This has come up many times at my table, as I’m sure it has for practically everyone else.

Me: D&D this weekend?
My Wife: Swim Meet Saturday. Lesson plans and housework Sunday.
Me: (Crying, sighs.) Next weekend?
My wife: Maybe? Little League starts soon. Haven’t heard from coaches yet.
Me: (Now ugly sobbing openly.) What…what about the weekend after that?
My wife: Spring break, so probably? We do have a list of projects to do around the house…
Me: June? How’s June looking?

LOL! I’m kind of picking on my poor wife a little, but you can probably see where I’m going with this. It’s tough to find a good gaming time, especially on the weekends. That’s with all six people involved living under one roof. Do I ever try to schedule anything outside of the family? Not very often, no.

One possible solution:

Shorter sessions, sandwiched in more often. Sunday night dinner and D&D. I expect almost daily Power Rangers games over Spring Break that only go an hour or two at a time. Prepping these is pretty easy. The only hard part is leaving the map and the minis out with three cats in the house. They like knocking the PC’s minis onto the floor for some reason.

More sessions more often also makes combat a little tougher trying to get everyone to remember what they were going to do. If I time it right, we start combat at the beginning of the session and end it before the end of the session. That might be most of what we do, but it works. I also finds it helps the younger players to stay engaged when the action and the story are constantly moving for most of the session.

I have seen random tables for why a character goes missing.

When a player can’t make it, we usually have a few options. The character becomes an NPC for the day. Tedious for the DM, but effective.

The missing player’s character trips going down the stairs to Room 1 (of 73) to the dungeon, sprains his ankle, and has to go sit with the horses. Works great for extended absences especially. I’ve literally seen random tables with results such as this.

One of the other players agrees to run the character for the absent player. I don’t love this plan for several reasons. The first being the player running multiple characters can easily get distracted. Second, the other player can never seemingly run the character the same way the original player does. Last, if the absent player’s character dies or ends up in a relationship with a bugbear, there could be some friction among players afterward. (Yeah, that happened.)

I’ve seen a variant on this where we all ran the missing character by proxy for the missing player. The character would literally have sounded schizophrenic with four different people helping with their decision making. And combat was messy that way. Not to mention the whole group got to look at the character’s sheet including all the character’s dirty little secrets. When the player came back the next week, the metagame reckoning was fierce!

Understanding is really the key.

IFF you are so lucky as to have a group of adults, planning a consistent game night is a heap easier. If everyone knows game night is always going to be on Tuesday from 5:00-10:00, then it’s easier to schedule weeks, even months in advance. It also gives the DM a consistent night to prep for. If people can’t make it, they know the following week is still going to be there. When everyone involved understands the plan, it usually leads to consistent game nights. I suggest discussing it during Session Zero.

Adults often have families, including those pesky little people running around everywhere. 😋

I kid. I kid. No, really. I have four of them from 15 all the way down to 6 years old. That encompasses a lot of activities. School always comes first, of course. My wife teaches Special Ed Behavior Disorder kids, so she’s pretty busy even when she’s not in school. Having a family group is a blessing and a curse.

I’m glad I’m not currently helping with conventions or running much of anything outside the house, even online. It’s crazy how many things come up during the week even outside of Little League season. We have swimming, band and orchestra concerts, award dinners and all kinds of things come up every week. That’s also assuming everyone is healthy. What do we do?

We’re not every family, but we do miss a few game sessions here and there. Kinda sucks, but responsibilities are what they are. I try to squeak in a session or two on the weekdays and there’s always plenty of time to write, design, and read during the downtime. At least some of the housework gets done when I’m not chasing them around, too. Ya know, I used to think be unemployed would give me more time?

Drinking coffee keeps me sane.

Game on! Have a good week. Please stay hydrated. See you soon.