Prepping for Campaign Hibernation

I’ve found that you almost ALWAYS have a campaign die in winter. With holidays, and many players working in the busy service industry, you tend to find that you just can’t keep the players at your table from mid-November through the beginning of January.

We’re still 6 months out, but it’s worth already considering how to handle it. One danger is that you can’t get a campaign back up and running again after the break. So let’s look at how you can prepare to handle this problem.

1. End the Campaign. I’ve found that the clearest solution is just to wrap up a campaign in early November. I’ll often begin planning to end a campaign a month or two before. If you prep for this when a campaign starts up in January, you can have a good long 10 month campaign going, which is about how long my campaigns last anyway.
2. Side-Quests. You can take a break from the main game to play with those players who are available to play. If you run some one-shot games with brand new characters set in the same world, you can flesh out some other side-stories, even providing context or hints at future events in the campaign. Play a game where everyone plays goblins using the Monster Manual stat blocks, stealing a magical item that can appear at a later point in the campaign.
3. Play something else entirely. I’ve run Fiasco and other one-shot games during this time, or switching over to board games for the month of December in order to keep attendance in the minds of the players. Going two months without regularly going to someone’s house to play can cause players to fall out of the habit, or find other activities to fill the time. By the time January rolls around, they don’t have time or have found something else do to with their time. I know that when I get back to the States in October, I’m not going to start an RPG campaign right away, but instead run some other random things until January starts.
4. Schedule your next session. Take a break, and schedule the next session in January. By setting a specific date gives everyone something to look forward to. Setting up a Facebook group message to talk about the game and where you’d like to see it go is kind of your last option.

Do you have problems keeping your players coming back? Does your campaign tend to go into hibernation?