Scheduling for the New Campaign and a look back at my Agile-Style Gaming Posts

 

Schedule Magic!

A few years ago I was working through some schedule angst and came up with an idea that managed to cover just about all of the bases I needed. I brought it up again a year later and talked about how it had gone and in general it worked pretty well and looking back years later I can confirm that it really did. It's not a solution for everyone - I doubt most people are going to have the combination of things I did at the time but hey, if someone does and those posts help them figure out something that works for them then great! I'd love to hear about it. If you have people at home that play and friends that come over and everyone is on conflicting schedules it's worth considering a matrixed approach to keep the wheels turning.

I haven't said much about this style in the past few years because it kind of faded out as life changed. It's been 6-7 years since that was the problem I was trying to solve and as things have changed and kids have grown up and moved out and moved on I don't quite have the schedule chaos I was facing back then. I moved to a new place, set up a new game room, added some new players to the mix, and tweaked up the rest of life as well.

For about two years now RPG time has settled into a far more predictable routine. We meet once a week  on Saturday nights and after some experimentation with rotating through multiple games we've settled into that most basic of scenarios: we have one main game. Sometimes we have had a backup game for when part of the group missed but for this run I am looking at dropping even that. Whoever shows up can take whatever characters they want in whatever direction they want. This should especially help with the last-minute cancellations which are not a regular thing here but can really cause chaos when they occur. This means I have to enforce a little more structure than I normally do - i.e. they must get out of the dungeon if they are in one -  but it pays off in having the session-to-session flexibility. I think this will pay dividends in improved focus and immersion in the campaign so I think it's worth a try. 

I have a little more preparation to do in having things ready to go at different levels and for varying numbers of players but a) I have more time to do that with only one game in play and b) it's D&D so there is no lack of material to co-opt for my game. I don't think it will be a problem.

I do occasionally cancel for vacations or family stuff and that means no game that week but I try to keep that infrequent. Consistency and predictability go a long way towards keeping the game going and on people's schedules so I'm willing to set things up to get us there.

So yes, all of that complicated calculating has now boiled down to one game we play once a week, every week, on a set night. The Agile Approach is what I needed for a few years but time marches on and things are simpler now.  Change is inevitable and life is funny but it works for all of my friends and for me so this is a good place to be.