Group's Scheduling Conflict Now Longer Than Actual Campaign

A tabletop RPG group's ongoing effort to schedule their next session has now consumed more calendar time than the campaign itself, with eight months of coordination producing three completed sessions and 247 messages in a group text thread titled "When Can Everyone Play???" that contains more narrative drama than any encounter the DM has designed. The group, consisting of five adults between the ages of 29 and 42, launched their campaign in June with ambitious plans to meet biweekly. They met in June, August, and November. It is now February. The campaign is on session three of a planned twenty-session arc. "At our current pace, we'll finish the campaign in approximately 2032," calculated DM Florence Initiative. "The villain will have waited so long for the heroes to arrive that he'll have retired and opened a tavern." The scheduling obstacles, cataloged across the group text, include: Derek's kids' soccer schedule (which conflicts with every Saturday from March through November), Priya's nursing shifts (rotating, unpredictable, and announced two weeks in advance), Marcus's wife's book club (which she joined specifically on game nights, a timing that Marcus describes as "coincidental" and the group describes as "targeted"), and Julian's "thing" (which has never been specified but occurs with reliable irregularity). The group has attempted Doodle polls (seven, all yielding zero dates with full availability), Google Calendar sharing (abandoned after Derek's calendar was found to contain a single event: "TBD"), and a rotating schedule that would allow play with four of five members (vetoed by whichever member would be absent that week). "We've spent more time in the group text discussing when to play than we've spent playing," said Initiative. "The group text is the real campaign. It has conflict, rising action, betrayal, and no resolution. It's better structured than most modules I've run." The group has agreed to "definitely meet this month." This agreement has been reached and subsequently broken eleven times since the campaign began.