Feast or famine gaming

tl;dr: Schedule games with the knowledge that some of them will mostly likely fail and drop off - so that after that happens, you still have roughly the amount of gaming you want going on.

At one point this month my gaming schedule was ridiculous
- 15 sessions in 28 days - just over one every second day
- this was made up of a bunch of different campaigns
- Up from 13 in January

This has simmered down to 10, including replacements for some slots which is helpful but shows there were even higher cancellations that got back-filled.

For a while it was looking pretty frantic but it was just a good run without cancellations. Rapidly the pendulum swung the other way - two home campaign sessions scrubbed due to travel plans, a table of my drop in game due to scheduling, a sick child, miscommunications, etc.

The numbers plummetted and suddenly what had looked like an insane amount of gaming pruned itself right back.

This is new for me - I was for a very long time an ultra-traditionalist that followed a strict process:
- you declared a campaign, probably with a set time-slot (Tuesday night, etc)
- rounded up players to fill the campaign
- launched with the intention of running until the heat-death of the universe

Maybe this worked as a teen gamer but it hasn't worked like that for 20 years and it has taken me almost this long to adapt to that. Sure, this may well sound like 'newflash, dinosaur discovers asteroids are not good for health' but I'm stating this out loud here in case someone else who was in my place can maybe skip some of my fumbling about relearning the obvious.

During the pandemic, I have switched to 'when can we meet again' at the end of each session which worked very well then because what else were any of us doing. Since the plague has been declared over, this is not working so well and the tail end of last year suffered. My home game was remote, hopefully switching back to in-person once the bard returns from their wanderings, and continued the schedule at the end of each session tradition from the pandemic, even though that lost opportunities.

To adapt again, I am running a couple of things in parallel and trying to be less angsty about which ones run when.

The Spelljammer campaign and the Southern reaches campaigns are getting scheduled by doodle polls covering two different groups of people, though many of the Spelljammer crew are in the second table of Southern Reaches. Both these are remote games so they can be scheduled throughout weeknights, not just weekends.

What this gives me is a pool of players, campaigns they can be slotted into and then it is just a matter of crunching availability (another big spreadsheet).

My key lesson learned from all this is that even with 3 player miminums and trying to schedule 5 in the games, the attrition rates are pretty high for some games and can spike suddenly with little warning - good to pad the calendar more than a comfortable level and let it cancel back to the ideal tempo. I started on this path with Ducal House - declaring it as 2/month and grabbing additional weeks where we felt like it rather than 1/week and cancelling.

The second lesson - or more a confirmation of a hypothesis - is that I would get more mileage out of episodic (Western Marches) style gaming where a smaller group from a big roster could play without it needing to be the same people every time. This has proved successful.

As we shuffle into the post plague era here, I am also trying to spin up some more in-person gaming - currently I have no idea how it is all going to fit together, but as noted above, I am sure a way will be found. Nothing to fear but fear itself and so on. That and people who refuse to fill in a doodle poll or answer emails, of course.