40K Friday - The Tranicos Campaign Battle 2 - Recon In Force

Establishing a presence on the planet with the help of several brother marine chapters, the Crimson Fists begin their campaign of reclamation. In particular, one small band of Space Wolves helps hold the line against the green tide ...

This too was a 500 point battle to help get our campaign started. This time I was playing the Orks and Apprentice Blaster was playing the Space Wolves:



1 Warboss (HQ) @ 105 Pts
     'Eavy Armour; Cybork Body; Power Klaw; Shoota / Skorcha; Stikkbombz;
     Warlord

13 Ork Boyz (Troops) @ 124 Pts
     Slugga (x13); Choppa (x13)

     1 Nob @ [46] Pts
          'Eavy Armour; Power Klaw; Slugga

13 Ork Boyz (Troops) @ 78 Pts
     Slugga (x13); Choppa (x13)

1 Killa Kan (Heavy Support) @ 80 Pts
     Dreadnought CC Weapon; Big Shoota

     1 Killa Kan #2 @ [40] Pts
          Dreadnought CC Weapon; Big Shoota

1 Killa Kan (Heavy Support) @ 40 Pts
     Dreadnought CC Weapon; Skorcha

2 Big Gunz (Heavy Support) @ 72 Pts
     Lobba

     8 Grot Krew (Gretchin) @ [34] Pts

          1 Runtherd @ [10] Pts
               Grabba Stick; Slugga

Models in Army: 42


Total Army Cost: 499

Around 30 Orks, a couple of Kans, and some big indirect fire guns- I should be able to make something of that!

Blaster's forces consisted of a Grey Hunter squad, a small Blood Claw squad led by his wolflord, and some Long Fangs.

We played Scenario 2 - Purge the Alien. My Warlord trait was Master of the Vanguard, giving my Warboss and his boys an extra roll when running. I set up the two mobs of boyz and the kans on the center & right, aiming to take out his fangs and hunters. The lobbas were on the left in some cover. He set up the hunters in some woods on his left, the long fangs in a ruin in the center, then the blood claws on his right. Our backstory was that the Space Wolves were out on patrol and had tracked a party of Orks into a wooded area where things got hot:

Ork Turn 1 - The boyz run forward, the kans shoot and miss, the lobbas shoot and scatter all over, doing nothing!

Wolf Turn 1 - 3 out of 4 Fangs hit, killing 6 boyz

Ork Turn 2 - Boyz run forward, lobbas and kans continue to miss

Wolf Turn 2 - Grey hunters& fangs wipe out a boyz mob and put a wound on the warboss!

Ork Turn 3 - Boyz charge the long fangs, wipe them out, one kan charges the hunters then explodes when blown apart by krak grenades

Wolf Turn 3 - Hunters kill more boyz

Ork Turn 4 - Everybody runs, lobbas continue to miss

Wolf Turn 4 - Hunters shoot at back of the remaining kan, lay one hull point on it, Blood Claws move up

Ork Turn 5 - Kan shoots, boyz run

Wolf Turn 5 - The last Kan dies to bolters and plasma fire, Claws and Lord charge boyz and Boss, take them down in Assault

So the Wolves win 6 VP's to 1 - not a great showing by me. Attempting to charge a unit of Grey Hunters in cover with only half of my forces was a mistake, and taking lobbas in a small battle like this was probably a mistake too. I'm thinking buggies or more boyz instead of lobbas and kans would have been better choices. I can tell I have a learning curve to climb going back to small-point ork forces. Apprentice Blaster was happy with the way it went for him, as he should have been.

Next time we're bumping it up to 650 and we will play another one or two battles.

The Apprentices vs. Stonehell - Session 1

(Prologue is here)

I told the Apprentices what I was thinking - that it would be nice to have another fast-D&D option - and they agreed. Apprentice Who was sick so he sat out this round but Red and Blaster were ready to go.

The first part of the experience was making characters. I told them 3d6 in order. There were frowny faces but no real griping other than "you know that means we're going to suck, right?". I tried to gently push them forward with the whole "part of the fun is overcoming the odds with a less than perfect character" D&D dad speech but it's clearly not a huge plus in their opinion. I did give them the chance to swap two attributes around, and that made them pretty happy - briefly.

We are playing advanced Labyrinth Lord so we have all the races and classes from AD&D and Blaster was shocked by the stat requirements for a Ranger. Subsequently Red was shocked at the Paladin - "Who has a 17 Charisma?" was the comment I believe.

Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Campaign

Apprentice Blaster was subsequently shocked to find out that Elves cannot be Rangers! His favorite race can't be his favorite class! SMACK! Welcome to the good old days son! Actually I used to think that was stupid too so I eased up here and pretty much let races access to class = race access to subclass as well. We'll figure out the level limits and stuff when it matters.

Anyway we ended up with an Elf Ranger (surprise surprise) and a Human Cleric for Apprentice Blaster, then a Half-Orc Fighter and a Halfling Assassin for Apprentice Red. They have names but we will not concern ourselves with those names until they reach 2nd level.

Couple of interesting things here:

• I like the idea of the halfling assassin so I allowed it. between this and the elf ranger thing I decided to just go with the tentative class = sub-class general guideline for now. Plus the advanced LL assassin doesn't have all that gray area stuff around what the table is for - it specifically says it's a chance to flat-out kill something under a couple of easily-met conditions. 
• Half-Orc fighter ... those were fairly popular back when in some of my circles, a very traditional choice and with no prompting from me
• Clerics - My background for the religions in this world is different than what I usually run and pretty loose so I told Blaster to make up whatever god he wants his guy to follow and tell us about it. He and Red immediately say "Talos" and start singing something from Skyrim and just tickling the heck out of themselves so apparently I need to play more Skyrim to start getting the jokes. 

This was all arranged very much on the fly so as they finished up character creation I handwaved a lot of travel time and said they headed straight for Stonehell when they left the great city of Dragonpoprt, bypassing the local town  in order to get right to the dungeon.

I'm sure it looks something like that

Stonehell is located in a box canyon which is walled off by a 20' stone wall, kind of like Helm's Deep without the fortress part. It's partially collapsed but the central section with the gatehouse is still intact. The canyon has some cave openings ala Caves of Chaos, plus there are some terrain features inside the canyon too - in short there are a lot of places to check out before entering the dungeon proper. They stopped to read the graffiti on the outside of the wall (treasure promises, warnings, etc.) and then went inside.

First stop was the first entrance on the left - empty, empty with big stone thing in the middle of the floor, then NOT EMPTY! Yeah, skeletons! A few minutes later and the skeletons are smashed to bits around the room and no one died!

Small, rubber skeletons, apparently - like these!

Encouraged by this they decided to check out a small wooded area and they manage to surprise a group of brigands waiting in ambush! A very one-sided fight breaks out and the brigands go down faster than the skeletons did, though they manage to get in a few licks in on the party.

Backtracking a bit they decide to enter a cave when the ranger notices some bear tracks and they hear a low growl form within -  a bear growl. Realizing this is likely the lair of the local mascot and good luck charm they decide to back off and check out some other options.

Heading up a nearby trail the neophyte heroes come upon a new cave with non-mascot wildlife - wolf tracks! They charge in and the wolves attack! In a flurry of vicious blows a wolf is wounded but the cleric goes down in the first round. Shocked back into reality a hard fight begins and goes on for 8 whole rounds, taking out all 4 wolves and only claiming the fighter's life along the way as an additional cost. The now somewhat less cocky party gathers up their things and heads to the nearest town, to bury the half-orc, help the cleric recover, and recruit some help.

Oh it wasn't THAT bad

DM Notes: Hey, I tried to get them to check out the hireling rules but they were not interested. All went well and they used appropriate caution until the wolf episode and well, hopefully they remember that. 

• The binding wounds rule worked well so we're definitely keeping that. 
• Assassination is not a hugely useful ability at first level as quite a bit of the time a backstab is enough to kill your target anyway - Red kept asking about rolling for assassination until I finally told him that you don't a special table to kill things with 5 hit points. Then of course with the wolves he really didn't have a chance to use it anyway.
• They got distracted trying to parley with the brigands until I reminded them that they had surprised the goons and that talking to them first would automatically skip past that. They opted to attack instead. They did track them back towards their lair, so that could be an interesting development for next time.

It was a promising run and they were amazed that we got that much exploring and fighting done in the time we were actually playing. That's a good way to start and next time we should accomplish even more as we won't have quite so much character building to do. 

d6 Star Wars - A 1st Edition Flashback

Yes, this is the sourcebook, I've used the RPG cover a lot

I made some posts about d6 Star Wars back in 2011 as I was trying to get a game going with the Apprentices and was appalled at the amount of mechanical nonsense getting in the way of my game. Where was the fast and furious dice-tossing I remember? Bunches of weird skills, tons more charts than I remembered, a load of very specialized skills and special-case rules - it just was not the same as what I recalled. I posted stuff (you can find them under Star Wars and under Rules Mongery over there on the right) that I liked but I think I overdid it a little as I struggled to turn Second Edition Revised and Expanded into the game I wanted. It is a very pretty book but don't fall for the trap! It's a ton of work to undo all of that stuff! Instead I found a simpler path and went retro.

I recently re-acquired a copy of the first edition rules and this is the game I remember. We didn't play it a lot but it left a very distinct impression and the only game that's really come close to that particular feeling is Savage Worlds. Re-reading this version reminded me why.

I see the DM is going for the win this time

A shorter, saner skill list. Fewer charts and tables. Still-clean rules for most of the situations that will come up in a typical RPG - no, we don't need 14 (literally!) different mechanical repair skills, from armor to droids to walkers to star cruisers! Somehow this version survives with only 4! I think this is a fair example of the bloat I'm seeing as the game expanded and the designers tried to make it into a system that could accommodate every possible kind of campaign. Somewhere the focus on making it run like the movies was lost. Maybe the EU had something to do with it, trying to shoehorn in everything a wide group of authors could think of was bound to stress the mechanics at some point. It doesn't need to be everything to everybody - put the core in the box/book and let the DM's tweak it to fit their game!

FIne, we all burn a force point!

I also think that some desire to run long-term ongoing campaigns led to the over-diversifying of the skill system to ensure there were niches where everyone could shine. I get this to a point but again, 14 mechanical repair skills - that means I'm not counting medic type skills here - tell me that this went way too far. Do you really need to be the guy that has Walker Repair but not Hover Repair and not Repulsorlift Repair, or Droid Repair? The same kind of thing happened with a lot of the piloting skills and the combat skills as well. How big is your party anyway? No wonder the militaries all used clones or robots - I've got a droid specialist, then a space fighter specialist, then a space transport specialist, then a starship specialist - it's crazy!

The D20 version went the other direction - it started off somewhat clunky and honed things down to far-more-star-warsian-than-many-believe-a-d20-game-can-be in it's final Saga edition. D6 started off awesome and then lost its way.

If only I had taken repulsorlift repair!

So if I was starting up a speedy Star Wars game today and wanted to go d6 what would I do? It's pretty simple, I would go with 1E. I'm sure there are some balance issues in there, and I really like the wild die which was added in a "rules update" that came out after this book, so I'm not saying it's perfect, but I think it's a much cleaner start than 2ER&E. I'd rather go back to the beginning and solve the problems as they come up than start with a bunch of solutions to problems I don't know I would ever see.

Motivational Monday

Getting back on track the right way

Labyrinth Lord and Stonehell

So ... went a little retro over the weekend. Why?

Sometimes, after months of running 4E, as much as I like it, the pace of 2 or 3 encounters per session wears a bit. I'm in the mood for something faster. In the past this usually prompted another trip to the Caves of Chaos or Quasqeton with the Apprentices, but at this time last week I was seriously looking at playing another round of Next ... with the Caves of Chaos and some hope of moving on to the Isle of Dread which is also a part of the playtest packet now.

But ... the boys still have a bad taste in their mouths from that failed experiment last year and I don't want to have to argue them into a game. I've tried having them read it before but since it's a LOT of text and "it's a test version" reading it loses out to talking smack to their friends on XBOX live. Also, I've spent a lot of time in the Caves and it might be nice to have something totally new to explore for all of us.

Poking around online turned up some possible options but then I ran across Stonehell and after reading some reviews and flipping through the preview I decided to make an impulse purchase. It's big enough to run for a long time but I don;t need to keep up with 30 pages of notes for each level - that almost-one-page-dungeon format it uses hits a sweet spot for me for this kind of game. I went ahead and printed out the upper section but I suspect I could run it from an iPad if I needed to.

Then I got to looking at what OSR system it used - lord knows there are enough of them out there these days. Ah, Labyrinth Lord - OK, I have that, it was pretty much Moldvay Basic, right. Flip flip flip - yep. Ah, but I don't really want to go back to Elf as a class, we already have that in the B2/B1 game. Ah-ha, Advanced Companion. It's an adaptation of the AD&D races and classes to fit into B/X type games - that should do it. My main motivation here is that I don't want to have to do any conversion work to run this - I'm doing enough of that on the 4E campaigns. I want to run it as-is and see where things go without that extra layer of processing/preparation that comes with  a conversion.

So I had an adventure and some rules - what else is out there? Couple of cool things:

• The B/X headgear table - hey, we're going all the way here. I want the Apprentices to understand it's OK to have fun with this and not be too serious.
• Meatshields - the henchman generator! I can't tell you how much I like this thing - it's funny and in the spirit of the game and all that stuff and I hope it stays up forever.
• The Labyrinth Lord combat wheel - I remember the AD&D combat wheel that came out in Dragon and once I put that together I stopped using the charts completely.It's a handy thing to have. I haven't put it together yet but I expect it will be a big hit when I do.

I'm sure there are others but these 3 stood out to me.

I also added some house rules:

• Jeff's Carousing Rules - I finally get to use these!
• Chop When They Drop - because everybody likes Cleave
• Dutch Courage - because it helps
• I use Claw Carver's binding wounds rule because I like it better than my old one: Immediately after combat a wounded character may receive “first aid” to restore 1d4-1 hit points lost during that combat. This healing may be administered by the character him- or herself (if conscious!) or by a companion.
• And Shields Shall be Splintered, of course.

Splintered!

Characters die at -10 hp (it was good enough for AD&D it's good enough here) A failed "save or die" roll does not cause instant death but drops you to 0 hit points and you immediately begin the death spiral of -1 hp per round until aided or you reach -10 and die. This applies to poisons and death ray type effects. Petrification still turns you to stone, Massive damage still does massive damage, etc. Someone hit by poison can be stabilized at 0 hit points but cannot regain consciousness without a potion or spell effect to neutralize the poison. 

Level drain effects allow a saving throw and drained levels return at one per week, assuming you are not turned into a wight during the battle. 

Also, I added a tweak for weapon usage: Using two weapons gives the user a +1 to hit, using a weapon two-handed gives the user a +1 to damage. At one point I tried out letting the two-weapon user roll 2d20's and use the highest but that was too much. I think toning it down to a +1 should make it interesting without overpowering the thing. The two-hander bonus helps bump up those weapons just a bit to make the player feel like he's made a choice that matters without overpowering that option too.

Anyway there is the thinking and the rules tweaking - next up is the action report.

Motivational Monday

40K Friday - The Tranicos Campaign Battle 1 - Supply Drop!

The campaign begins! Thundwerhawk gunships drop units of Crimson Fist marines in locations all over the planet to assess the magnitude of the Ork problem. For one force things get complicated early as their follow-up supply drop is knocked off course by unexpected heavy fire from a hidden ork force. Annoyed but unafraid, Captain Banderas leads a team to locate and secure the supplies for his men...

Lining up before the battle

This was the kickoff for our year-long 40K campaign and it was a lot of fun.  This is an escalation campaign to give us all a reason to paint a little more and to ensure we play regular games.

We started with 500 points which is really really small for a 40K battle though it's not far off from what our Rogue Trader fights used to look like - well, mine anyway. The Apprentices weren't around back then. Anyway 500 points gave me this:


1 Captain Banderas (Space Marine Captain) @ 128 Pts
     #Iron Halo; Power Armour; Storm Bolter; Power Fist (x1); Frag Grenades;
     Krak Grenades; Warlord

9 Tac Squad Alpha (Tactical Squad) @ 175 Pts
     Combat Squads; Power Armour; Bolt Pistol (x9); Bolter (x7); Missile
     Launcher; Flamer; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades

     1 Space Marine Sergeant @ [31] Pts
          Power Armour; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades; Melta Bombs

9 Tac Squad Beta (Tactical Squad) @ 195 Pts
     Combat Squads; Power Armour; Bolt Pistol (x9); Bolter (x7); Missile
     Launcher; Flamer; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades

     1 Space Marine Sergeant @ [51] Pts
          Power Armour; Frag Grenades; Krak Grenades; Power Fist

Models in Army: 21
Total Army Cost: 498


That's not a lot to work with, but with combat squadding it gives me two 5-man flamer/sgt squads for close up stuff and a pair of 5-man squads with a missile launcher to stay back and shoot things. Plus Captain Banderas of course. My Warlord trait was "Dust of a Thousand Worlds" which gave my captain and all friendlies within 12" the Move Thru Cover rule - very nice.

Starting positions

Apprentice Red's Evil Sunz mob consisted of a Big Mek and some boyz mounted in a battlewagon (that rusty vehicle in the upper part of the pic), two individual Big Gunz (Kannons) in the center of the board, and a dreadnought (which counted as Troops because of the Mek, which is a handy way to get nastier stuff into a low point game). The 'wagon had a kannon and a deffrolla, the dread had 2 DCCW's and 2 big shootas.

We played "Crusade" and ended up with 5 objectives. The red barrels in the pictures are the objectives, tying in nicely with the supply drop theme. They ended up roughly 2 on his side, 2 on my side, and one in the middle. I opted to set up second/move second and the fight was on!

Bottom of Turn 1 - Orks have moved, Marines have not

Turn 1 - The Orks move up, the wagon turns sideways for some reason, and there is a bunch of shooting that mostly misses (Orks!) and that which hits bounces off of the always reliable power armor. The marines close-squads advanced, one missile squad bounced a shot off the side of the wagon and the other missed the kannon battery completely.

Top of Turn 2

Dreadnought 11 o'clock!

Turn 2 - Ork shooting manages to kill the first marine - on turns 1 & 2 5 out of 6 blasts land on target over the marines and it finally catches up with them. The marine close-combat squad on the right moves up and then charges the battlewagon, smashing it with krak grenades and the sergeant's power fist! The explosion kills a few boyz but the marines are unscathed. First Blood to the marines!

Death of a Battlewagon

End of Turn 2

Ork Turn 3 - The boyz charge the Alpha close combat squad and Captain Banderas challenges the Big Mek to personal combat, which he accepts. The boyz wipe out the tac squad completely, while Banderas utterly destroys the Mek. Slay the Warlord! Leaping from the fray, the Captain moves away from the raging orks and prepares to gun them down with his brother marines.

This roll resulted in the deaths of 5 marines. Sometimes the armor just doesn't work.
(6 wounds from orks, armor saves are a 3+ ...)

Bottom of Turn 3

Marine Turn 3 - After the mixed results of the hand to hand assault above the marines descide to do what they are good at and blast the boyz into oblivion with rapid firing bolt guns and frag missiles. Feeling somewhat redeemed, the marines are in a strong position as the orks have no more scoring units.

Captain Banderas leads the firing to finish off the boyz

Turn 4 - The gretchin kannon battery realizes that the marine boss is standing out in the open all by himself, and they nail him with kannon fire, slaying him! To follow up the deff dredd charges into melee with missile squad Alpha (the last place they want to be) and pulps two of them. The marines do pretty much nothing this turn, stunned by the fall of Captain Banderas!

End of Turn 4

Turn 5 - The Orks manage to kill one more tac marine with a krak round and the dredd charges forward to try and push missile squad Beta off of the objective. close combat squad Beta continues to advance on the grot battery but the main action is elsewhere. The marine missile squads, knowing it's a close fight, manage to score two glancing hits on the dreadnought. With a roll the game continues to Turn 6 and the Orks still have a chance!

End of Turn 5

Turn 6 - The orks kill one more marine but the dredd fails his charge. In response, missile squad Alpha nails the lumbering xenos machine in the back with a krak missile, destroying it and the game is over.

The Ork dredd falls and the grots are about to die flaming death, bringing the fight to an end.

In the end the Crimson Fists held two objectives plus Slay the Warlord, First Blood, and Linebreaker. The orks had only Slay the Warlord, giving the Fists a 9-1 victory in this first battle.

Battle Notes: Red realized pretty quickly that he only had one scoring unit and that he had made a mistake with that choice. His only real chance was to steamroller me off of the objectives and losing the battlewagon, the boyz, and the mek in about one turn decided things right there. Low point battles can be very swingy and this one certainly was - exhibit A being my failed armor rolls in the Turn 3 assault. I also think that for the next low-point battle like this we may go with a 4X4 playing space instead of 6X4. This would also compress the terrain somewhat too.

Force Review:
Marines: Tac marines are stellar at this point level, being very customizable and having the option to split into 5-man units. Don't leave your Captain exposed!

Orks: Big meks are a nice cheap HQ choice but they are not that great at taking on other characters. Kannons are great, and Dredds are fine but it probably should have been in the middle where the big fight was going to happen instead of way off to the side. The ork shooting ended up divided among several targets  and he took 4 turns to get into hand to hand.

We had a lot of fun and at this size the fights do not take as long so we worked in a second battle the same day where I took the Ork side. More on that in Battle 2, coming soon.

Overreaction Wednesday

Picking up from last week Part 3 of the Next goals is here and I continue to like what I see. I think 3E multiclassing is cool but it is one of the things that helped break the game so we will see if they can keep it under control. Down in the comments someone posted that they would like to see 1E/2E style multiclassing make a comeback and after laughing at the idea at first I had to stop and think ... I actually did like those multiclass options quite a bit. Why not take a stab at that? I doubt it will happen but it's something to think about. If not and someone wants this feel I suppose the best way would be to start everyone at 2nd level.

Part 4 is here and while this one didn't thrill me quite as much as a lot of the changes they describe don't really interest me some of the modular stuff will be a big deal. I do like that someone is thinking about how to structure the whole thing in advance, but we saw a lot of that with 4E that weakened considerably just a year or two into the game. "Cautious Optimism" is my feeling right now.

The Barbarian class for Next is out and it looks pretty cool - shades of the 1E version with a double stat bonus for AC and I had a flashback to my 2E Tempus specialty priest when I saw the "Incite Rage" ability that lets you add bonuses to willing buddies. If I get a chance to play I think I know which class I'm taking first.

The 4E campaigns continue here. The Apprentices have finally reached the Temple while a couple of party deaths in the Impiltur campaign threw the group off for a few weeks but they have recovered now. I really need to get back to catching up on those session summaries ...

The other interesting development is that I finally broke down and picked up Stonehell. As much as I like 4E it does tend to center around those big set piece fights. While I am experimenting with a more traditional D&D approach in the ToEE game with wandering monsters and more open "encounters" it does still take a while to run a fight and I would like something a little faster to run on weeknights. I was looking at the latest playtest pack for Next and it has potential, but it's also very much in flux from month to month making it hard to run a sustained campaign. I dug back into Labyrinth Lord, specifically the Advanced Companion, and realized that it covered a lot of what I was looking for - then all I needed was something fresh to run and Stonehell struck my fancy. So I'm reading it this week and thinking the Apprentices and I may start a new game this week. More on that later.

Extremely Expert DM Advice #3 - Keeping a Game Alive

Greyhawk Vacation!

Alright so you have a game and some players. Maybe you've even had a session or two - success! It can be a real challenge to keep that going though. Now if you're in a dorm and have a bunch of friends on campus maybe not, but if you're mainly working with the full-time job and family and other hobbies crowd then schedules get complicated and subject to change - how do you fight through that and keep your game alive?

There may be a lot of other advice out there on the web but the thing that has worked for me is to schedule your game and then stick to it. Yes, it's that simple, but it's difficult to execute in some situations and for some people. Regardless, I'm convinced it's the primary key to success for keeping a game going long term.

When I started the 3E group I ran a few sessions and ended up with about 6 players at the time. We talked and settled on an every-other-Saturday at 6pm schedule and stuck to it for about 8 years. I ended up with a solid pool of about 8-9 players, at least 5 of which could be counted on to show up on any given week, and occasionally the whole crew would make it for a particularly epic session.

I didn't even know they made these

The DM is the core of this - if you don't show, then no one else can either. So spend those cancellations wisely and sparingly. If you want it to live you have to make a commitment and that's what I did. I kept that game going through a divorce, the aftermath, being a single dad, dating, a layoff, and all kinds of difficult circumstances. Yes it takes some time and yes it means you give up some other things that you could be doing at that time and yes you may have to tell non-gamer people that you're busy with something  but that's what it takes - make it a priority and jump on board! Sure, every once in a while you'll get sick enough that you can't run. Sometimes you'll have a work thing, or a girlfriend thing, or a kid thing or a holiday thing - it comes up but it doesn't come up that often and if you have a standing schedule for your game then you can try to schedule the planned stuff around it. If you stick to it, your players will start to make it a priority as well and start adjusting their schedules around it too.

Players, even if they do adjust their schedules, will miss sometimes too. People get sick or have things come up. That's OK, just play on with the rest of the party. Their attendance is appreciated but not required. You may want to consider your minimum party size to run in case you have multiple non-attendees and know in advance - you may not have enough to feasibly run your game. For our current D&D campaign I have 6 regular players, the encounters are built for 5 (yes it's 4E), and we've decided only to run when we can get 4 players together, so if I have 3 "can't-make-its" then we call it off for that week, again assuming that it comes up before the game starts.

Remember Marc? It's like that sometimes.

How do you handle it in-game when players miss? Honestly I don't spend more than 5 minutes worrying about it. With D&D it's pretty easy to come up with a simple justification of why a character shows up or takes off.

"Looks like the Elf Ranger had to get some fresh air or commune with nature or something"

"The archaeologist is going to spend some more time digging though these ruins while the rest of you check out what's on the other side of the river."

"What happened to the Drow?"
"She didn't say"

Other helpful note: We never end in the middle of a fight. I say "never" because I think I've done it twice in the last 10 years and each time reminded me why I don't do it. One of the reasons is that it's much easier to add and remove characters when they're not in combat. It's also better for their health, because if there is a fight on and the player can't make it, my usual handling of it is that so-and-so falls unconscious. This takes them out of the fight but not out of danger, so if things go badly for the party, well, it could be bad for everyone. Adding characters to a fight? "so-an-so charges through the door" - no one gets too concerned about where the reinforcements came from when they're in the middle of combat.

So after all of this scheduling consistency and regular attendance is only part of "keeping it going". There is another hurdle out there, more for some than for others, but it does exist: Gamer ADD. Maybe those mechanics that looked cool a few months ago turn out to be tedious or confusing in play. Maybe the setting just isn't doing it for you. Maybe the current game is fine but that new game over there just looks so much cooler ...

That's not MY stuff - I didn't like Cyborg Commando

These are the early stages of Gamer ADD and few things annoy players more than a DM who keeps switching games. I've been that guy, I know other DM's who have been that guy - don't be that guy! This is why picking the right game is so important - because you need to stick with it once you get started. Level based games like D&D are especially troublesome when this happens, because part of the enjoyment is tied to character progression, and switching games typically means a lot of new characters and not a lot of leveling up. Now if you genuinely feel like you've picked the wrong game then it's probably worth making a change. Just don't do it 3 or 4 times over the course of a year or it won't matter for much longer.

So, to wrap up:

• Set a schedule
• Stick to it
• Don't switch games

You may be fighting stuff like this too

Now that we have that down, I'll tell you how I now violate the first two regularly.

Once you have a group established and have things rolling for a year or two you can be more flexible with the scheduling. After we took a break at the beginning of 2010 I started up with a group cut down to 4 players. I set a time and we followed the plan I outlined above setting the schedule for every-other-Friday night  and it worked. Along the way we picked up two more and we also started seeing more schedule conflicts. We have high school football stuff on Friday nights in the fall, so I talked to the group and we switched to Saturdays. One guy has another game on alternate Saturdays so he can't always make those nights. We switched back to Fridays once football was over, but one guy can't always make it on Fridays. So now what we do is that when we do play we look at calendars and schedules at either the beginning or the end of the game and we try to set the next session at that time. Sometimes we can't so we work it out over email during the week. 

Now this works because we a) have only 6 players involved b) everyone has a pretty regular schedule of work and family stuff and c) we only need 4 to run. One of the benefits of this has been that we hit stretches where we run more often than twice a month - sometimes hitting 3 weekends in a row. There have been a few larger gaps too but those have been less common than the bonus sessions. It works for us. The group is pretty committed to playing regularly and everyone seems to like it.

I would not do this with a new group. I would do exactly what I described above and stick to that for at least a year before I tried getting flexible. I also would not do this with a larger group as it gets more and more complicated to juggle those schedules. If you have a smaller group and playing the game is a priority for them it might work for you.

Motivational Monday