The real fantasy element of Dungeons & Dragons is pretending that you have a group of friends who all get along with each other and can manage to meet regularly for four hours at a time.
(Originally published on hachyderm.io: 2024-02-04)
Offspring downstairs right now playing DnD w/ friends across five states, two countries, nine time zones. Scheduling is a trial, but they’ve managed to pull it off for five years, through college, grad school, various moves, still with three original people and assorted additions.
I have no idea how.
So far my teen daughter and her friends are trying! They in basement right now struggling to get zoom running on her Linux Mint laptop because the GM graduated last year and they have to video them in! LoL
we got around this by setting up a large group, and having subsets of 3-7 people meeting randomly for 1- and 2-shots. every once in a while there's a 6-session or so mini-campaign to take care of something very significant. sessions are all on VC (but not VTT) to spare everyone the travel time and also allow players from a variety of geolocations. if someone drops from drama, the game survives.
the setup worked well during pandemic lockdown. at least then, everyone had lots of time.
My current group met every Thursday for 14 years, starting in the 70s. These days they meet at least weekly online- still, it’s all a a matter of timing.