
I started writing this post a week ago – as I promised to some of you who have stayed in touch with me in the last couple of months. But then, over the weekend, I realized I had to do something equally as brutal as it was honest and benevolent. I had to kill my RPG campaign because of schedule conflicts. And I felt terrible. As Hendrix sang in the timeless “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” now I’ve gone and thrown it all away.
Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth!
The lyrics are spot-on – even if I’m messing around and mixing a few songs together. Seriously, though, I thought I’d share it with you without my usual reflection and tips-giving. But writing this took me almost two weeks – the wound’s still too fresh. So, please excuse me if I’m a bit out of shape in this post. I promise I’ll get back to my writing in time. But for now, I want to tell this story: When I saw a broader picture of how our RPG sessions got canceled or re-scheduled time after time – I knew I had to do the right thing. But frankly, facing and admitting it was the hardest part.
Why didn’t I acknowledge schedule conflicts?
Long story short: I was very, very attached to that one. I will gladly give it justice and write at length about its design, but that needs time. Today, I’ll leave one breadcrumb, namely megadungeon. Those who recognize it will know what’s coming. The thing is that I started this campaign a year ago, mid-autumn, with a weekend of playing the “first act.” Then, we continued with a slightly changed party around January and finally stuck between August and September. Designing the campaign, though, was a far longer process.
For months, I was crafting my megadungeon just for the fun of it. I tried a lot of approaches, resources, and tools. I learned a lot and practiced some vital skills for my GMing. But I wanted the game to be a complete experience – for me as well as for any potential players. So I kept telling myself that it wasn’t the time yet to start it. Frankly, I explicitly thought that the scheduling conflicts may break such a carefully designed RPG. Hence, the weekend trip to play it – to have more of the players’ buy-in before starting the regular play. Still, though, that buy-in hadn’t prevented the campaign from falling apart.
Having it sit in my head for so long (almost a year when we were picking up in January), I was very excited to have my long-envisioned campaign actually happen. And it was a good decision and a very gratifying experience. I saw a lot of my design choices work just as intended, and the players seemed to have a ton of fun with it as well. But at the same time, I was blindsided. I felt the warning, but it was too subtle to bust through.
What schedule conflicts really are?
What do I mean by “warning”? And why it was “too subtle”? It’s all about knowing people. Or reading the room, but in the more literal sense of understanding what’s going on in a given moment. Instead, it’s about feeling the group’s dynamics throughout the campaign as a whole. And when you run a long-term RPG game, the schedule conflicts are but a symptom, not the actual problem.
Under the irregularity of the game, there’s probably something more personal. Maybe someone in the group has some unrealistic picture of their schedule? Maybe they want to play so much that they don’t see it’s beyond their current capacity. Perhaps someone is playing along because they feel obliged, but they don’t find as much personal pleasure as they hoped for.
It’s easy to trivialize this issue by saying that it’s all about priorities. And, in a way, it is so. I thought that myself. But, on the other hand, it’s just the surface of it. It’s not just prioritizing and managing expectations and mutual agreement or respect for each other’s time. All these things are a part of the picture. People agreeing to play an RPG campaign do commit to prioritize gaming sessions in their schedules. And to do so consciously, everybody has to be on the same page with what they expect from the game. But what does everybody expect from the game? Why are they willing to commit?
We’ve got fun and games!
Let me tie that back to the rock classics. Even though much is being written (here also) about RPGs, it’s primarily being written for – and written by – the Game Masters. We, the GMs, are a different part of the RPG community than the ones who play at our tables. I may have that discussion in another post, but that’s not my point today. I want to focus on the fact that we GMs tend to get very serious about our hobby. There are tons of emotionally intense discussions on the Internet about many aspects of running or playing RPG – schedule conflicts, prioritizing, and managing expectations included. But it’s all for fun, after all. It’s all games!
So, don’t get me wrong, I’m not hand-waving anyone’s commitment to their game here. But I think it’s helpful to look at it from the other perspective. Most of the players won’t turn their lives upside-down to make room for an RPG session in their schedule. (If they do, well, that’s questionable, by the way.) Game Masters tend to be more strict with that, but they are the ones who invest much more than the rest of the group, so that’s predictable. But even the GM probably has a life beyond their games. Even professional game-streamers who actually live off running (and prepping) their RPGs leave their studio once in a while. And you can juggle your priorities only so much.
Let this be my conclusion (and the lesson I learned): No matter how clear the expectations, how strong the commitments, or how much there’s of buy-in – the hardships may come. People playing RPG – you, the GM included – will have conflicts between it and their schedules. Some sessions will get canceled. For me, it was the trip most of the group took and three infections, forming over two months of a gap in our schedule. But the reasons don’t matter as much.
Act!
What matters is that when things like schedule conflicts arise repeatedly in your RPG, there’s most likely an issue underlying that. And when that happens, don’t hesitate to act. Assess your ability and will to run it – because it may be impossible to run a fun activity for others when you’re not enjoying it yourself. Then, try talking to your group about it – or to a person who you think is struggling with the issue. But know that it’s very hard to pick up a game that has crashed down. And if it seems that it is so in your case – put a polite end to it. It’s better to finish with an itch for more than with frustration or faked satisfaction. There’ll always be more games to run. Which is true and the right thing to do. But it doesn’t make that any less painful. ????
If you feel like you need to tell your story or share your lost campaign – you’re welcome here.
(…. and write)
I also want to take this opportunity to start wrapping up unfinished businesses regarding the blog. As I wrote at the end of May, I was facing some challenges and conflicts between my writing and my other, more serious commitments. I think I’m resolving that right now, and that I prepared myself to start posting regularly again. That took me much more time than I thought because the website decayed a bit – I had to renew some of the back-end services (like HTTPS, which was why the site displayed as “potentially dangerous”) and had to, well, reconcile my schedule with the time for the blog. So, see you next time!
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