Back when I read about the West Marches there was one thing I didn't understand: "There was no regular time: every session was scheduled by the players on the fly."
How on earth was this supposed to work? In my world, the referee was key. I'd run a game every Monday, or every second Sunday, or what have you. It was a hallmark of how I saw myself. Back in 2011 I said: "I'm a good host." Building a Better GM has a much longer discussion of this. The key part about this, however, was that I set the dates.
When I started running an open table on Discord, things started to change. I was participating in multi-referee campaigns. At first, I was on a Discord server and ran a game on Mondays. Then @phf@tabletop.social would run game on Mondays, too. We'd take turns. Then we got more players and we started picking other weekdays because some people couldn't play on Mondays. When I joined a second Discord server, for a second multi-referee campaign with @settembrini@rollenspiel.social and others, scheduling got even more flexible. I was running or playing two or three evenings per week, sometimes four.
One of the players was @MadMoses@dice.camp. He is involved in other activities and often had scheduling conflicts. He started asking me about my gaming intentions: In two weeks time, would I be more likely to run a game on Monday or Wednesday? I wasn't planning ahead and said that I'd run on whichever date worked best for him. After a while, I realized that his inquiries ensured that he could always make it to the game. Almost every session, there was Cédric the illusionist.
At the same time, some players weren't as online as others and I've had a few situations where somebody said: "I'm offline for like ten minutes and by the time I'm back, a game date has been both announced and all the available seats have been filled!" It was true. Something needed to change.
I posted a message saying that Cédric was making it to all the games because his player had been organizing game sessions via direct messages. If other players wanted to do the same, I said, feel free to contact me. And slowly at first but more regularly now, players have been contacting me. The players of Ahriman the necromancer and Boris of the mountain have asked for dates limited to high-level characters so that they could explore the deeper levels of Arden Vul. And now the player of Porphyrios and Serapion contacted me, asking for a date where one of his characters and Aldon the elf might lead an excavation attempt in the ruined city of Arden Vul, since none of the other players seemed to be all that interested.
And just like that, player-organized expeditions have become a reality, in my campaign. We're 45 sessions into Arden Vul.
#RPG