Adventure: The 3-Dragon Problem Problems

The Three-Dragon Problem campaign is supposed to be running monthly, but it isn't. I've got lots of ideas and plans that will probably not come to fruition. I'm enjoying it, but its a rough haul. Monthly is a tough schedule for an ongoing campaign, I don't feel I'm getting as much investment in the game as I'd like and its tough to keep everyone engaged with that much time between games.

The group made characters and had our session zero in January 2023, but then it was 22-days before they got to play those characters. We ran through a 2-part adventure where we had a 28-day break between part 1 and part 2. The next session was 13-days later, but it was something of a flop, where things got bogged down in town. Then there was a huge break of 70-days before the group made it to an ambush on the road leading to a goblin bandit cave. It was another 64-days before we got back together and they walked into the town they left for seven months ago in the real world. It's been a tough row to hoe, but the crops have been seeded and from here on out the adventure really cuts loose and the players start driving the story... Or that was how I envisioned it going. The way it really went was  no game in July, so another 63-day span between sessions. We did manage to get four months in a row before the holidays closed in and interrupted our schedule. 

As is, we haven't played since 11/19. December being what it is and all, I think there is no explanation needed. I'm the reason the January game was cancelled, as I had a little bit of pneumonia swimming around in my system and all the coughing and wheezing made it seem unlikely I'd be able to do much gaming. We floated a couple dates for February, but I couldn't gather a consensus. Which is the nice way of saying I didn't get responses to my proposed schedule. And I got petulant this month and didn't send out a reminder/query this month, if they want to play they'll let me know. Which is the wrong attitude.

The hardest part of this is the lack of communication. Which I think is pretty much the status quo in an ongoing campaign, but that doesn't stop me from feeling like a high-maintenance DM every time I remind them that I'd like more input from them. The other problem I have is that we are playing at two of the player's home and I feel a certain lack of agency having the host 's invitation being necessary to schedule the game. If I were running at my house or in some public space I'd have the option of saying, I'm running on X-Date for anyone who can make it, but that doesn't work in this situation. Hopefully, April will roll around and all of my whining will be irrelevant because we'll run through the summer without missing a beat. Or, we've missed four months, the momentum has been lost, and the game will sputter to an end. Hopefully that's not the case.

I'm just whining about the same stuff that every DM on the planet deals with in their game. In 13 months we've managed to have 9 sessions and lost one player, which is about a 70% success rate. Not terrible. But the future feels uncertain.