Your meetings are productive. You have your story arcs figured out. You have stacks of handouts for the players. What could you possibly be forgetting?

Oh, yeah: when is the game actually going to get run?

Genesis "8:00... Thursday night... Gaming room... Be there! And, I'll round up everyone else."
"C'mon man, you're friggin railroading me on this; there's no way!"
"Cry me a river Morgan; see you there!"
- Austin and Morgan, Geekin'

As the rollercoaster creaks to the top of the big hill, you might wonder whether you're ever going to make it. There's a moment of pause, and then it's all downhill. Your first game is exactly like that.

After tinkering with your setting and plots for weeks, months, or years, actually starting the game may seem like an impossible dream or a baffling imposition. Do you have everything you need? Could you write another packet? What if you forgot something vital?

These questions will plague you the closer and closer you get to a soft date, and that date will get pushed back. "We'd like to begin in the fall" is a soft date. As fall approaches, and you discover more to do, the date will slide to "late fall" then to "early winter" and then to "early next year."

But is saying "we're starting on September 25" any different? It is if you stick to it. A soft date is inherently mutable, becoming harder to nail down the closer you get to it. A hard date decided well in advance becomes a firm deadline upon which you can base other deadlines. You need to begin recruiting players at least two months before the game? You now know exactly on which day to begin. You have four more essential packets and twenty more major NPCs to write? You can now split up your remaining time to set a deadline for each item to be completed.

What's important is working up the will to pick the hard date. You'll be tempted to factor in the remaining work, player schedules, and dozens of other problems that will lead to meetings' worth of debate that push your accomplishment even further back. Take a holistic view of how many essential tasks are left, and pick an arbitrary date that seems to take them into account. You'll be amazed at how much more gets done when there's a sense of actual urgency, rather than a "we'll run it when it's done" mentality. You can shift it a bit if it proves absolutely necessary, but not much and not many times.

By setting a date, you will be inclined to meet it, even if it is arbitrary. By forcing the date to wait on your development schedule, you will take much longer to start the game, if you ever start it at all.

But what if you're not ready for the first game? What if there are incomplete plots, missing packets, or hardly any players? All of those are problems, but not insurmountable ones. There's no easier way to see what the problems are with your plots or handouts than actually running them or handing them out. If your game is good, even if it's unpolished, you will gain new players from friends passing on how much fun they had. If your game is not good, even a huge turnout for the first game will not last.

Once you've run the first game, you know what areas to improve for the second, and, hopefully, you have several players who are all going to tell their friends what a great time they had and what potential they think your game has for the future. It's all downhill from there.

Inertia
"When's the next game?"
"We'll let you know via the mailing list."
"I could plan better for it if I knew today."

Of course, "all downhill" is really more of an average. It gets progressively easier to run your game the longer and more regularly you've been running it, but there are likely to be patches where you could slow down or derail if you aren't careful.

Perhaps the most dangerous of these patches is the long delay. There is a reason why you frequently hear about gaming groups that have been playing every week for decades. The same reason explains why you rarely hear about gaming groups that have been playing a couple of times a year for decades. Despite how much they may grumble about having to meet your schedule, the players that stick will find it progressively easier to make time in their lives for your game. The longer they can plan in advance, the better, and if they can just assume that they'll be gaming on X days of Y months then the plans take care of themselves.

Ideally, you will know the date for your next game at least by the time of the current game. You should be in a position to remind everyone of the next date at the beginning of the present one (if you wait until the end, you might miss the people who left early - and if they left early once, and don't know when to come back, you might have lost them for good).

Unfortunately, this may not be feasible. You might not be able to afford your next venue without the proceeds from the current game. You might need at least a month to prepare, but next month looks busy with work and family for everyone on staff, and the month after is just as hazy. When you're asking a large group of players to schedule their time around your game, not having a date is better than having the wrong date; if players schedule time off, babysitters, and so on around one date, they will be unhappy when that date changes.

If at all possible, figure out how to have your next date scheduled by your present date. If that's not possible, pick a date as soon as you can do so with certainty. Keep your players informed of why you have not set a date yet, and then inform them the moment that you have. You may have a few players that can meet any given date, and like your game enough to do so, but by leaving the schedule unknown, you'll lose many other players.

However, you might lose these players anyway if your next date is too far removed from the current. In love, absence may make the heart grow fonder, but in gaming, frequency makes the character grow faster. Despite the coolness of your world, your plots, and your NPCs, your players are much more likely to stick if they enjoy playing their characters. For some players, seeing their character get more and more XP and loot is the biggest part of enjoyment, while for others, simply developing the character's story independent of stats is important. Neither type is wrong, nor does either benefit from an extended absence from playing the character. In an infrequent game, those who value advancement gain XP slowly and sporadically and those who value roleplaying potential lose track of their motivations and character mindset over time.

The time you can wait between games depends on the game. A convention game may make it on a yearly schedule, a weekend-long game may be fine happening seasonally, and a several-hour game can get by monthly. But there will be a point where enthusiasm for the game rapidly diminishes as players wait longer and longer to get to play their characters again. This is further worsened by not knowing when the next game will be, but even a predicted game may be too far away.

This is all to say: once you've started your game, run it as often as you have the financial and GM resources. If you can get all your development done for the next game in a month, don't wait three months for the next game without a very good reason. From a position of maintaining a player base, regular, predictable, frequent games are your number one goal.

Competition
"I can't make it. I have another game that weekend."

Of course, with all these regular, essentially arbitrary dates, there's one vital piece of the equation missing: competition. As much as you might wish otherwise, you are not the only source of scheduled dates for your players. While they will be more inclined to make time for regular, anticipated dates, this is not always possible. What do you do about the competition?

Your major concern, of course, is events that will distract a significant chunk of your player base. The most common of these is other games; many players patronize multiple games during the year, and some of these games may be a bigger draw than yours. Even if you're sure that most of your players will choose your game over the one you've scheduled on top of, it will create bad blood if you do this on a regular basis. It's not a good thing to be known as the game that tries to keep players from attending other games (whether or not that reputation is deserved).

But other games aren't the only events that can take a large number of your players. Are a lot of your players fans of a certain band? You may lose them when the tour comes through. Is there an anticipated movie opening on your date? You may lose the players that enjoy seeing blockbusters on opening night. Is there a sci-fi convention going on that weekend? Be prepared for a sparse turnout.

You're often better off trying to take these competing events into account with your scheduling. This might mean more than just avoiding the exact dates. If four large, seasonal games split up the weekends in May, they still might lose players that can't game every weekend. At least a clear weekend on either side is usually a good idea to shoot for.

But what if you can't meet the needs of your game and all the other conflicts as well? You may have to pick the one that's going to lose the least amount of players. Furthermore, even though it's cynical, you might be even better off shooting for losing the least amount of important players. If ten of your most involved players play one game, and twenty tag-along players play another, you might have to schedule against the second. It's cold to set value judgments on the worth of certain players to the game versus others, but sometimes running a game is about quality more than quantity.

And then there are the personal schedules. John has a family outing on the 12th. Bill has courtside tickets on the 19th. If you schedule your game on these days, you're going to lose a player. With this kind of situation, it's often better to not consider player schedules at all, because you're probably going to wind up deliberately excluding one person and definitely going to give the impression that your entire game can be moved to suit a particular player. Favoritism claims cannot be far behind. When it comes down to losing a player or two here or a player or two there, cut your losses and rewrite any plotlines where the excluded players were necessary.

If you have a reliable schedule far in advance, your dedicated players will mostly schedule their personal lives to attend your game anyway.

Now that you're prepared to get your game running, next month I'll talk about a unique problem in multi-GM games: players trying to get what they want by turning the staff against one another.