Anyone who knows me knows that I play in a LOT of tabletop games, both as a GM and as a player. My current count is nine games, played in either monthly or bi-weekly. Most people assume I spend all my waking hours prepping, but honestly, I don’t spend more than thirty minutes a day dealing with RPG admin work. The trick is having a system and making good use of small pockets of time.
Most of this will be about being a GM, but if you just want to be a player in a bunch of games, much of this still applies! A player who remembers when games are and shows up with notes is always going to be able to find tables to join.
Organizing
Being organized is, unfortunately, key to this. I’ll be real: I’m not a naturally organized person. If you give me a backpack, it’ll be a disaster within a month of regular use. My crafting areas are only neat right after a cleaning spree. The only reason my bookshelves are neat is because they’re on-screen during calls, and my friends’ love language is shaming. Still, time spent hunting down crap is time spent not prepping, and I’m really trying to use every minute I manage to free up.
So, when it comes to games, I’m very organized. Everything is in its own folder. These folders back up so I can access them anywhere and a computer dying doesn’t destroy me. I have a dedicated gaming notebook that keeps track of all of my games. I pin important links and details.
When I start a game, the whole task for that day is to get everything set up:
- Folders for anything I could possibly need in a game, so I don’t have to go hunting
- VTT game
- Discord channel (all of my games get, at a minimum, a channel in one of my servers)
- Pin all of the important details, like where things are being stored and where we’re playing
I’ll repeat this: This is a whole-ass task. It takes a bit of time. If this is all I do for game prep for that day, I consider it time well spent.
Scheduling
This is where most games fall apart. Every webcomic about gaming will eventually have a comic about how hard it is to get five people to show up at a set date and time. It’s a universal problem, and you have to take it seriously if you want to game more.
Easy mode for this is having games on the same date and time on a regular basis. So, it might be every other week, the first Monday of the month, etc. I would be cautious about being overly optimistic about scheduling a game for every week, though. That’s a huge ask for players, and you could end up with more cancellations than you were anticipating. If your weekly game is canceled half of the time… bruh, you have a bi-weekly game. Schedule for reality, not your dreams.
Hard mode is having games that move around, which is over half of mine. They take more work to schedule, and you really have to plan ahead. However, it’s much easier to get people to agree to a date that can wiggle than a set schedule.
The trick is that you have to get on people’s calendars early, but not too early. People don’t like to commit too far out, but if you wait, you’ll find out that they’re busy every single night. The sweet spot for me has been to start pinging people around the 14th of the month for the next month’s games: That’s far enough out that you’re in front of the last-minute events but not so far out that people have no idea what they’ll be doing that week. Also, if you schedule too far in advance, people are more likely to forget.
For me, I send out polls to each group and pick the date with the most reactions. Save for one game, I don’t require 100% attendance. Some tables insist that everyone needs to be there, but I can say from experience that this is the swiftest way to kill your game. I tend to slightly (SLIGHTLY) over-recruit, then only ask 75% of the players to show up.
Honestly, for either, think hard before demanding 100% attendance at every game. I’ve seen this kill many a good table where 80% of the people were all in, but one had a chaotic life. Everyone there wants to game, or they wouldn’t have accepted the invite! If the game keeps getting canceled, the reliable players will drift away. It is better that one person has to get caught up every few sessions than to have a notebook full of ideas that never get used.
But wait! What if you’re not the GM? Does this still apply to you? Ideally, no, but sometimes, it could! As a player, you can still poke the GM to set a date if it looks like they might have forgotten. Heck, you can offer to be the person who does the scheduling. Being a GM is a big task, and it’s always nice when someone can lighten that load.
Prep
If scheduling is the game killer, prep is the GM killer.
The biggest danger with running a bunch of games is falling behind on prep and burning out. To fight both, you have to limit how much prep you’re going to do in a day. For me, I know the max I can fit in is 30 minutes. After that, I start to lose focus and unfocused planning is just wasted time. The trick is to be consistent. You’re not going to prep a whole AP in one short session a week, after all.
If I don’t have a game that day, I tend to do two fifteen-minute prep sessions for different games. I like hopping around, and my games are almost always in different phases of prep (reading / sheets / maps). I try to keep a chapter ahead of my players when running APs because you never know when they’ll be able to find a shortcut that the developers didn’t think of.
If I have a game that day, I’ll generally spend my whole time slot prepping for that game. That involves reviewing where we left off, checking my maps, and writing down some notes about what I think the players will encounter next. So, if they’re in room A15 of a dungeon, I’ll write notes about the next four or five rooms they could reasonably get to. If they’re entering a town for the first time, I write down the plot hooks I want to make sure I hit.
As for reviewing, I’m now a firm believer in recording my games. This has been a game-changer for me. Since I know I don’t have to take detailed notes during the game, I can focus more on the players and plot. It’s also faster than you’d think to review the video: The most important parts are usually in the last ten minutes, and a quick scan can tell me what maps they hit during the past session. Just make sure your players are cool with you recording them.
This is a lot. Is it worth it?
For me, yes!
I have a circle of gaming friends that would never fit into a single game. I also love running Adventure Paths, which come out at a breakneck speed. Besides that, I love dabbling in multiple systems. If I were only in one game, I’d lose a lot of chances to have fun with other people.
Maybe this is way too much for most people (most people would balk at the idea of being in nine games), but the advice still holds if you want to create a second game in your schedule. Hell, most of it still applies if you just have one!
Either way, may 2024 bring you as much gaming as your heart desires!
Katie Plays Games 