So, what are you playing? How often? Using what format or venue?
I am running two 5E games.
One is in-person, hosted in my basement game room ("living the dream!") and we meet every 3 to 5 weeks. We had been leaning towards 5 weeks vs. 3 weeks, so I have been trying to push for 3 weeks the last couple of times and so far so good. There are four PCs - which are all folks I only started playing with when I moved to Pittsburgh in 2019 (we played for just over a year remotely during the pandemic - see below) - one had never played before, one had played one or two one-shots or failed campaigns, and two had last played in 2E era. Everyone is in their 40s (except for me - I'm 52). This is the same group I ran through an adaptation of
Ghosts of Saltmarsh, but we put that group on hiatus after the climax of
The Final Enemy. We hope to return to these characters eventually.
The other game also meets every 3 to 5 weeks (and like above, I have been pushing us towards 3 weeks over 4 or 5 lately, and so far so good) but it is run remotely. We play over Zoom, using a table camera for minis/combat and Owlbear Rodeo for exploration mode. Since this seemed to work for Group One, I decided to start a second group of people scattered from Italy to L.A. This game is also based on
GoS, and the idea behind it was that I could reuse what I had prepped for the above game (though currently it has veered pretty far from the first group - so far that we now have a player in common). This group includes, two people I have played D&D and other RPGs with since the 90s (one in '93, the other '96), one who played in (along with the '93 guy) my "Out of the Frying Pan" 3E campaign from ('01 to '06) before moving to Milan (where he still lives), one who is the recruited played from my other game (the newbie), and one was a recruit from a short-lived DCC game, who I had never played with before then. Of the six of us, three of us are in our 50s, two in their 40s, and not sure how old the former DCC group player is (late 20s? early 30s?).
I wish we could commit to playing every 2 weeks - but schedules just don't allow it, and unlike what others who prefer to schedule more often to allow for an occasional missed session - I prefer to schedule each session at the end of the current session and then make sure we make it.
In the 4+ years I've been running these games, we've only ever had one player miss two sessions and another miss one session over the course of two campaigns (though we have had people Zoom in due to Covid once or twice) in Group One, and in Group Two (leaving aside an early player who dropped out after missing twice - a new baby will do that) we've only ever had one player miss once (and that was just a couple of months ago). The only time we ever had to straight up cancel a session was when
I had covid and was too sick to run even remotely.
I'd love to join a biweekly weekday evening game as a player ideally in-person, but remote would also hit the spot. In the meantime, I run games for
Dungeons n' Drafts - PGH and occasionally drop-in as a player for a one-shot.
Edit to Add: In-person group plays 4 to 5 hours. Remote group plays 3 hours.
