If they loved rpgs as much as you, they'd find a way
It's probably not your fault. Year-long campaigns are just a very niche sell. Maybe you need to run a few oneshots instead?
Signed, someone just like you
In my experience, the winter months kill many a game. Between the holidays, work stress, weather, and seasonal depression it can be hard to keep your group together for a few months.
My players love our game, so I'd be hesitant to say that it's not important enough to them. Sometimes we let the important things slip when we're busy, or a perfect storm just keeps you apart.
All that to say, we usually get back together in the spring. Sometimes there's attrition, and usually we're playing a different game when we come back. But that's okay too, it feels natural to start up something new after you've lost your momentum
It absolutely was scheduling for us.
We loved the game and have been playing a pretty long campaign for slightly less than a year.
Then work got in the way for a few members, me included, and we weren't able to find a day when everyone could play for a few hours consecutively, with some of us working on the weekend, others on the weekdays, and others still having life-changing events going on, such as having to move hundreds of kilometres away.
We still manage to play once in a while, but nowhere near the weekly cadence we had before.
It's really hard to organize 7 people tbh. It hasn't killed us yet though, almost a year in
That's essentially the same thing, right? The rest of their schedule was more important, so they prioritized that.
Well technically yes, but the game can still be really important to you, while not being as important as working at your job that you need to survive or something. I envy people who have the flexibility to be able to completely prioritize gaming with friends, but unfortunately that's not the case for everyone. I miss my old D&D group :/
One of my fondest experiences of D&D is a campaign that ran slightly over three years! Not everyone we started with made it to the end, but the folks who did will forever hold a special place in my memories.
You know, in the end, not every band is Rush.
I rebooted my game recently and made the players promise to commit to at least one game per calendar month, which we schedule immediately after playing. Players who weren't willing or able to make/keep that commitment were dropped and replaced and now I have a pretty good thing going on. There's more people who want to play than want to GM, so if you're GMing you can afford to filter out uninterested players.
Sometimes yeah. But also I don't expect them to care more about D&D than, say, their kids, their careers, their financial wellbeing, etc.
Having run and participated in a few multi-year games with busy adults with children, my absolutely unsolicited advice for anyone wondering how to do the same is the following:
All that being said, if people aren't engaged in the game or that interested in playing, there's not really anything you can or should do about that aside from find other players.
Another benefit to remote Foundry games: you can stop at any time and the board/scene does not change. Hit a hard stop time in the middle of combat? Who cares! The turn tracker will stay right where it’s at until next week.
It is truly a blessing for the times I torture my players with a 4 hour boss fight which was, of course, preceded by 1.5 hours of them being indecisive at the magic shop.
Hey! Couple q's regarding Foundry. I'm the DM of our group, and have a ton (and I mean a ton) of homebrew for the campaign we're running atm. The homebrew spans changes to core mechanics (no damage rolls for example) to completely revamped classes, races, and backgrounds. How easy is it to homebrew on foundry? I've been eyeing it for a while because roll20 is so user unfriendly I was thinking of going back to Owlbear and manage everything through google sheets, or upgrading to paid VTTs.
I’ve been running games on foundry for 2-3 years and don’t think you’ll have issues with custom classes, races, or backgrounds unless you are doing something really really wild.
The core mechanical changes are going to be harder, but compared to roll20 it wouldn’t even be a competition foundry is just better for customization.
The most annoying thing is probably going to be porting all your homebrew. You can share it between worlds though via compendiums which is a nice timesaver.
Superb advice!