Welcome to GM Screen Time, the series where we dive deep into my bag of Gamemastering tricks to find different strategies and tips I’ve used at my tables to promote a fun environment. In this installment, we discuss the dreaded topic that stops an unverified 90% of people from ever getting their games to the table at all: scheduling. Everybody wants to play games together. The problem is that between school, work, extracurricular activities, soup nights, vacations, and everything else, people are busy. It’s not only finding the time to game, but finding an amiable time where everyone can game.
The ABC Framework for Scheduling
My group recently wrapped up a playthrough of Paizo’s Sky King’s Tomb Adventure Path for Pathfinder Second Edition, a campaign that encompassed two and a half years IRL. We play two hours per week every Wednesday, and over the past eight years of consistently playing together we are averaging only a handful of missed weeks each year. Since we mostly play remotely, this offers a significant level of flexibility, but we’ve managed to get together across states spanning Seattle all the way to Maryland, and even worked around a player’s work trip to the Eastern Hemisphere.
Playing with the same group for that long is different from queuing up a multi-year campaign with strangers. It’s not easy. However, I have developed a framework that touches on the three most important things that players can do to keep their tabletop roleplaying games on track.
Step aside Glengarry Glen Ross—there’s a new set of ABCs in town, and this one doesn’t come with a set of steak knives…or the risk of being fired from one’s job.
A – Alignment
A is for Alignment. When everybody is deciding that game night is something that they want to make happen, first you need to look at everybody’s commitments. Start with a generic week and block out the times that people would be available to play, generally speaking. If people have kids, things get more complicated as you also need to consider their current and future schedules.
Hopefully there are some times on the resulting calendar that work for everyone. Great! You’ve already narrowed down the playing field significantly. Getting down to a specific day and time window takes more maneuvering, but I have a few pointers to offer.
Weekends are a red herring. If you’re looking to schedule something on a monthly cadence for a longer number of hours, a weekend day becomes more feasible. For me, weekends are for the family and I’m simply not going to commit to a Sunday afternoon every week to play games. We’ve found that weeknights are key.
Consider time zones, kids’ bedtimes, and travel time if you’re playing in-person. We chose 7pm because it gives enough time for dinner beforehand, and for a period of time we had players on opposite ends of the country. You also need to get enough sleep, especially during the week, so a 7-9pm runtime has worked perfectly for us. And now, coincidentally, we’re all back in the same state for the first time, so it works even better.
Over half of our group has children and this is a really good time to ensure that significant others are aware of the planning and the commitment that you’re trying to make. Planning with them and taking some workload off their plate on non-game days or planning a standing date night shows that game night is important but not the most important thing on the calendar.
That’s the other side of Alignment; it’s important that we’re not just looking at schedules of availability, but we also want to align on the idea that we all want this game night to happen every week. Which brings us to B.
B – Buy-in
B is for Buy-in. You and your players genuinely have to want to play and make the gaming happen. Especially when committing to a years-long campaign, this isn’t equivalent to just dipping your toe into the pool to test the water. Playing one-shot adventures or trying different systems in shortform sessions is the ideal way to know that YES this is a game that I like enough to play consistently for a few years.
When we’re looking for Buy-in, we want the players to be invested. This means people should be willing to put in the work for understanding rules specific to their character, wanting to contribute to the story in meaningful ways, and take ownership of creating something wonderful together.
For our last session of Sky King’s Tomb, the week before I told everyone that the next week would likely be the final one so they should give some thought as to what their characters might do in the aftermath of the campaign. And unsurprising to me since my players are excellent, all of them delivered with some amazing vignettes to cap off the story and leave some dangling threads if we ever decide to pick back up on where we ended.
I can always count on them for that, which brings me to…
C – Consistency
C is for Consistency. This seems like a silly thing to point out, but it can’t be an activity that is a placeholder until something better comes along. Break out the Sharpies and write it down in the calendar. Making game night reliable and predictable removes the question of when. The time is already carved out.
I say this with the caveat that you shouldn’t refrain from taking trips or doing things that would cause you to miss out. Giving your table advance notice, however, can allow other people to make plans for those same days, thus reducing cancellations. At the end of each session we always check in to see if next week is still good for everyone at a bare minimum, although we’re usually looking out about a month to give people a heads up about missed time.
I’m not saying that gaming is the most important thing, because it’s not. What I’m saying is that tabletop RPG night is the Millennial poker night. I look forward to it every week, knowing that when Wednesday rolls around I have two hours of entertainment already on the books.
At the end of the day, the key to a regular tabletop gaming night is to bring the players together, give them a reason to care, and make it a habit. And remember: first prize for best scheduling job is a Cadillac El Dorado.
