Last night we spent the evening playing Magic the Gathering because 2 of our players were missing.
Our current social contract stipulates that if one player is missing, we play but if two aren’t there, we postpone the game. We’ve had this “clause” for about 5 years and it’s worked pretty well.
However, we’ve had people missing games on a recurrent basis for the past 4 or 5 sessions. Furthermore, there are signs that point toward it getting worse instead of better.
Having babies, children emergencies, business-traveling spouses to pick up at the airport, Friday workplace wine & cheeses and visiting parents are a reality of any adult gamers and a RPG gaming group needs to address this to keep the game going.
So chances are that having at least 2 missing players will increase. That’s why we need to reinforce the ‘roll call by Tuesday’ clause so I can plan the game accordingly.
So yesterday, I brought the subject up with Yan, Math and Franky to try to explore possibilities to allow the game to continue in a fun way for all. Here’s a rundown of our proposals and the pros and cons I see in them. Fell free to chime in with thoughts and suggestions (i.e readers, not just my own players).
Play with only 3 players present
Pros: We would probably never miss a game.
Cons: Creates a class imbalance in the party
We agreed that if we went with this approach, we would use NPC’s (controlled by players during combat) to make up for absent party roles.
We’d also rule that no player can be more than 1 level behind the highest character. So players that never miss would be rewarded with having the most powerful PC while players that miss once in a while would not be all that penalized. This actually also applies to all three solutions.
Designate Stand-in players that show up when players are missing
Pros: Makes up for missing players, brings in new blood in group. Allow for the people that gravitate around our game group to join in the fun.
Cons: Being a stand-in sucks, you can’t build a character story if you are there only every so often.
If we were to do this, in order to be fair to the stand-in, we’d call him (we have no female gamers in our circle) whenever 1 player was missing, filling out the group to 5 PCs.
(Thing is, after having played with 4 PCs in the last week, it IS the perfect setup for pacing)
Invite a permanent 6th player to the group.
Pros: We’d probably always be at least 4, the new player would be a permanent member allowing full immersion in the game.
Con: I’m sure my gaming room can’t fit 6 players (adding a panel on our table squeezes us against the room’s wall and door). A Six player game is slower and harder to handle.
If we went with this approach, we’d probably need to play at Math’s or Stef’s if all players were there.
So there we have it. Three possible solutions to the issue.
Personally, with the recent shift to a more casual game (and the concept of the extended party I’m implementing) I think we could afford to invite a new player.
I wouldn’t mind moving from my place on days that all players show up, and while the game would be slower, we also would have more social energy and have fun as pals.
Also, adding some new blood would also help fight the stagnation that is creeping up on our 9 year-old gaming group.
I’ll approach Eric and Stef with the proposals and I’ll let my players think about it.
On my side, I have 2 players in mind already but one just told me he’d rather stick to our monthly McWod/Pathfinder geek out… hopefully the other one would be interested…. plus I could use a bodyguard around that table of Masterminds! 🙂
How did you address this in your games?
I’m all for adding a 6th player. Like we said, chances are we’ll be 6th only on rare occasions… And going at Math’s place on these occasion seems a good trade off. Obviously that’ll affect the pace off our games when it happens, but that beats having no game… 😉
You can find a sixth player!? I am in awe. My recruiting pitch is getting harder to make against those common gamer foes: wives, children and earning money to avoid homelessness. It was so much easier when everyone was poor and single.
Trask
We have a similar problem and I found another solution. I’ve started working on a campaign scenario set of rules using D&D miniatures for short one-night two-hour adventures. We get the fun of rolling d20s without the worry about missing classes.
Here are the rules, the characters, and the scenario:
http://mikeshea.net/dungeontown.pdf
It beats Magic
Having trouble getting players because of wives? Easy answer:
Invite the wives!
For the past few months, my group has been majority female. Apparently this is unusual.
In any case, option 2 sucks, and options 1 and 3 are good. 4/5 is my ideal player volume, but 6 is manageable (though stretching it), and 3, well, check out my last 2 campaign writeups for just how well a 3-person group can do, even against challenges designed for 4 or 5.
Heck, I’ve done a lot of 3-person groups in the past. For both D&D and d20 Modern.
Trask: Yea I’m lucky enough to have a lot of potential players around. We don’t game that often (once every two weeks) so it becomes negotiable with our better halves.
Graham: My wife, while a geek is not a gamer. It’s the same for a lot of our spouses. Also, yes a predominantly female RPG group is rare, at least it has been around my social circles. Pity but true…
Since she’s a geek, however, she will understand the need to geek out.
But I keep seeing stories of wives who don’t let their husbands game because it takes them away from them. Which is why I always suggest extending the invitation. Once they know that they are welcome to be there as well, and it’s not just a way to escape being with “the wife”, most should be more accepting of it, even if they decide not to game.
Oh totally agreed and this would warrant it’s own post.
Some of our spouses don’t get it and mock us by saying we play with toy soldiers.
We usually retort that we could be spending our Friday nights at a bar…
Good point for the invite though…
Although another case is the Wife and Kids combo. My wife is exceedingly nice in that she takes over parenting duty on gaming nights. So inviting your spouse may not be doable when kids aren’t old enough to spend the evening occupying themselves.
We recently had a slightly different problem where we had to ‘uninvite’ a player who just wasn’t meshing with the group and was slowly causing people to find reasons not to come to gaming. As an adult gamer, I found this a hard thing to do but had to ask the player not to return because it was jeopardizing the continuance of our gaming group as a whole. I have seen these social contracts before but figured that my group wouldn’t want something as formal as a social contract. We are usually pretty good at letting each other know about absences and will play with the one player missing but will usually go with a card or board game if we are missing more than one. We game weekly and that increases the chances of a cancellation but we are generally pretty regular gamers. I’d add another player but be sure they are going to mesh with your other players.
A gaming group that is 9 years old… I can’t keep a group going more than a month at a time.
-pbs
Mike: I’ll have a look looks fun….
Deadshot: Ahh this is so hard to do… especially if it’s a friend or someone close to your social circle. As for a social contract per say… ours is not formal nor written… it’s just the social rules we all agreed to abide with by playing together for the last decade
PBS: Welcome to the blog! Yup, almost 10 years… and if it weren’t for the fact that I went 800 km north of Montreal to work in my early 20s… I’d have a core of players going back more than 22 years (Math and I started playing together when we were 13 and we’re 35 now!)
Any special reason why your’s lasts only 1 month?
If there are at least three players, we’ll play. If there’s a class imbalance, let the DM and the players adapt. We haven’t yet run into any problems with that. Of course everybody is afraid if the Wizard or the Healer is missing. But it alls works out in the end.
Oh and the preview functionality is really slowing me down! You need to test it with a slow connection….
Hmm… good point. Is it really that slow on dialup?
If so, I’ll just disable it outright. Let me know.
Usually I really try to avoid dungeons unless I KNOW that everybody will make it. City adventures are easy to accommodate any number of players, but of course this isn’t always possible. My group is pretty heavy into the Roleplaying, which makes running 2 characters impossible, and I’m normally to busy with my bad guys to be running an NPC PC, you can either make them follow the party with them mysteriously ill, or have the folks that showed up go out on a scouting mission, and return to camp at the end of the session.
Two missing players work great for that!
Yet on the same coin, every gaming group needs a break once in a while, hence the ever popular staple of “BAD MOVIE NIGHT” Nothing satisfies a geek more then a creature double feature.
We tried playing boardgames once, RISK. It didn’t turn out that well, I don’t know about your group, but around here we are furiously competitive. Double teaming whoever is ahead, only to turn on your partner when they have a couple more armies then you do. It got bloody around hour 20.
I’ll take “Night of the Atomic Zombies” instead, thank you.
My gaming group consists of 7 people playing in 3 different campaigns run by 3 different GM’s (each campaign no more than 4 people), in a 3 week rotation. We have two tactics to help us avoid missing sessions. The first is that we have found the one time block, that for us, has the least scheduling problems. That is Sunday nights at 6pm. We found from trial and error, that almost no one has a scheduled event on Sunday nights. We block out 4 hours for gaming, and are able to meet that commitment with a very high rate.
The second thing we do, is maintain a gaming calendar. One of the members in my group maintains the calendar in Google Calendar, and those that are using online calendars subscribe to it. Around mid-month, our calendar czar emails the group with the schedule, which games will be on which Sunday’s. The members of the group email back if there are any issues they are aware of. If there are, then we do a little scheduling, often kicking the game in jeopardy to a backup night (typically a weeknight or Saturday). In extreme scenarios, the GM’s may agree to shuffle the rotation and move a game up or down a week.
It may sound like a lot, but we keep nearly 100% attendance in all three games year round, and have been doing this for about 4 years.
I hope this isn’t too self-promotional, but it does seem tangentially related. One answer for those whose real life issues keep them from a face-to-face group is play-by-post gaming. The online group I’m part of has managed to avoid the worst problem online — games and DMs disappearing. It’s been around since 1996 online, and it existed as a FTF group for 10 years before that. Now we have a wiki, we use Googledocs for PC sheets, and we have our own hand-built game boards. We currently have about 90 players in 14 games, and we are expanding. We need players who want to post five days a week in a true 3.5 D&D game that allows for both solid combat and great roleplay.
Please pass the word or let me know if you have any places to suggest for recruitment.
Thanks!
Cayzle
The game world is called the Wold:
http://www.woldiangames.com
The new wiki is here:
http://217.155.204.140/Woldipedia/index.php/Woldipedia
A sample game (the one I DM) is here:
http://www.woldiangames.com/games/index.html?game=float
Quite simple: We are more strict in who is in our group. One guy was an avid soccer fan, and would miss any game that occured together with a soccer match of his team of choice. Now since we scheduled games on sunday, and all games happened on sunday, he basically was missing 3 out of 4 games for three months straight. But it’s quite simple: If soccer is that much more important to you than RPG, then you should go and watch soccer. We will find another player for you, no problem.
TLDR: If you regularily schedule stuff at the same time as your RPG evening, just drop the RPG already. I just decline any invitation from family in sunday and ask them for saturday instead. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t play P&P RPGs.
Cayzle: Self promotion that provide a solution or an alternative point to a post is always welcome…. 🙂 Play per post is a great solution to geographically challenged players.
K: It isn’t all that easy for a lot of groups. As we age, RPGs take second or third place in our free time and I understand that. I’m the group’s RPG freak, with Yan close behind me… for some other players, we could be playing Rock Band or Poker and they’d enjoy it as much.
If I want to continue living out my passion, I need to find a best of breed solution. 🙂
Wow, I’m impressed at the response level to that weekend post! Thanks!
And that is not even considering kids getting sick or business trips for work…
We’re friends before everything else and RPG is the thing we prefer doing together but if we cannot we always find something else. So we’ll never force any one out unless he goes psycho on us, which I really doubt is going to happen… 😉
The social contract may look formal but it’s just a name that properly define the agreement we reached on the proper gaming behaviour so everybody in the group knows what to expect in all fairness.
ChattyDM, I enjoy your blog and particularly this post, because you bring up a big problem. I guess my group is unusual in that I’m a female DM with a mostly female group-and we all have kids. I would like to be able to have us all make the commitment to keep our game time clear, but it isn’t realistic with the demands on our time.
That being said, I do think it’s important to be selective about who you game with. Everyone in our group wants to be there and makes it a priority. When we are struggling to schedule a game around people with family commitments that can’t be rescheduled, I don’t want to have to scrap a potentially workable playing time because someone has something they’d just rather do.
We went with your third choice–we have 6 players. Of course, as soon as we expanded to 6 players everyone started showing up for every game and things run more slowly now; I feel like I’m working harder to keep things running smoothly. It’s still fun.
Valerette: Thanks for dropping by and commenting!
The challenge of adult hobby gaming are many and scheduling is one that always crops up, regardless of the game. RPGs have the extra problem of having to deal with a continuing story regardless of who shows up or not.
As I write this I realize that I have a vocal female readership and I would truly like to know/learn more about the challenges they face above and beyond the overly discussed “male jerks vs female gamer cliché” and “Fantasy is only about Penis” subjects (although I’d have a blast reading comments on that last one!). Like I said above and before, apart from my 2 years spent at my University gaming club, I’ve not played much RPGs with women.
I will probably make an open call for a female guest post in the near future… any early takers? Email me.
Valerette: Unusual, but not unheard of. While I am a male GM, my current players are 3 females and 2 males. We have had a majority of female players for a while, and around a 50% ratio for even longer. With my fiancee wanting to try her hand at GMing, we might end up pretty close to your group’s setup one day.
Though with my brother joining up next week, we will be back to 50/50 with 6 players.
ChattyDM: I have to say, in my experience, the girls make just as many penis jokes as the guys.
Then again, I just might have really dirty-minded girls for players. So I’ll leave this for Valerette to comment on.
As for the guest post, my fiancee Christine might be interested. I’ll talk to her.
That would be cool…
The key difference between your group Graham and Valerette’s is the number of kids… unless I’m mistaken, you guys have none yet…
Ahhh the college years… 🙂
Yep, that’d be it.
My brother, at 26, will be the oldest current player, I believe. Though I can never remember how old Neil is (he’s one of the newbies this week).
None married, no kids.
(And I doubt that some of the players will ever have kids. One of our female players is actually somewhat phobic of pregnant women, so I doubt she’ll ever become one.)
Well, it has been a while since we’ve had a FTF group going. Last FTF group I played/DM’d with had groups that lived 2 – 2 1/2 hours apart. Add that to all the adult lives stuff and it becomes a mess. We generally made it a rule that if at least two people from each site (plus DM) could show up, we’d play. Due to my family schedule, I could only play every third weekend. So if something came up then, it shot a full month and a half between sessions. Too long.
If we were to start up again, I’d supplement by playing online during the down times (I’ve started playing and DMing- Scarred Lands: Conquest- at http://plothook.net). A lot of what the group does can be done online, though combats typically work much better FTF. Especially if you have tactical players. Coordinating so that you had major encounters to deal with for each session could be challenging, but would be worth the effort, I think.
Plus, the advantages for downtime, single player activity increases greatly, as you can communicate with individual players. Of course, I sit at a computer for 8 + hours a day, so this is convenient to me. Not so some others.
No wonder MMORPGs act as competition to tabletop RPGs for some people… everything is easier… less flexible and more constrained, yes, but easier.
We have seven players, most in their 30s, half with kids. One is a pilot and commutes to our area to work/game; two of us–including me–travel a lot for work. I’m running Paizo’s excellent Shackled City adventure path, and we’ve been playing in this campaign for just over a year. Much of the AP is dungeon crawl, and it might take us five or six sessions to get through a single dungeon.
Because it’s so rare for everyone to get together, and I don’t want to deal with absent players’ characters suddenly disappearing or having a bout of narcolepsy, we agree that we play if at least four players are present. The missing players’ characters are handled by those players who can make it to the game. It’s a little extra work for those players, but mostly they enjoy doing character studies (or, occasionally, mockeries) of the other PCs.
Positive side effects of this system are: (a) The party isn’t outclassed by the encounters as written; (b) I don’t have to make up ridiculous reasons why a character who was just there 5 minutes ago isn’t now; (c) I don’t have to scale down encounters (which is a pain–this game requires enough prep time as it is); and finally, (d) everyone earns experience, so no one falls behind.
Now, there are exceptions to our rule. For example, our next session will be almost 100% roleplay, so I want everyone there. We had to cancel last week when a few players couldn’t attend. If a particular encounter will be particularly important to one PC, I won’t run the session until that player can be present.
Overall, this method works pretty well for our group. If you can’t be there, you’re probably going to miss out on part of the story, but you won’t be penalized.
Hey Ully: Welcome to the blog! I agree that long dungeon crawls are particularly ill-suited for, shall we say, attendance-challenged game.
You seem to have found a good system that meets your needs. That’s cool!
You think so, Chatty?
Watch for my DM log tonight to see how we handled introducing two new players into the game.
You guys need a cleric or a wizard. I know you found a way around that, but one of either, especially a cleric, could help alot. If you don’t like how they’re usually role played, than have the player pick an interesting god. I have my own idea of a cleric of Jesus who dresses like a Catholic-priest but talks like a Souther Baptists. He fights with his fists.
Can you bless your fists like you do your weapons?
We’ve since added a new player and he plays a priest.
For your Cleric, I’d suggest removing his domain powers, giving him Improved Unarmed Attack and Switch Magic Weapon for Magic Fang… Bang, magic fisted cleric of Jebus!