Conflicts of Interest
We discovered back in “Devil’s Night” that Antipaladin’s boss and Sorcerer’s fiendish forebear were one in the same. Now we know what happens when a busy executive tries to mix business with family life. As a Chief Executive of the Lower Planes, it’s nice to have your priorities in place. Same deal if you’re a gamer.
This holiday season, as I enjoy a little vacation time and a lot of cancelled sessions, I find myself considering the natural ebb and flow of session attendance. We’ve talked a couple of times about players who flake out on sessions, but there are times each year when the problem becomes endemic. The winter holidays tend to be one of these times. Summer vacation is another. It seems that, whether you’re in school or not, family trips and festive commitments have a way of disrupting fantasy worlds.
One workaround is to try and plan ahead for these times. I try to structure my campaigns such that CLIMACTIC EVENTS unfold in late November and early May. My thinking is that, if all the coolest stuff is happening in the busy season, players are more likely to make time for gaming. Alternatively, transitioning out of “plot arc mode” and into “episodic mode” can help to accommodate low-attendance games. If you move away from stories that require all the regulars to be present, you can have some fun times with three-man or even two-man sessions. These can be the times when you really get down to character-building and backstory. Asking for guest players can also keep the ball rolling despite poor attendance, while the ever-popular “X-mas one-shot” can lend a sense of occasion to your filler sessions.
At the end of the day though, these are just patches on an impossible problem. My best advice (and the tactic I usually rely on) is to make like Sorcerer’s Granny and pick family over armored warriors. That cycle is just part of the hobby, and I think it pays to accept it rather than fight it (or even worse, resent it) every holiday season.
Question of the day then! Are there times of the year when you notice that your session-attendance tanks? What are they? How do you work around ’em? Let’s hear all about your seasonal dry spells down in the comments!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Twice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
Regarding the mouseover text, does that mean Thief is Sorcerer’s cousin? (removed by quite a few times, I’m sure)
Tieflings and sorcerers also make for awkward holiday get togethers.
“Pass the turkey.”
“Why don’t you use mage hand and get it your damn self?”
Guess the turkey was over 5 pounds.
“Shut up about your Strength score you dumb jock!”
Tieflings aren’t usually actually descendants of fiends. (Especially since as of 4E and continuing into 5E Devils don’t have sex-organs since they’re all manufactured from the the tortured souls of mortals rather than born, but demons do and they’re horrifying) Instead they’re the descendants of mortals who made pacts with fiends.
For example, Thief’s great-great-grandfather might have made a deal with Not-Lolth, and then the first daughter of every other generation might be a Tiefling. Tieflings can have non-Tiefling parents, and non-Tiefling children. The cursed bloodline flares up when certain conditions are met.
Depends on edition and setting. Feel free to run tieflings however you like in your
comichome game.And in Pathfinder, they are explicitly both. One may be a tiefling through the influence of a fiendish pact, birth, or through alchemy/magic (Per the entry in the half-fiend template). Though they really focus on the fiendish blood in Pathfinder, and also focus on its unpredictability.
moving content to fit the seasons sounds awfully railroady.
when a player flues out and it’s not a boss or top mook fight up ahead we play anyways, ghosting. Otherwise it‘s „pull out another game“ time, just so the tome and junk food get used properly.
This is a seasonal thing, though. It seems less like individual session content is being moved, and more that the whole campaign structure is designed to work around the players schedules. (Though I can’t imagine the amount of work that would take)
Oh I dunno. I’m just talking about running “the holiday episode.” The difference is you plan to add a few side quests or hold off on character-specific development for about a month at a time.
I think Thief’s optometrist bill could be dropped substantially by paying a visit to Barbarian instead. Lesser restorations aren’t the cure for blindness, Thief, a good fringe cut is. (Although, that gives me a good idea on how to reflavour the next time I cast blindness…)
Any attacks upon Thief’s bangs will be met with swift stabbings in self-defense.
My response to holidays is to run longer sessions. While holidays mean people going away, so people have less days available, it also means that people have less work on, so longer sessions are possible. While the longer sessions aren’t long enough to make up for the lost days, it still helps.
I never thought of planning campaign timing around IRL times, and never will again because that sounds like a lot of work. Also, it really just wouldn’t be possible with my players, they have a habit of challenging the BBEGs to fights while in level 8-13, in middle low-mid levels. There’s no way of telling if a session will end up being plot relevant or not.
You never run out-of-sequence arcs? Flashbacks? Side quests?
My regular groups are all pretty good at committing to game nights, so we don’t usually get people flaking out once something’s booked. We do still accept losing about a month over Christmas as we can’t schedule anything in the first place though.
Is it that straight up zero gamers are available during X-mas, or do you not game unless the full table is available?
We don’t /plan/ a game where the full table won’t be available. Occasionally life happens and someone needs to drop out at the last moment, and then we’ll either run a player short or play board games instead, but when we’re agreeing dates for sessions we only set dates everyone can make. Unless it’s a really unavoidable the people I game with are good at keeping those dates.
Do we have a warlock character yet? Theres quite a few and I dont remember them all.
I made the mistake of putting him on the Handbook of Erotic Fantasy side of the comic. Kind of wish I’d sandbagged the class in retrospect.
Welp, I’m now tempted to give some support to get access to that.
We have a Fiend Warlock with weird homebrewed hair powers that Colin insists on calling “Witch” for some reason.
I’m hitting back-to-back cancelled sessions because we play on Wednesday which is Chinese Food and Movie Day, and New Years respectively.
As is tradition.
It’s almost like the forces of evil provide a hostile work environment and a terrible retirement plan. Who knew?
As is also tradition.
Now I’m picturing Thief putting on several pairs of glasses over her bangs and complaining that they do nothing, while Wizard is all “I can’t imagine why…”
As a glasses wearer myself, I can empathise. As a glasses wearer who is super picky about wanting to see every last detail, I’m surprised I don’t get charged extra.
Well I mean… How many sets of eyes do you have?
Right now. Down here is summer, it has not been that bad lately, the weather has been more autumn than summer, but still the only girl of the group, who also is the only one with conditioned air on her house, is out on vacations with her family. So the rest of the guys and me face a hard decision: we either play dying of heat and dehydration or we skip the game for a time. Though choice, and that if other of the group don’t go on their own vacations. Summers can be pretty suffocating, even a shirt be too much, and being shirtless is not that much of a help. And that is living in a city by the sea. Good thing the weather have been rather cold for this time of the year but if true heat comes we will have a problem. So each summer we have the same thing. At least we have ended our Mage campaign in time for the holidays and new year. Which leaves the group with other problem: What we do next? Luckily with the need to think in other than the heat or its coming they will think in a good idea for a campaign, i work best in winter than summer 🙁
I like the idea of using the holiday doldrums as a planning period.
Also of note, you could always run a campaign in Handbook-World. 🙂
In the north hemisphere you got winter and holidays together, then summer comes the other half of the year. Summer bring, depending on the location, weather issues. Holidays always are a difficult time to coordinate people. Down here, since we got holidays and summer at the same time, we don’t have that much problem with winter since is quite easy to bring the people together, we don’t take winter vacations. So yes, instead of being four guys, sweating rivers, shirtless as if we were on the beach and with too much thirst to even care about the Evil Overlord to enslave the world, we use this time to plan our next games 🙂
Also Which system would you recommend for that? D&D, PF, other? I have already think of it, but since the setting is, no offense, kinda nonexistent and the plot of the campaign has yet to appear in full form, i would rather expect for the Handbook of the Handbook of Heroes 😀
Shirtless, sweaty Christmas D&D. I can very nearly smell the holiday spice.
My city has a fishing industry, that you smell is the fish and the sea. Either that or the guys and me got an interesting heritage XD
Also is not my fault we can actually live the dream of so many people. But i assure you shirtless D&D is even better than you think 😛
My group is made of about 85% college/university students so planning sessions during finals week is an effort in futility we also generally don’t play over christmas. If we have cancellations outside of those times we’ll usually just try and do a one-shot or something else depending on who’s still around.
Finding myself back in school many years later, I’d forgotten how rough it is to schedule anything. Academic itineraries are rough, yo.
While I do experience less pbp activity in the holiday season, I’ve noticed that it’s really not all that bad. Some people get busier, but about an equal amount of people find themselves suddenly with more free time.
On the other hand, summer seems the real bane of the hobby. On the one hand active people will just vanish for weeks at a time. And on the other people who only make time for the hobby during the summer sign up for games that then die when they abandon (often without so much as a word) come the fall.
Why do you think that is? More student presence online?
That’s exactly what I suspect, yup.
Ooof. Bad choice of boss there, Antipaladin. I can already see the future job interviews going by awkwardly.
“Could you state the reason for leaving your previous employment?”
“Blatant displays of nepotism, animal cruelty and soul-draining work conditions.”
It’s the animal cruelty that AP really hates. Poor Patches….
I imagine this spell would make him go berzerk:
https://aonprd.com/SpellDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Vile%20Dog%20Transformation
Depending on who and how many are missing, we typically break out the board games. We keep a couple around for just such an occasion, Boss Monster, Munchkin, the Labyrinth Board game, anything that is quirky and fun.
Most recently when one of our group announced a three weekend hiatus for the Holidays, we just moved forward one game. We typically are running one game and have already voted on what the next is so that the GM can be preparing. So when one of guys was going to be out we put the World of Darkness game on hold and i’ve been running the opening of our Mutants and Masterminds “Hero High” game. It’s been fun.