Scheduling a D&D group across time zones

Online play means a table can span continents. The group that met at school scatters to three cities, a player moves abroad, the GM takes a job in another country. The game can survive all of it. What it cannot survive is a slot that lands at 2am for the same person every week.

Gryphon Harvard's account of a nearly six-year campaign shows it can be done. The group finished despite one player working 12-hour shifts, another studying by day and working by night, and a Dungeon Master living in Vietnam, far from the rest of the table. Their DM, the post says, kept choosing times that suited the group as a whole, even when they were inconvenient for him.

Map the overlap

1. List everyone's city, not a time zone abbreviation. "EST" is wrong for most of the year, when New York is on EDT, and "CST" can mean US Central or China Standard Time.
2. Ask each player for their free hours in their own local time, for a normal week.
3. Convert them all into one reference zone, such as the GM's, and lay them side by side.
4. Look for a window as long as a session, plus half an hour for chat and technical trouble.

How hard this is depends on the spread:

• Up to three hours apart, like the two US coasts, an evening slot works for everyone. 7pm in Los Angeles is 10pm in New York.
• Five or six hours apart, like the US East Coast and western Europe, a weekend afternoon in the Americas is an evening in Europe. 2pm in New York is 7pm in London for most of the year.
• Eight hours or more, like Europe and Australia, or the US and East Asia, someone plays early or late. Weekends help: Saturday evening in California is around midday on Sunday in Sydney.

Post times everyone can read

"Friday at 8, my time" makes every player do the maths, and sooner or later someone gets it wrong. Give the time in each player's city, or let software do the conversion.

If your group plays on Discord, use its timestamp format. Write <t:1791050400:F>, with the moment as a Unix timestamp, and Discord shows it to each reader in their own time zone and date format. That one reads as 7pm on Saturday October 3, 2026 in London, and 2pm the same afternoon in New York. The Discord developer documentation lists the styles: F gives the full day, date and time, and R gives a relative time such as "in 3 days". Any Unix timestamp converter will give you the number.

Daylight saving

Clocks do not change on the same day everywhere, and many places never change at all. Here is 2026, from timeanddate.com:

• Most of the United States puts its clocks forward on March 8 and back on November 1.
• The United Kingdom and the European Union change on March 29 and October 25.
• Most of Australia runs the other way round: clocks go back on April 5 and forward on October 4.
• Vietnam, Japan, Queensland, Hawaii and most of Arizona do not change at all.

So for three weeks in March, and one week at the end of October, New York is four hours behind London instead of five. A table spanning the US and Australia has it worse: New York and Sydney are 16 hours apart in January, 15 from March 8, 14 from April 5, 15 again from October 4 and 16 from November 1.

Anchor the session to one zone, usually the GM's or most of the table's, and warn everyone else a couple of weeks before their start time moves. Put this year's change dates in the group calendar now, while you are thinking about it.

Share the bad hours

With a wide spread, somebody plays at an awkward hour. That is fine when it is a choice. It becomes a problem when it is always the same person and nobody has said so out loud.

• Rotate between two slots, one kinder to each side of the world.
• Keep sessions shorter for the players at the edge of their day. Three hours from midnight is a lot; two is manageable.
• Ask how it is going. The DM in that Medium account asked for feedback regularly and took it to heart.
• Split the table if no slot is fair to everyone. Two groups meeting at good times beat one group where somebody is always exhausted.

Play between sessions

When live time is scarce, spend it on the parts that need everyone together. Shopping, levelling up, downtime and recaps can happen in a text channel during the week. The group in that Medium account planned in a WhatsApp chat and played on a Discord server with channels for handouts, props and quest notes. When one of their core players could not make it, the DM ran a one-shot for the others rather than cancelling.

Where Roll Call fits

Roll Call anchors each campaign to the GM's time zone. The days and hours a campaign can play are set in the GM's local time, so a 7pm start stays 7pm for the GM when the clocks change. Everyone sets their own time zone while setting up their account, and each player's availability and time off are read on their own clock.

When Roll Call ranks possible times, it favours evening starts in each player's own time zone, not only the GM's. Once a session is booked, the campaign page and Roll Call's emails give its time in each person's own time zone. Posts in a linked Discord channel use the GM's time zone and name it.