Sorry to hear about your game being cancelled, Robert. Your comments are evidence that the patterns I have noted are indeed universal – and the first step to controlling patterns is noticing the effect that they are having. So I hope you can get some additional control over your game by making use of the analysis. Having said that, one of the reasons for player absence without notice that I will accept, without arguement, is employment, especially on the part of a casual worker. I get the impression that this doesn’t happen to you very often, so it’s not unreasonable as a justification. If it does start occurring more frequently, you may need to make arrangements with the player for play to continue whether he is in attendance or not. That usually means running the PC as an NPC and getting direction on goals and ambitions from the player.

I have been playing weeknight games for about 6 years now. The best of that has been weekly on Thursday nights where I only had to suffer one workday of being REALLY tired before the weekend. We would often play till 2 or 3 am, having started at 7 (with the usual hour or two of chat before the game, leaving about 6 hours of actual gaming). I’m a high-school teacher, so I would spend all Thursday afternoon making sure Friday was well-prepared and easy. I moved cities, so I’ve been forced to change, but that group still plays every Thursday night at one person’s home.

More recently I have been playing fortnightly Tuesday nights, which lends itself to a tired week. It is a different group of gamers, with two of us with family commitments (hence fortnightly rather than weekly) and one casual shift worker. I’d like to start the game as early as possible so that we can chat and catch up and gossip as we eat together, but it just doesn’t work for us with late finishing workers and those of us with young children.

Tonight was supposed to be the casual worker’s night off, but he has been asked to work very early tomorrow morning so decided to cancel his game. He has booked Monday night for us – so the two of us with family will book in Monday night, and the others are getting together tonight as well, most likely for board games and chat.

I totaly agree with your observations (perhaps because I am not far from Sydney). We have tried to organise an entire Saturday game, but between the shift worker working till midday and everyone not really focusing till the sun went down it was not very successful.

I have also noticed that last-hour-rush. I also GM for the RPG Club I started in the school I teach at. We game for almost 5 hours on Wednesdays straight after school, and once I see that the clock says there is only an hour left I start to ruch things through, trying to complete the combat or scene and wrap it up on time. On the other hand, the Tuesday night game has no set end time. It has been as early as 11pm, usually around midnight, often 1am and occasionaly 2am. It all depends on the natural endpoint of the session.

@bullroarer4 – that would seem to accord fairly well with my experiences, then. Do your first & last -hour experiences also match what I have encountered?

@Drew – It started as just a bunch of people gathering at a central location to play games at the same time, a sort of weekly micro-convention you could say. Organization was forced on us. At it’s height, we had a core group of about 40 who were there every week and another 90 or so who showed up once a month or less. These days, there are about 12 of us left. But the more people you have, the more you need organization to keep them out of each other’s pockets. We had room for 5, maybe six games – with 6-7 players and 1 GM each, on average.

These days, almost all my non-convention gaming is in people’s houses, and sometimes using Skype or the like to bring in remote players. When I was in school, we had the use of a classroom, but that was only accessible for the lunch hour on weekdays, which wasn’t enough to do much. Since then, it’s been living rooms or (preferably) kitchens or dining rooms with decent-sized tables.

I’ve never encountered a gaming organisation of the size you’re talking about there; the Irish Games Association does (or possibly did) a regular Thursday evening meet in a pub in Dublin, but that would mostly be board and card games, not RPGs. And even then 30 people would be a busy night.