This Feature is part of my ongoing True Campaign Managery course. If you’ve not been following it from the beginning — or you don’t know what the hell I’m babbling about — visit the True Campaign Managery Course Index to catch up.

This Feature is also a continuation of the last overlong lesson about Scheduling and Attendance Policies. Which should be obvious from the Part II in the title. If you missed that lesson, you should be able to figure out what to do.

When you’re done reading the feature, check out Q and Angry: The Clubhouse Rules – Scheduling and Attendance Follow-Up Podcast wherein I respond to questions, comments, and criticisms from you, my readers.

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Are You Sick of This Scheduling Bullshit Yet?

Welcome back, kids and kidettes. Today, I’m finishing up the lesson I cut off a couple of weeks ago at the 6500-word mark. Yes, that’s right: 6500 frigging words. That’s why I stopped when I did. But don’t worry; this lesson will be at least 500 words shorter. Maybe even more shorter. But, knowing me, probably not. My words are like a fart: they expand to fill whatever space I’m in.

Last time, I told you how to build a Scheduling and Attendance Policy to maximize your game’s reliability and then to plan for reasonable and foreseeable contingencies like cancellation, reschedulation, absenteeism, latenessocity, and mysterious player missingness.

What I didn’t do — as you should have noticed because I kept explicitly calling attention to it — what I didn’t do was discuss enforcing rules, establishing limits, marking attendance, or punishing players. Hell, I was clear that some unreliability is inevitable and that you’re just going to have to suck it up. How much should you suck up? Well, that question brings me to the first topic du jour of the day…

At The Campaign Manager’s Discretion

Let’s talk about Discretion. The Game Master’s — or Campaign Manager’s — Discretion. Your Discretion.

Everything in your Scheduling and Attendance Policy — and everything else you do to manage your campaign — is subject to your discretion and yours alone. You ain’t setting up a government, you ain’t running a bureaucracy, and you ain’t managing a corporation; you’re running Pretend Elf Games with Friends. And you’re doing it based on your personal and somewhat arbitrary judgment. And that’s how it should be.

The fact is that it’s entirely possible for two players to miss the exact same number of games in a year and for only one of those players to actually cause a problematic disruption with their truancy. Likewise, it’s entirely possible for every player at your table to be individually, reasonably reliable and yet still see the game sputter and fizzle and die from inconsistency due to the way the perfectly normal, occasional absences work out.

That’s why this shit’s not about numbers and rules, but rather about agreeing with your players about what group membership means. It’s about communicating clear expectations and making mutual promises to prioritize this gaming crap and to treat each other with respect. And it’s about accepting that you live in a less-than-perfect world, that shit’s going to come up, and that you’ve got to game around it.

It is thus your job to — solely based on your own good judgment — decide when things have gone from shit happens to this is gonna kill the game and to act accordingly. There’s no math for that and if you try to math it, you’re gonna break it worse. If you don’t like the idea that everything’s subject to your discretion and that you’ve got to rely on your own — sometimes arbitrary and emotional — judgment, you ain’t cut out to be a Campaign Manager. Sorry. That’s how it be.

Mere Campaign Supervisors try to spell out limits, punishments, recourses, and all that crap. But that ain’t something you, a True Campaign Manager, should ever try to do.

The Game You Want Versus the Game You Can Have

Next topic: how your Scheduling and Attendance Policy decides what game you’re gonna run.

I went through this long spiel last time highlighting all the ways an unreliable schedule screws with your game. And those were facts. It doesn’t matter why your group can’t have a nice, reliable schedule. All that matters is that it can’t and how that affects the game.

True Campaign Managers acknowledge facts and never run campaigns their schedules can’t support.

I also said last time that the Gold Standard for Reliability is the regular, weekly, four-hour game session. If that’s your schedule, you can run pretty much any kind of game you want. But the more you deviate from the Gold Standard for Reliability, the more adjustments your game’s gonna need.

And note that I ain’t referring to the hypothetical on-paper schedule you’ve all agreed to, I’m talking about what you actually manage to pull off. Do you actually manage to get together every week for four hours on the same day with no more than one missing player every three or four weeks and no more than one cancellation every couple of months? Great. You’re hitting the Gold Standard for Reliability. But if that ain’t what’s happening at your table, you need to adjust what you run and how to cushion it against unreliability.

Recapping and Reintroducing

If you go more than a week between game sessions or if you’ve got semi-regular absences to contend with, you’ve got to be totally on your Recap and Reintroduction game. People start forgetting shit after just a few days and people lose investment too.

A few years ago, I taught y’all how to properly recap your games and invite your players to reintroduce their characters in my Feature Well Begun is Half Done. If your game deviates at all from the Gold Standard for Reliability, master that shit. You need it.

Also, don’t buy into the delusion that distributing written recaps between game sessions is enough. It ain’t. If you’ve got a regular, weekly game, you can get away with that shit, but otherwise, that ain’t reliable enough. If you like doing written recaps, great. Do them. But also do an actual start-of-session recap every session.

I know it’s a pain in the ass to waste fifteen minutes at the start of every session for this crap if your game’s already unreliable. It hurts to waste game time when you’ve got so little of it. But the more it hurts, the more important it is to do it. That’s how life works sometimes.

Which brings me to…

Wasted Table Time

Obviously, the less game time you’ve got, the more you treasure every second. Thus, if your game deviates from the Gold Standard for Reliability, you’ve got to be a hardass about not wasting game time on nonsense. You’ve got to be a master of pacing. Fortunately, I already taught you how to pace your game like a True Game Master. And since you all passed that course, I don’t have to belabor that point.

But it’s for precisely this reason that you absolutely need a block of fifteen minutes at the start of every game for pre-game social nonsense. Especially if you’re deviating from the Gold Standard for Reliability. Hence forcing your players to arrive early. Players need time to get the social shit out of their systems or else they’ll spend the whole session distracted with chatting, joking, and side shit. The longer players go without actual interaction — messaging on social media doesn’t count — the more social shit builds up. So, if your players can’t arrive fifteen minutes early, you need to wait fifteen minutes to start your game.

Let me get this straight, Angry… you’re saying that if I already have limited game time, I should waste the first fifteen minutes of every session letting my players shoot the bull and then waste fifteen minutes more on detailed recaps and character reintroductions because every minute of game time is a treasure?

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. You got it. Treasuring game time ain’t about quantity but quality. It’s better to game well than game lots. This is how you maximize the value of every minute of game time you’ve got.

Speaking of wasted table time… have you ever noticed that some game systems and options really chew up the table time? And that some systems are just more complicated than others? That brings me to this unpleasant topic…

Run the Game You Can, Not the One You Want

If your campaign deviates from the Gold Standard for Reliability, you’ve got to pick your game system with care. And Game Masters hate it when I suggest that outside, external factors like scheduling nonsense and unreliable players might force them to run the greatest latest edition of the world’s greatest roleplaying game even though they’d rather run some overengineered, overcomplicated behemoth like Pathfinder or the latest piece of indie trash that everyone agrees is God’s gift to roleplaying gaming.

Picking the right system comes down to three things…

First and foremost, unreliable games need familiar systems. If your players don’t know the game well — and you don’t either — you need reliability and repetition to counter that. Otherwise, your players will struggle session after session to remember what dice to roll, how their spells and abilities work, and where to find simple shit on their character sheets like Armour Rating or Parry Score or Reaction Adjustment.

If your game ain’t reliable, you want a system everyone knows up, down, and sideways. Failing that, you want the simplest system you can get.

Second, unreliable games need efficient systems. Some systems have lots of mechanical moving parts and thus things like action resolution or combat resolution chew up a lot of table time. If you don’t have a lot of reliable table time to begin with, you don’t want to be wasting ten minutes evaluating dice pools every time someone picks a lock or an hour on every combat. That means picking efficient systems, but it also means culling out time sinks. Eventually, every Game Master figures out which options and which subsystems suck down table minutes in their systems of choice. Maybe it’s summoned monsters and pets, maybe it’s crafting rules, maybe it’s chaos sorcerers. Whatever it is, that’s the crap you excise from your unreliable game.

Third, unreliable games can’t afford to waste game time on non-adventuring crap. Shopping, downtime activities, town interactions, random encounters on long wilderness journeys; all that shit’s fun in the right game. But if you don’t have a lot of reliable game time, your game ain’t the right game. Whatever game you’re running, figure out which parts aren’t really playing the game — however you define that — and cut them out.

Characters Can’t Drive if You Don’t Know Who’s Coming

This one’s gonna hurt…

If you can’t rely on regular, weekly game nights with all or most hands on deck, you can’t have a character-driven game. You know what I mean by that, right? It’s a campaign where the character’s personal stories, quests, and motivations drive the game’s plot more than external goals, world events, and quests for non-player characters.

It’s a two-fold problem. First, the less reliable your game, the less investment each player will feel in their fellow players’ characters. Each player might be able to stay invested in their own characters — or they might not — but without very regular, very reliable intraparty interaction, that doesn’t translate to staying invested in the rest of the group.

Second, if you’ve planned a session around Ardrick’s plot and character development and Adam bails, that’s a problem. I ain’t saying you can’t deal with the problem, but it is a problem nonetheless. And it’s better not to set yourself up for problems that are definitely gonna happen.

Write the Plot You Can, Not the One You Want

Similar to that whole character-driven thing, there are also entire classes of campaigns and plots that just don’t work for less-than-totally-reliable campaigns. However well you recap your game, your continuity suffers if you’re not running the Gold Standard for Reliability. So stuff that relies on strong continuity — like complex mysteries and intrigue plots and anything that relies on informational setup for future investigational or deductional payoffs — just doesn’t work. You can’t rely on players to notice or remember shit and you can’t guarantee that the player capable of making the deduction will be present the night you need the revelation.

I know you hate hearing this shit, but the sad truth is, if you’ve got an unreliable game schedule, the best thing you can do is run episodic, quest-driven adventures in the edition of D&D everyone knows best. True Campaign Managers — and True Game Masters and True Scenario Designers — can make a great game out of anything and they accept the things they cannot change.

The Tools of the Trade

Let’s move on to topic the third in this disjointed follow-up and clean-up lesson. And a less depressing topic to boot. I want to suggest a few tools and resources to set up as part of your Scheduling and Attendance Policy.

In Case of Emergency, Contact…

First, get Emergency Contact info for your players and give each player yours. This used to be a standard thing Game Masters did, but we got tricked into discontinuing the practice when social media became a thing. And that’s bad and we should feel bad.

You must be able to contact every player at the absolute last possible minute. One you can use even if you’re stuck in traffic or you have spotty internet access or you’re having a power failure. And it must be something that will get that player’s immediate attention.

Likewise, every player must be able to get you a message at the last possible minute whatever their situation in a way that will immediately get your attention.

The easy, obvious thing is to exchange cell numbers so you can send emergency SMS text messages. So, give everyone your cell number and get everyone to give you theirs. You don’t have to share the information with the entire group, mind you, just between you — the Game Master — and each player. Adam doesn’t have to give his number to Beth, Chris, and Danielle. Just to me. And he needs mine.

If text messages ain’t the right solution for you, fine. Agree on some other means of immediate, emergency communication that satisfies the criteria above.

The Campaign Chat Channel

Next, establish a permanent private group chat for your campaign on Discord or Facebook Messenger or whatever. This ain’t a substitute for the Emergency Contact shit above, it’s separate and additional. Basically, the channel is for non-emergency communication and official announcements. The group can also use it for between-game chatter, but I don’t recommend you use it for between-game gaming.

Someday, I’ll tell you why any kind of away-from-table gaming is a bad idea.

Set something up. Name the group after your campaign and give it a unique icon. Establish that it’s for the game, specifically, and not for other nonsense. If it gets too bogged down with non-game chatter, people will stop paying it any attention. They might even turn off notifications and then miss actual, important information. You don’t want that to happen.

Reminders and Announcements

Once you’ve got a Campaign Chat Channel, you’ve got yourself a place for Official Reminders and Announcements. Take advantage of it,

First, send out reminders three to five days before each and every scheduled game session. Even if your sessions are totally regular and everyone’s earning gold stars for attendance, send out a short message reminding folks of your upcoming sessions. Second, whenever the group reaches any kind of decision at all — you’ve agreed to reschedule or cancel a game or move to a different venue or whatever — make it official with an official announcement message. It’s easy for folks to think they’ve reached an agreement in a casual conversation only to discover not everyone thinks the same.

Whatever platform you’re using, figure out how to make your Official Reminders and Announcements look, well, official. Make them stand out. Use bold text or font colors and a uniform format. And flag them if your platform lets you so they ping the group when they get posted. Make it as impossible as possible for anyone to say, “I didn’t see that message.”

Emergencies and Non-

Once you’ve got both Emergency Contact information and a Campaign Chat Channel, make it clear that the Emergency Contact is only for emergencies. What’s an emergency? That’s up to you. To me, it’s any change in scheduling or attendance on the same day the game’s happening. If the game’s Thursday and you find out on Tuesday you can’t come, that ain’t an emergency. But if it’s Thursday and the game’s tonight and you suddenly can’t come, that’s an emergency. And if that forces me to cancel the game, that message is an emergency too.

This has the knock-on effect of making people think long and hard about last-minute schedule changes. They’re really, hugely disruptive so they deserve a moment’s pause. Forcing players to send me a direct text message if they’ve got to skip a game — or forcing myself to send a group text message for a same-day cancellation — reminds everyone of the weight of such a choice.

Polling the Masses

Finally, let me suggest that if you’re stuck individually scheduling your game sessions because the group can’t agree to a regular schedule, use an official, electronic poll rather than just talking it out and coming to an informal agreement. I mentioned I do this for all my groups and there are two specific online tools I use.

When2Meet is a simple, web-based scheduling platform. It’s totally free and you don’t even need to make an account to use it. People can input their weekly availability by hour or else put daily availability in for the next four weeks. It’s great for finding out when people can play on a regular basis or for picking specific gaming dates and it organizes the results in an easy-to-read graph.

WhenAvailable is another free, web-based scheduling tool but all participants need to create an account with an e-mail address. That said, it hasn’t sent me any marketing or spam mail, just poll-related notifications. It’s a bit cleaner and fancier than When2Meet and it lets you work more than four weeks out, but it doesn’t let you gather availability data. Instead, you just offer up a list of dates and people can flag the ones they’re good for. It also offers a paid, premium service with more features but I haven’t checked that out.

We Need to Talk

Before I close, I want to briefly discuss The Talk. You know what I’m talking about here. You’ve got a player whose attendance or tardiness has become an issue and you’ve got to make that known.

This ain’t a full-on lesson in Conflict Resolution. I’ve got a whole, big thing coming later in this course about Conflict Resolution. It’ll probably be a big-ass two-parter. All I’m talking about here is bringing an issue to someone’s attention. And that’s important. If you go in fixated on resolving a conflict, you’ve got the wrong attitude and the wrong expectations.

Attitude and expectations are everything.

What to Expect When Your Addressing

Lots of people seek my help with their scheduling, attendance, and tardiness problems. And they’re always disappointed. People want me to give them solutions or tell them the magic words to invoke that’ll make their players and their schedules just work. Life doesn’t work that way. You can’t solve every scheduling problem and not every player’s willing — or able — to change their behavior. And there is nothing you can do about that shit.

When, in your judgment, a player’s doing something that negatively impacts your game, all you can do is tell the player they’re doing something that negatively impacts your game. That’s it. You can do literally nothing else. You can’t make them understand, agree, care, apologize, or change. You can just point to an issue and say, “That’s a problem.” And then it’s totally on the player to decide what to do.

Of course, once they pick their course of action, you get to decide what you’ll do. If you’re both reasonable, rational, respectful adults, you might go back and forth discussing the different things each of you will do until you find some kind of happy middle ground you can both live on. Otherwise, it might be a shorter exchange where the player says they’re not willing to do anything and you say they’re not welcome at the table anymore. Or they might just throw a tantrum because you had the temerity to even broach the issue. That’s the shortest exchange of all.

The point is, if you go in thinking you’re going to reason, convince, or debate someone into agreeing with you and doing precisely what you ask them to do, you’re fucked. If you instead go in knowing you’re just identifying a problem and then listening to the players’ response before you decide what to do next, then maybe you can handle this shit. Maybe.

You’re Better than Them

As a True Campaign Manager, you know how to listen properly, how to communicate effectively, how to mediate disputes, and how to resolve conflicts and you know how to do it all gracefully, humbly, and dispassionately. And if you don’t yet, you will with practice. Unfortunately, most players — most people — don’t know any of that shit. They’re sucky listeners and sucky communicators and they get angry and defensive and emotional when they feel like they’re being accused of things.

That’s why you need to do need things gracefully and humbly and dispassionately. You have to be able to take a certain amount of crappy communication, defensiveness, and even rudeness. I ain’t telling you to be a doormat — if someone’s disrespecting you, assert yourself — but I am telling you to be patient and forgiving. Even when people don’t apologize. Because they ain’t gonna.

Can’t handle that? You can’t manage people. Sorry.

Is This Really Worth It

Knowing your The Talk may not actually change anything and knowing that every The Talk is basically blundering through a door with a lit torch not knowing whether there’s a herd of oil-soaked cow mummies bloated with methane gas pushing around kegs of black powder with their undead snouts inside, you’d better make really sure need to go through that door.

The first step in every The Talk is having The Talk with yourself. You need to address whether the problem is really a problem and whether it’s worth having a blow-up and losing a player over. That said, if there’s a player at your table you’re consistently afraid to raise issues with because you know they’re going to respond like a methane-filled mummy cow bombardier put to torch, that’s an issue in itself. And one you can’t ignore.

I’m just saying to pick your fights.

Having The Talk

If you decide you must have The Talk with a player — and you accept that your only goal is to tell the player there’s a problem and nothing else — then, given what a powder keg this shit can be, you want to do it in the least explosive way possible. See, telling someone, “We need to talk,” instantly puts them on the defensive. And telling them their actions are causing a problem always comes across as an accusation of guilt. That’s how people be.

First, you never want to do this shit by text. Ideally, you want voice-to-voice or face-to-face communication. However you run your game. Second, you don’t want to give the player any time to dread The Talk. So, the best approach here is the Good Night Everyone; Oh Hey, Adam, Hol’ Up a Sec Gambit. That’s where you — as casually as possible — grab someone at the end of a game session for a quick chat. And the key is to emphasize that it’s a quick chat. That’s why it’s called Hol’ Up a Sec and not We Need to Talk.

If you’re running an online game, it’s actually a good idea to end your session a few minutes early just to leave space for The Talk. Don’t explicitly tell anyone that’s what you’re doing. Think of it as the This Is a Good Stopping Point; Good Night Everyone; But Since We’ve Got a Moment, Adam, Can You Stay On the Call for a Minute Variant.

No matter what you do, the player’s gonna feel like a trapped rat, so you might as well actually trap them like a rat. It’s way better than putting The Dreaded Talk on the calendar so tension and bad blood can build.

Once you two are alone — obviously, you do this shit in private — don’t hem and haw and jaw and beat around the bush. Just get down to it. Identify the problematic behavior or action as specifically as possible and explain that it’s burdening the game. That’s it. One sentence, two clauses…

You’ve missed three of the last six games; that’s made it hard for me to balance sessions, burdened me with figuring out what to do with your character, and created extra work for me to catch you up on all you’ve missed.

Stick to the facts, “This is what you did and this is how it impacted me and the game.” Don’t speculate on motives, reasons, choices, or anything else. Say what happened and say how it impacted you. And then shut up and listen. Really listen. Listen like you listen to players declaring actions. Repeat what you hear and make sure the player agrees that you heard them right. Don’t argue, don’t debate, don’t cajole, and don’t defend. Listen.

In the end, if the player offers a resolution, great. Thank them and move on.

If they say anything else, just reiterate that it’s causing you difficulty, tell them you just wanted to make them aware of the issue, and end the discussion. Because, really, that’s all you wanted, right? To make them aware?

Believe it or not, even if the player doesn’t promise a resolution and even if they get really defensive, they will often start to adjust their behavior. Slowly. Over time. Once they calm down. And that’s what you want to look for: some kind of effort towards a correction. Even if it’s slow, partial, or slipshod. Behavioral changes take time and people often suffer setbacks. So you’ve got to be patient. If you notice an effort — even if it’s just that Adam starts giving you more advanced notice and starts making an arrangement for Chris to run his character — acknowledge it and thank the player. Behavioral changes that ain’t reinforced don’t stick.

But if things remain a problem… well, then it’s time for Conflict Resolution. But that’s a story for another lesson.

In Conclusion…

Now’s the fun part where I try to sum up 11,000 words spread across three weeks of writing for all y’all. This job really sucks sometimes.

If you want to be a True Campaign Manager, you need a clear Scheduling and Attendance Policy for every campaign you run. The point of the Policy is to ensure every player agrees on what a commitment to your Pretend Elf Game means, that everyone treats game time as a precious treasure, and that everyone respects everyone else’s time.

The first step in establishing a Scheduling and Attendance Policy is to either establish a regular gaming schedule or outline the procedure by which the group will agree on when to play. Then, the Policy is all about how to cope with the inevitable disruptions. Thus, the Policy should discuss the procedure for canceling games, the conditions under which games will be canceled — including the question of how many players are needed to make a game a game — and how the schedule can be changed, either temporarily or permanently. The Policy must also address what the group will do in the event of planned or unplanned absence, tardiness, or players missing from the table without explanation. This ain’t about establishing rules and punishments, just procedures that minimize the amount of game time lost to such disruptions.

The True Campaign Manager should establish regular and emergency communication channels for the group and spell out just what counts as an emergency. Those same channels are useful for regular, official announcements and reminders, which the True Campaign Manager should get in the habit of sending. They’re also useful for distributing links to electronic polls, which are a great way to schedule sessions.

The ideal here is reliable attendance at regular game sessions, but that’s not always possible in real, actual life. When it’s not, the Campaign Manager has to recognize that less reliable game schedules make it difficult to run certain kinds of systems and campaigns. Thus, if the schedule’s not reliable, the Campaign Manager shouldn’t try to run character-driven games or games with complex, intricate plots and the Campaign Manager should choose a game system that everyone’s very familiar with and one that uses game time as efficiently as possible.

When a Scheduling or Attendance issue arises, the Campaign Manager has to decide whether the issue needs addressed based on their own discretion and good judgment. If it does need addressing, the Campaign Manager has to arrange a private talk with the player in question in as casual and non-confrontational way as possible. The Campaign Manager’s goal is to make the player aware of how the facts of their actions impact the game. And that’s it. Once the player knows how what they are doing is affecting the game, there’s nothing else to do except watch and wait. If the player makes any sort of effort to resolve the issue, the Campaign Manager must acknowledge the effort and thank the player. If the player ignores the issue, the Campaign Manager has to decide whether to escalate to Conflict Resolution.

And that’s it, that’s everything you need to know to schedule a Pretend Elf Game with Friends.

Easy fucking peasy.