not rely on the second group if you want your game to keep going.

Also if you're scheduling days, '1st and 3rd Tuesday' is usually better than 'Every other Tuesday' because most event schedules follow a 'week of the month' pattern, if you do 'every other' it's likely to end up getting more conflicts.

 

[Blue]

All working adults. We pick a night of the week, either every week or biweekly, and we stick to it. Down one, still play, down two, cancel. Works just fine.

Trying to work out weekends would be absolutely horrendous with various kids events, family functions, etc. But this works great, with a known gap in December, and some skipped sessions in the summer as people are on vacation. Plus the occasional "X is sick and Y had a work emergency".

I boggle that people make this hard for themselves, just have a set schedule.

 

[abazaba]

Not entirely related to scheduling, but: some people (here) state that they still play when one person has to cancel. I'm just curious about how people handle the details of that ? Does another person play the character of the missing person instead ? If not, does there have to be an 'in-game' reason for the missing person's character to be gone for a session, and then re-appear the next session ? Something else entirely ?

 

[Lord_Blacksteel]

Not entirely related to scheduling, but: some people (here) state that they still play when one person has to cancel. I'm just curious about how people handle the details of that ? Does another person play the character of the missing person instead ? If not, does there have to be an 'in-game' reason for the missing person's character to be gone for a session, and then re-appear the next session ? Something else entirely ?

• With superhero games it's super-simple - "Superman had to go divert an asteroid" etc.
• For my last D&D type game (Temple of Elemental Evil using Tales of the Valiant) we went with the campaign rule that by the end of the session everyone had to be out of the dungeon or Bad Things would happen to them. No one wanted to find out what that was so they got out of the dungeon. Several of the PCs had background abilities to add temp hit points via cooking so the running excuse when someone was out the next session was something like "Malice the Bard is having a hard time with the Paladin's chili from last night". It works really well once everyone gets on board with it.
• If there's no easy option like these then we wing it to come up with a story but no one plays anyone else's character.

Also, don't stop in the middle of a combat. Either stop early before the fight if the DM knows it's going to take a while, or go ahead and run a little long to wrap it up.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Not entirely related to scheduling, but: some people (here) state that they still play when one person has to cancel. I'm just curious about how people handle the details of that ? Does another person play the character of the missing person instead ? If not, does there have to be an 'in-game' reason for the missing person's character to be gone for a session, and then re-appear the next session ? Something else entirely ?

Generally speaking, the PC just poofs out of existence and reappears next session. We might joke about the character getting sick or going off to return some videos, but really, they're just not there when the player isn't.

It can get dicey when the character is in the middle of something or integral to what's happening, like if the one character has a car that they're all in when we last left off or they're specifically pursuing one of the PCs' goals, but those situations are generally rare.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

For some games, each session is an adventure and the characters are all back at 'home base' between adventures. Adventurer's League and West Marches style games are often like this, but lots of other formats work too. In that case you're picking up the crew with each adventure, maybe Stabby the rogue is in jail and can't go on this West Marches expedition, or Electric Elliot has to fly off to solve a problem with someone else, or Cop McCoperson is being investigated by Internal Affairs and can't make the stake-out. With a lot of WM/AL setups, you're getting a new group every session anyway, so it's not even 'explanation'.

You can also just have the character go inactive, or mostly active and continue the adventure. If that character has a skill the party needs (like they have comprehend languages and you want that as an excuse to lore dump, or they are the one who can cast teleport circle to get everyone to the next spot) the DM can just have them do it, and otherwise the character is busy or sick or offscreen.

It's possible to have another player control the character, but it's pretty clunky, requires some agreement about how that works (can the character die? Can the current player use up limited-use consumables or accept bad things for the PC?), and generally isn't needed.

If someone is really so lacking in suspension-of-disbelief that this ruins the session you could just skip a session, but most people would rather shrug off a minor 'realism' point in favor of actually gaming.

 

[plecostomus]

Not entirely related to scheduling, but: some people (here) state that they still play when one person has to cancel. I'm just curious about how people handle the details of that ? Does another person play the character of the missing person instead ? If not, does there have to be an 'in-game' reason for the missing person's character to be gone for a session, and then re-appear the next session ? Something else entirely ?

I am running Quests From the Infinite Staircase which is about answering wishes, so I have the stardust mephit NPC from that book kidnap the absent player's character to grant a minor wish. The player gets to describe what wish their character helped with when they come back. Also when the mephit brings them back, the character gets visions of important events during the session they missed (essentially they get to listen in-character to the recap we do at the start of each session).

I keep a NPC retainer from Flee Mortals! on hand for if multiple players are missing, to help with any combats. The retainers and beast companions from that book are very easy to use, no problem for a player to run them even without having seen the stat block before. So a NPC traveling with them might help them, or a friendly animal might show up, etc. So far they've had an Awakened Dog (reskinned Hobgoblin Tactician) and a Nothic (reskinned Lightbender Companion) help them.

For the game where I am a player, the DM says the absent player's character teleports back to our Spelljammer ship to do maintenance. The ship can teleport them in/out of its own accord.