Quorum is the number of players you need to run a session. Without one, every absence turns into a debate in the group chat an hour before the game: do we play, do we wait, is three enough? With one, the answer was settled weeks ago.
Phil Vecchione makes the case in Quorum For Your Game on Gnome Stew. One of his groups had no agreement, so it worked out from scratch whether to play every time someone could not come. His Cyberpunk RED group had a simple one: they play as long as only one person is missing. Nobody has to ask, and the player who is out knows the game goes on without hard feelings.
The everyone trap
The most common starting rule is no rule at all: we play when everyone can come. It sounds fair, and it quietly starves a campaign. The original poster in an EN World thread on quorum had five players, all married and working, and an unspoken rule that nobody played unless everyone could. Their game every other week had slid to once a month, and sometimes less.
The reason is simple arithmetic. Every extra person who must be free makes a workable date rarer, so the more players you require, the fewer nights qualify.
A starting number
Most tables are four or five players. In a 2022 Sly Flourish poll of 4,400 D&D players and GMs, 39% had four players and 28% had five. Another 18% had fewer than four, and 15% had six or more.
One reply in that EN World thread offered what it called the official definition of a quorum: half the group plus one. Several others played with three or four out of five. For most tables that gives:
| Players at the table | Starting quorum |
|---|---|
| 3 | 2 or 3 |
| 4 | 3 |
| 5 | 3 |
| 6 | 4 |
| 7 | 4 or 5 |
Count players, not the GM. If the GM cannot make it, that game is off whatever the number says.
Adjusting it
Gnome Stew's advice is to fit the number to the kind of game and the size of the group.
- Party-based adventures need more. In a dungeon crawl where each character brings something the group depends on, it is hard to play without the healer or the tank.
- Personal stories need fewer. In a game where everyone follows their own thread, such as vampires living their separate lives in one city, it is easy to put the spotlight on whoever is there.
- Small groups have less slack. At a table of three, losing one player changes the game far more than at a table of six.
Lower it by one if you have been cancelling more often than you have been playing. One empty chair is usually a better evening than no game at all.
Absent characters
Decide what happens to a missing player's character before it comes up. In a 2019 Sly Flourish poll of 3,135 DMs, 53% let the character fade into the background for the session, 23% had someone else run it, 13% sent it on a side quest and 11% cancelled the game.
Whichever you choose, keep two promises. Nothing permanent happens to a character whose player is not there. And the absent player gets a short recap before the next session, which Gnome Stew also recommends: session notes if your group keeps them, a few lines from the GM if not.
When to cancel anyway
Quorum is a floor, not an order. Gnome Stew makes the exception explicit: if the next session holds a big reveal, a climax, or a story that depends on the missing character, it can be worth waiting even with quorum met. The alternative is a shorter session that stops just before the big moment, so the missing player is there for it next time.
Agree too what happens if the GM or the host cannot make it, because no quorum covers that. A backup one-shot run by someone else, or a board game night, keeps the evening without moving the campaign on.
Write it down
Put the number, the absent-character rule and a cancel-by time in your session zero notes or a pinned message, so new players can read it too. Revisit it after a couple of months. If the table is still cancelling often, lower the number by one and see what happens.
Quorum in Roll Call
Roll Call has quorum built in. The GM sets it per campaign, either as a minimum number of players or as everyone. It counts players only, because Roll Call assumes the GM attends every session. Times too few players can make are never proposed. Among the rest, attendance weighs more than anything else in the ranking. Lowering the quorum puts more dates in play, and Roll Call lays a round out from the earliest date still open, so a thinner earlier date can end up taking the first session. Lower it to get your table playing again, not to find a better-attended night.
Quorum counts the players whose answers Roll Call has: given this round, carried over from the last one, or filled in by Auto-RSVP from a connected calendar. And once a session is booked, if the players still attending drop below it, Roll Call shows the GM a below-quorum warning on that session but cancels nothing. Whether to play short-handed stays your call.