I've been running my in-person game pretty open-table style. Once a week I send out a four-question survey to my player pool asking "if we gamed on (mon|tues|wednes|thurs)day, would you make it? Yes / no / maybe". If we get three players for a given night, then we game. I've been very surprised at the degree of flakiness; so far in ~six weeks we've had two sessions dip from 3 expected players down to 2. I don't think I've ever seen a session-failure-rate due to flakiness anything like this before. This post is speculating about explanations.
Many (most?) of my players are young men, early-career, between one and three years out of school with this as their first job. It's been a bad job market in this field for the last year or two. One of the more common excuses for flaking is that more work suddenly popped up and they're working late, in the hope that if they work hard now they won't get laid off next year. In fairness, when I was their age, I dropped D&D entirely as a hobby for a couple years to focus on work. So I respect the impulse to work hard early-career and solidify their positions, but the way in which they don't keep their commitments does bother me.
Amusingly, the players of chaotic characters have been flaking at a higher rate than the lawful guys.
Another hypothesis is a generational change in culture, perhaps arising out of differences in the pandemic experience between those who were in college at the time and those who were working at the time.
A third possibility is that maybe new campaigns / player-groups are always sort of like this and it's just been so long since I played with anyone but family or the Old College Stalwarts that I'd forgotten about it. It may just take time to distill a core of reliable players, to winnow the chaff from the wheat. The July 4th holiday certainly didn't help with building campaign momentum.
Finally, I must consider the possibility that this is all my fault. Maybe my game just isn't that interesting or that fun. Maybe by making it open-table, with no real penalty for no-showing and no social pressure applied by other players for people to show up, I've brought this on myself. Or the opposite, that maybe I've taken too strong a hand in recruiting players and scheduling sessions, and really maximal respect for player agency would require them to self-organize in the West Marches style, at which point players would be applying social pressure to each other to honor their commitments. If I do want to maintain my current role in recruiting and scheduling, I could probably also "solve" the problem of session-failure by either expanding my player-base (eg going from 8 total players on the roster to 12) or by lowering the bar and running sessions for two players, which also gets more viable as they level and get access to henchmen (as happened last week; only two showed but they were game to give it a go anyhow, and one of them had hit second level the previous session, so I allowed him to hire a 1st-level MU and they made good progress with three bodies in-world).
A fourth possibility could be that we are living in 21st century and not in 70-80s when 50-60 players open table games were happening, and that majority of players are not tabletop fanatics but consumers, who view this as just another form of entertainment, and that there are tons of other more immediate forms of entertainment out there you are competing with.
ReplyDeleteGod bless you, Akim, for being Wrong On the Internet and giving me someone to argue with on a sleep-deprived day.
Delete> we are living in 21st century and not in 70-80s when 50-60 players open table games were happening
West Marches, the Alexandrian's open table manifesto, the Flailsnails Conventions, and my own past open-table games which established my expectations about player reliability were all products of the 2007-2019 period, not the 70s-80s. Don't need 50-60 players; even at my current rates I reckon I could run decent sessions with a total pool of 12 or so. 50 sounds like much more trouble than I need.
> there are tons of other more immediate forms of entertainment out there you are competing with
Maybe so, but I didn't have any trouble putting together games and having people (of similar young male demographics) show up when they said they would through the MMO boom, Minecraft craze, Skyrim launch, and Factorio. Unless you had something other than videogames in mind? Youtube and Netflix also existed through the period under consideration and did not seem to be too much trouble.
> majority of players are not tabletop fanatics but consumers, who view this as just another form of entertainment
"Consumer" vs "tabletop fanatic" seems like a very poorly-constructed dichotomy - many fanatics in many hobbies are primarily consumers of product rather than creators.
If by "consumer" you mean "casual", then this is hardly an argument *against* the open-table style, which readily allows low-commitment occasional-attendance players to coexist with more serious ones.
If by "consumer" you mean "wants to be spoon-fed a railroaded adventure path or have a copy of the Critical Role experience", then I also don't think that's the problem that I have; I'm very up-front about the type of game that I run, and have told prospective players with those expectations that while they are welcome at my table, that is not the experience they will get here.
Although I suppose it would be more correct of me to say "correct about the general situation of the industry, in a way which is irrelevant to the particulars of the problem and the post" rather than "wrong on the internet". It is true that it is not the 80s, but irrelevant, because that's not the baseline I'm comparing against. It is true that most players are consumers, but not clearly relevant. It is true that they have many sources of entertainment, but irrelevant if this is not a change vs baseline.
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