Scheduling Play

We're currently using e-mail to organize play. We do this through a process of circulating lists of days we can play or days we can't play. There might be a better way. I'll admit to being a Google partisan. They're hosting the blog for instance at no cost to any of us. They also provide a free online calendaring service. I use it to schedule my life. It let's you create a whole set of different calendars. I have one for my home life, one for work, one for family holidays, and one that I get from Google for national holidays. One of the best features, though, is that you can share your calendars with other people. So, Tina and I share our calendars and I can overlay her calendar or any of those others on top of mine. Then I can see how my schedule looks.

If everyone created a Google calendar account, we could use it to do scheduling. I'm not saying that everyone would have to adopt it as the calendar that they use to schedule their life. They'd just need to create one calendar where they'd post the days they were willing to play for the near future. Then everyone would share that calendar with everyone else. DM's could then, using the overlay feature, select the people from a particular party and put them on the calendar to see when a particular campaign could play. I think it would be a lot easier than what we do now.

There would still probably be some e-mail prompting begging people to update their calendars, but the information would be easier to organize.