If you have been playing Dungeons & Dragons for very long, you’ve probably discovered that the biggest threat to a D&D group is not the DM’s inexperience or a problem player–it’s the inability to get everyone together at the same time. Whether you’re trying to run your own game, or you’re looking for the best time to hire a StartPlaying Pro DM for your group, juggling everyone’s availability can be a nightmare.
Enter group scheduling polls! These online tools are the first step towards ensuring your table is steady enough to run nearly every session. Here I’ll show you 5 of the top options for scheduling your D&D group, and then I’ll give you three more tips for making sure your party sticks together for the long term!
LettuceMeet
Website
Price: Free
This tool is easily my favorite, for ease of use, price, and it’s clean, fresh interface. (Fresh..get it? Fresh Lettuce? Ah…nevermind.). In less than two minutes you can choose the days and time range you want to meet, color in your own availability, and send a link to your players. They each color in their own availability, and you can easily see where the times overlap.
The more obstacles and inconveniences a website places before the player, the less likely they will be to complete the form. This site is fast, easy, and barely even requires brainpower to fill in your availability! There is no obligation for anyone to sign up to use it–not even the organizer–but if the player does sign in with their Google account, it will layer their Google calendar under the availability picker. Then all they have to do is color in the blank spots and submit! That really does make scheduling your D&D group friction-less!
No tool is perfect, however. Here are a few reasons LettuceMeet might not be the tool for you:
- What you see here is what you get. There is no documentation to say, for instance, how long your polls might be stored, or to answer any other questions you might have.
- This tool is free. Free is great, but there is no option to pay for the service. A skeptical person might wonder how maintenance of the site is funded. I, on the other hand, choose not to be skeptical. Hey, free AND perfect is not easy to come by!
- There are no options on this site–no dark mode, no way to change the colors–which may be an accessibility issue for you. It’s free–what do you expect?
WhenAvailable
Price: Free for basic, $38/yr for Premium, $10 per-use Premium
WhenAvailable is almost as easy to use as the tool listed above, and comes with a few more bells and whistles. However, it’s not quite as intuitive of an interface–in fact, it’s not immediately apparent where to choose the times you want to offer when creating your first poll. It also doesn’t allow invited users to choose the times on a particular day they can meet; they only get the option to respond with a “yes”, “no”, or “maybe”.
That said, it does have several extra benefits. For instance, WhenAvailable offers a large library of fun backgrounds for your schedule. For scheduling your D&D group, they even have one with colorful polyhedral dice! The themed backgrounds are available for users at every price point, and they don’t even reserve the best ones for paying customers, like some services do.
Here are the most relevant things Premium offers that Basic does not:
- Google calendar sync
- Unlimited number of guests (Basic limit is 20 which should be enough for most parties, but a West Marches-style group or local game stores might need more)
- Basic only allows one guest group. Which means that if you’re running two different campaigns with different groups, you’d have to pony up for Premium.
- Send reminders
- Cover image and logo–important for ProDMs, maybe, or stores and conventions
- Vote on behalf of your guests. This one is actually pretty big. Who doesn’t have that one player who says “Just mark it down for me, bro”?
- Duplicate your polls
All in all, WhenAvailable is a solid choice for scheduling a D&D group–especially at the Premium level. Honestly, at $38 USD per year, it’s not a bad deal–you’re definitely going to use scheduling tools again. Holidays, anyone? .
Rallly
Price: Basic is free; Premium is $7/mo or $56/year
With a sleeker look and a more efficient interface, Rallly.co (yes, that’s three ‘L’s) is a great choice for a table of busy professionals (or really, anyone who uses email).
The process for setting up your meeting poll is very much the same is WhenAvailable’s except for one notable difference: Once everyone has responded to the poll and a date has been chosen, the organizer can choose to Finalize the poll–which locks it and sends an email to all participants with a link to add the event to their calendar. That’s it! That one simple thing actually gives Rallly an edge over either of the options above. After all, many players will get a text or phone call with the scheduled time, and then forget to put it on their calendar. This automatic email with the chosen date is an extra failsafe the other options don’t have.
In terms of price, Rallly comes out ahead, too. There really isn’t much reason to spring for Premium, unless you want to keep your polls long term. On the Basic (free) plan, polls are deleted “when all date options are in the past AND the poll has not been accessed for over 30 days”.
While I do love the option for a fun dice-themed background, I gotta say that Rallly is easily my second choice pick.
SurveyMonkey
Price: Prohibitively high.
I know, we’re talking about polls, which is pretty much all SurveyMonkey does–I mean, it will do all kinds of polls for whatever you need. So it’s not surprising someone might consider this an option. If I’m going to be honest, though, the ONLY reason to use SurveyMonkey for this purpose is if you already use it for work and are comfortable with the interface. That’s it. The price of this service makes it not worth subscribing just to organize games.
In addition to the higher price, using SurveyMonkey for this is like asking a Paladin to sneak into a warded library. I mean, you can…but wouldn’t the right tool be better? When setting up the poll, for instance, all you get to do is put a date and time into a field. There’s no calendar to reference, no way to sync to your Google Calendar, no way to see your player’s responses all arranged on a calendar.
If you do want to make your polls like this though, I’d suggest Google Forms. It’s free. And you get the fun backgrounds too!
When2Meet
Price: Free (with ads, donations welcome)
In last place: the very bare-bones site When2Meet. This site is simple and basic with no extra features. It functions a bit like LettuceMeet, but honestly it looks like the site hasn’t been updated since 1998.
In fact, the only thing this tool has that the others don’t is a video tutorial, which you can find on their About page, or on YouTube. And video tutorials are indeed very useful!
Okay, so we finally found a day to schedule our D&D game. Now what?
Here are three more ways you can ensure a stable game:
Play on the same day and time, no matter what.
Once you know when is generally good for most of you, set your schedule in stone–whether it’s weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. (Don’t run monthly if you can help it–players forget too much over a month.) Every Tuesday at 6pm, or whatever. If there’s that one guy who can’t make it on Tuesdays but everyone else can? Sorry…he can’t play this time around. Maybe you can make another table with other people that will fit his schedule better. You can still be friends. It will be okay.
Make sure your players prioritize game night. Everytime I onboard new players for a campaign, I tell them that I expect them to treat this like going to classes, or church, or their kid’s weekly hockey game. Work, school, big family events, health emergencies all come first, but I expect them to prioritize our game over other social events.
Future-Proof Your Table.
Even with really committed players, life happens. Sickness, emergencies, weddings…. Make sure you have enough players that if a couple of them can’t make it one night, you can still play. So if your minimum amount to run is 3 players, make sure you recruit 5. Five players is still doable, and it gives you some extra flexibility. But if your minimum to run is 5, bumping it to 7 may be too much when everyone shows. In this case, recruit some players to be “on the bench”. Maybe these players are new, or they have an inconsistent schedule. Have a short list of people “on call”.
Also, keep a couple of quick one-shot adventures or random dungeons on hand for those days where the party is about to head into a big story moment, but suddenly the most central player(s) can’t make it. Dream sequences or a quick dip into the Feywild are great for this.
(Want a great dream sequence map? Check out Czepeku’s Realm of Dreams.)
BUT WHAT IF IT DOESN'T WORK? Scheduling is still a chore and you never get to play. What then?
⇒Hire a Pro DM from StartPlaying.
Game consistency is one of the best reasons to hire a Pro DM. Why? Experience has shown that when people pay for games, they’re more likely to attend. They’re also more likely to be invested in the story and less likely to get distracted during sessions. And a professional dungeon master from StartPlaying has incentive to actually run the game, not cancel whenever they’d rather be napping or just not feeling it.
So you can certainly join a game on SPG to play while you wait for your own group. But you can also hire a DM as a group. Once your D&D group has scheduled a day you can all play, head over to SPG and filter the game search by time. If nothing appeals to you, many Pro DMs will take a custom request from a whole group of friends.
Why do this? Well the biggest benefit of hiring a professional DM is not consistent scheduling, though that’s really a plus. The best thing about playing with a Pro DM is that it gives your own dungeon master a chance to sit back and be a player.
After all, there’s a wonderful sort of magic in finally having your whole group of friends on the same side of the table. That’s a great reason to hire an SPG DM.
Krystal has been a Dungeon Master for 7 years and especially works to provide a safe space for women and neurodivergent players to play regular, consistently scheduled games.
