I have run mostly closed games whenever I’ve tried to run things in the past, and it has generally resulted in failure (the failure here meaning - a game didn’t happen). It is inevitable that people signing up to play in a game are always going to be less engaged in it than the person running it, and that usually ends up expressing itself by flakiness, prioritizing other hobbies or activities over the game, etc.
When I decided to run an OSE game in 2022 I went ahead and set it up as an open table - the game has a minimum of 3 players required for a session to happen, and up to 6(or 7 in one case). That is the setup I used for my OD&D game the year after that, and between both games I have had to cancel a session due to lack of players only twice, and that was mostly due to failed attempts at trying different schedules.
I was actually planning on making a thread here about this exact topic, but Justin beat me to it, so let me use the opportunity to opine on some thoughts I’ve had about these campaign structures.
In all cases, I am talking about in-person games. I have less interest in online gaming, and have been doing it mostly as a lesser stopgap until I can get back to playing in person (this is not to diminish the enjoyment I’ve had in those online games on the purple server, or indeed the level of work the referees have put into them!) so in-person is what I am interested in.
In the past 3 years I have run 3 “campaigns”, all in person. First OSR thing I ran was an OSE open table sandbox, the Greylands. Scheduling for that was what i described above. In that game I had some regular players who would show up for most, or close to most, of the sessions. I also had plenty of players joining in for 2-3 sessions or just one-offs who would not come back again. In my mind this is a perfectly operating open table setup, in total I had 17 players attend at some point or another. The game would be held every week, usually on the weekend (we experimented with doing it on weekday evenings, it didn’t quite work).
In 2023 I ran an OD&D game, the Serpents of Smoke and Steel. The organizational setup was exactly the same, as I was hoping to leverage some of the previous more dedicated playerbase from my OSE game. That…sort of succeeded I guess? Some of the regulars from the first campaign became regulars in this one, new players showed up which became regulars, but some regulars from the OSE game never even attended this one, due to scheduling conflicts on their end.
This second campaign ended up naturally as a semi-closed thing too. I still organized it liken open table, play began and ended in a “safe spot” on the map, with a month of downtime in-between every session, the usual stuff. But a core of 4 players very much formed, with others joining in for 1-2 sessions but rarely sticking for longer.
At the time, and even now, I feel a bit ambivalent about this development. While this resulted in no failed sessions due to lack of players, it also meant that this campaign only had 12 players total, with most of those only showing up for 1 session or 2 at most.The presence of such a strong core also meant that new people joining in felt like they were on the outside of an already existing group, which I suppose was technically true.
The third campaign I ran, also in 2023, was a sort of redo of my Greylands game, run at home for my 2 partners, and mostly focusing on the tentpole dungeon of Dyson’s Delve. That was an entirely closed game, we never had other players, and we tried to play roughly once a week but sometimes would do several shorter sessions throughout the week instead.
It worked okay, though I feel that 2 players is in that weird spot where it isn’t a duet game, but also not a full enough party to let people bounce ideas off each other. It meant I no longer needed to deal with having play start and end in town, as I knew that attendance would be the same every time, and downtime now occurred only when needed, rather than between every single session.
So with all of this out of the way, my main thoughts have been on where to proceed from here with my following campaign which is going to be entirely set in a megadungeon and thus quite focused in its scope and purpose of play.
A megadungeon is great for an open table, as people can simply drop in and out as they need and they won’t be in the middle of some long-running multi-session plan that a core group is executing (or they will, but plans can change), but it can also be a great way to have a solid core of players in a closed game try and form longer term approaches on how to tackle the dangerous environment.
The question of venue is also weighing on my mind. An LGS is great for open table games, as it is a public space and I don’t have to invite people I might be okay with gaming with, but not necessarily have in my home, to play at my place. A closed table can be easily hosted at my place, which reduces the amount of travel and work I have to do on top of all the prep I do as a referee.
So I am curious if people here have had success with running long term closed campaigns and how they get around scheduling. My arbitrary cutoff for “long” in this case meaning 50+ sessions or 1+ year long of regular, weekly or at most biweekly game sessions. A campaign that last 1 year, but involves 5 sessions I think is not a long campaign, just spread thin.
