I recently found myself chatting about my RPG glory days when I had little responsibilities and plenty of time to game. Up into high school (I started gaming at 9) it wasn’t unusual for me to play daily. These tended to be short sessions (under 3 hours), and there was a time when, in addition to the after school game I also ran an in-school group through a module during lunch breaks.
Even through college, I managed to play regularly. I always had at least one weekly game and sometimes two or three. At one point I even worked in a monthly LARP (which quickly expanded into daily chat sessions, as the internet made its way through our group). It wasn’t until new stages of life (more demanding jobs, dating, marriage, kids, etc) began eating away at my time that I finally loosened my grip on gaming to a weekly fix (still short sessions) and then a bi-weekly fix.
With these shifting times dedicated to gaming I’ve learned over the years that GM and player expectations need to change in order to keep a campaign viable. Tearing through a dungeon crawl that takes 10 sessions is a very different experience if you can accomplish it within two weeks versus half a year. Players with dynamic characters* are more tolerant if their characters are growing regularly rather than being stuck at, say, 2nd level for four months.
On the other side of the screen, I’ve found myself finding that even the most interesting dungeon crawls become tedious if they take too long. If we’re playing bi-weekly I find that my mind wanders after 3 or 4 sessions. I’ve lost interest, and sometimes I can’t even remember why the group entered the dungeon in the first place. From a narrative standpoint, it’s like the story (I know, I know – I’m not arguing that dungeon-crawling isn’t “story,” but I hope you can understand my point) was put on hold for 4 months while the group took their lumps and gathered treasure and bennies before picking up the plot again.
Campaigns with static characters have their own challenges. In my experience players get bored quickly with static characters and are ready to move onto something new after a handful of adventures. Having Captain Awesome and Aerial Wizard beat up on supervillains with their invulnerability and weather powers is fun for the first couple of sessions, but rotating through the same 2 or 3 powers gets repetitive and there’s only so much you can do to maintain interest with subplots. Static characters certainly seem better suited in campaigns where the group meets less frequently.
That said, players with static characters are looking more towards the adventures to maintain interest and this puts a burden on the GM. Such adventures tend to be heavy on investigation and intrigue and, the less often the group meets, the more time is spent in-session re-educating everybody (which risks losing the tension that built up before the last session broke).
Finally, it’s worth noting that the less frequently you meet, the more regularly your campaign gets disrupted. Cancelling a bi-weekly session could mean a month between sessions. Also, if a key player can’t make a session it’s not that big a deal to cancel if the group will meet the next week. If the game is bi-weekly or monthly then the group is more likely to soldier on without the player, consequences to campaign continuity be damned.
I’ve recently come across this in my Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Initially, I wanted a low-powered setting where the PCs would level up gradually and there’d be lots of intrigue. This would be awesome if I were running a weekly game, but given that I’m running a bi-weekly game that sometimes only meets once a month, I’ve had to adjust my expectations. I’ve slimmed down my grandiose plans to be more easily digestible (individual plots are resolved within a session or two and over-arching plots don’t require the players to recall much) and collapsed my campaign arc to involve quicker resolutions from Point A to Point B to Point C. I’ve also allowed my players to increase power level faster than I’d intended, understanding that they’re also hitting campaign benchmarks more quickly than I’d anticipated.
So how about you? How often does your group(s) meet? Are you happy with your gaming frequency or are you having to adjust? What changes have you had to make to your GMing style to accommodate the new perspective? Are you finding yourself enjoying the change or would you prefer to return to your original style? Is there another frequency that you’d like to try and why?
*Throughout this article I use the terms “dynamic” and “static” in regards to characters. For purposes of this article, a “dynamic” character is one that typically starts out weak and experiences regular “power-ups” throughout the campaign. An example of this is “zero-to-hero,” where farmhands and blacksmiths eventually become demigods during the course of their adventures.Â
“Static” characters are those who don’t change or who change very slowly over the course of the campaign. They are generally competent right out of the gate, occasionally only raising an attribute or skill or gaining a new power after accumulating experience over several sessions. An example of this is found in most superhero games, where the character starts with a full suite of powers and changes little over the course of the campaign.
I’m mostly playtest nowadays, either my own games or others, and if they are longer than 10 pages, I wont read them. I noticed that I can always have time for board or card games, but roleplaying games takes a lot of commitment. Both before the session and during the session.
So I’m mostly playing no prep games, usually with collaborative storytelling, that takes between 45-90 minutes to play. If we want to play something longer, we just play the same game twice, just as a board game.
The sessions are more intense than when I played traditional roleplaying games. No more traveling or playing out when the characters are acquiring new gear, but sharp cuts to different scenes with filled with content. At least 100 minutes of fun in two hours of playing guaranteed.
While scheduling issues might be more disruptive to a less-frequent game, I think they’re also less common. Several years ago I ran a nearly-once-a-week game for two years; probably 50% of the sessions missed one player, and not a single player was present for every session. With games that often,
1) any little hiccup in your daily schedule can mean that you miss a night.
2) if you do miss a night, as a player, you might not feel like you’re missing much, because you’ll be able to catch up next week.
My latest game was twice a month, for two years, with much the same players, and if anything, the players were even busier than before – but we only had one player miss half a session, due to a work emergency. I think playing less often gave us more flexibility to work around the player’s schedules, and also gave the players incentive to work their personal schedules around the game.
Exactly the same place I’m in. Every two weeks with huge valleys when a game session is skipped. Although I would love to have a weekly game (continuity is SO much better), my commitments to family and work take priority.
Even though we meet weekly, because we alternate games (or have runs of exhausted players), a month between games is pretty common. It does result in the game feeling more disjointed; it’s more important for each session to feel self contained, because memory of clues can go pretty stale.
This has so much truth to it. I think sometimes, especially for what my group has gone through, our schedule adjusted but our expectations didn’t, and the games suffered because of it.
My main Eberron campaign has been showing signs of wear because of this. It’s taking them so long to get through the different parts of the prophecy they’re following, it feels like the campaign will never end. They were asked to retrieve six artifacts, but they’ve only gotten two in the three plus years we’ve been playing the game. When you only play every other week, pre-empt game night for other stuff that comes up, and swap GMs several times a year, it can take a while to achieve what used to be standard goals. I’m still not sure how to fix it, but if I want the campaign to continue, I’m going to have to adjust something.
Unfortunately, I started gaming fairly late in life, so I never really got to experience that luxury of having copious amounts of free time to devote to the hobby. I currently get to game about twice a month with two separate groups (although that schedule was thrown off a bit due to some personal stuff–good things, thankfully).
As it stands, I would love to be able to game on a weekly basis, but adult responsibilities make that pretty much impossible. Making it worse is the fact that I’d really love to be able to try out a number of different systems, but finishing a game in one system takes a rather long time. And if the rest of the group doesn’t happen to be in the mood for something different, I’m S.O.L. for several months. (I just had that problem when, after finishing a 5e campaign, I proposed a short superhero adventure, maybe two or three sessions. Everyone else in the group still wanted to stick with fantasy, so we’re playing another 5e game. I can’t complain too much, I suppose, but I do really, really want to play a superhero game.)
Up until a few years ago, a weekly game with regular attendance from the majority of the players was standard. Since then, it’s been a weekly game that gets preempted for business travel from one or the other players, but even then we can usually either shift the night, or run solo games.
Our weekend game that should be easy to do runs into more issues than the weekend one — this is often more related to family or child-care issues.
It’s still a far cry from my college days where we gamed a few days a week, or the military — which was weekly at most of my posts — or even the early aughties, where work schedules were generally compatible enough that we gamed a few times a week. (No kids then…) Usually our sessions are short — 3 to 4 hours, but that’s been most of my gaming since high school.
Our group only games once every two weeks. I’d like to game weekly, but real life and peoples’ schedules don’t allow that these days. Thinking back to my high school gaming days makes me nostalgic, in a happy way!
we meet up each Thursday evening, though I tend to be the least reliable of all the gamers in my group, which is a terrible trait in a GM (mea culpa!). So Im very glad I have at least one player who can jump in and run something at short notice.
I mostly run Pendragon, and the ‘1 adventure per year’ episodic nature of that is very forgiving of missed weeks of game play. Its easy to say a few years pass and no one blinks an eye; and if i miss a week where we have yet to complete that years adventure; the group are used to cliff hanger endings from me, and that helps to tide over peoples interest until the next session!