Welcome to GM Screen Time, the series where we dive deep into my bag of Gamemastering tricks to find different strategies and tips I've used at my tables to promote a fun environment. In this installment, we discuss the dreaded topic that stops an unverified 90% of people from ever getting their games to the table at all: scheduling. Everybody wants to play games together. The problem is that between school, work, extracurricular activities, soup nights, vacations, and everything else, people are busy. It's not only finding the time to game, but finding an amiable time where everyone can game.

The ABC Framework for Scheduling

My group recently wrapped up a playthrough of Paizo's Sky King's Tomb Adventure Path for Pathfinder Second Edition, a campaign that encompassed two and a half years IRL. We play two hours per week every Wednesday, and over the past eight years of consistently playing together we are averaging only a handful of missed weeks each year. Since we mostly play remotely, this offers a significant level of flexibility, but we've managed to get together across states spanning Seattle all the way to Maryland, and even worked around a player's work trip to the Eastern Hemisphere.

Playing with the same group for that long is different from queuing up a multi-year campaign with strangers. It's…

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