A friend of mine has this problem with their D&D campaigns. He makes huge efforts and there’s always one or two people who flake or don’t have the same commitment level. He’s gotten quite angry and sad about it.
He is trying something different now, to make a hybrid campaign where there’s a lot of one-shots in a broader story arc. It’s structured like missions in an ongoing struggle.
Maybe if you want to do board games,
we need more games that scale up and down easily. I’m not a board game person, IDK.
Tell your friend to look up the Western Reaches style of play. One of the core ideas is that you begin and end each session in a safe zone so that you can have a rotating pool of adventurers. You can tuck in some rules for having mercenaries for when you have fewer than the encounters are balanced for and you’re off to the races.
It does reduce the possibility of highly on rails campaigns and instead requires more of a sandbox plan with one page dungeons and stuff. Even so, it seems made to solve this exact problem.
> Tell your friend to look up the Western Reaches style of play.
The playstyle is called West Marches.
IMHO, the important bit of this style isn't so much the player pool flexibility (tho it does help that case), but the inversion of who's driving the story. The DM prepares the world, but it's up to the players to organize their excursions outside of the safe zone, for their own reasons. This forces more involvement of the players in the story, instead of the more passive campaign on rails you mentioned.
So in the GP's case of flaky low-effort players, West Marches style may not help because it puts more burden on the players in addition to just showing up and having everything presented to them.
That said, if the group can manage to do it, player engagement should be higher, and the DM suffers less disappointment because they're only prepping a session of content based on the players' plans for that session, not a long storyline that requires more alignment and adherence.
West Marches doesn't have to be totally on the fly for the DM. The players organize and define their agenda prior to the play session, so the DM should have a little time to prepare. The excursion is planned to visit a specific area of the map, so the DM only needs flesh out a bit of the world at a time.
D&D has too many rules. I invented a really light weight set of rules so that we can engage in more "role play" as opposed to RTS. It's more fun for the casual game and you don't waste so much time between turns.
Try anything that's described as "Powered by the Apocalypse". It's an excellent foundation for rules-light role-playing games.
Urban Shadows was my intro into this style of play. Monster of the Week is also very good. But there a huge number of great games out there that are not D&D (which is really a bit clunky and overly complex, IMO).
You just have to make up your own - unless you want to!
Our D&D group meets once to twice a month and is about seven or eight people. That's large enough that at most two of us can not show up and we're still enough to play and enjoy ourselves. The DM writes session recaps and posts them the day before the next session. The overhead here is minimized by his taking notes during the session. This has kept our group going for something like three or four years now!
The one thing about D&D is that I know almost everyone there exclusively through the campaign, and 90% of my interactions with them have been in character, which means I actually know very little about their personal lives. We're getting better with this with non-D&D hangs though.
He is trying something different now, to make a hybrid campaign where there’s a lot of one-shots in a broader story arc. It’s structured like missions in an ongoing struggle.
Maybe if you want to do board games, we need more games that scale up and down easily. I’m not a board game person, IDK.