When one of your regular players can’t make a session, you have a choice to make: Don’t play, play something else or play as normal.
The first two options are pretty straightforward — let’s explore the third one, playing anyway. When you find yourself in this situation, you can…
• Let their PC fade into the background. PCs can be called away, recovering from injuries or simply around but not part of the adventure (although taken to extremes, that last choice is a poor one — think The Gamers). Your group will help you out by suspending their disbelief — just don’t make them suspend it from a crane. This is the simplest approach, and generally the best one overall.
• Have another player take over their character. I tried this a few years back, and it worked reasonably well. I got buy-in from my whole group beforehand, and no one ever had a problem with what had happened in their absence. It did, however, require more work from whoever got stuck playing two PCs, and we had to make sure up-to-date character sheets were always on hand.
• Play that PC as an NPC. Personally, taking on a full-participation PC role isn’t something I want to do as a GM — but making occasional contributions and ensuring that the PC in question stays out of harm’s way is just fine. Unless there’s a compelling reason to go this route, I generally prefer either of the other two approaches to this one.
When I started writing this post, I expected to wind up with more than three options — but I really think it boils down to these three. What am I forgetting? And which option do you prefer?
If we end up playing without a player, the missing PC is somehow unable to participate in the current adventure but I’ll try to play an extra solo or duo session with the missing player(s). That way everyone is happy.
I tend to use a combination of these methods. Note that the last two methods are really just different sides of the same coin, and probably most often the PC of an absent player will be handled somewhere between these two ends of the spectrum, with some input coming from the other players, and some from the GM. Of course if continuity concerns can be addressed, and having a PC out of the action for a session doesn’t cause other problems (not enough XP for that character, PC group is too low on manpower, or whatever), then the first option is idea. Sadly, I don’t think enough games are designed with due consideration of this problem.
Frank
This is a common occurrence with our group. We’re eight adults with work and family to balance, and things just come up…more often with such a large group.
In our D&D game, we’ll have single dungeon excursions that last for several sessions, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have PCs magically disappear for a session. I also don’t want to penalize players who can’t be there by not allowing their PC to gain experience. For these reasons, we always have another player volunteer to play the playerless PC.
My players are great role-players, so it’s often fun to see how a player will represent a different player’s PC. We’ve enjoyed some pretty good laughs at these characterizations, some of which become complete caricatures.
We currently have a one-player-out rule, where if only one person can’t make it, s/he is responsible for getting the character sheet to a volunteer to play the character for the session.
This seemed like a great idea when we were all lower levels, but as we’re now all 18th level, it’s sometimes hard to pick up another character sheet and figure out what all that character is capable of accomplishing.
Mostly, I have the PC fade into the background. Either they take on an extreme supporting role (“I’ll go watch the horses”) or they are recuperating somewhere else. This generally works well, as when the player gets back to the game, my other players do fairly well role playing the explanation to the absent PC of just what exactly went down (“A giant skeleton squashed the ogrun?”)
The second option, where another player picks up the PC, is the one I personally hate the most. I allowed someone to do this in all the games I missed, until one game where the player played my character completely OUT of character and got him killed by the other PC’s. To avoid that scenario EVER happening again, to anyone, I’ve outlawed such things in my games. Well, strongly discouraged.
The approach our D&D group usually uses is a metagame one; the missing PC simply disappears and is not referenced IC (although OOC we’d say something like “it’s too bad Tom the Cleric isn’t here right now, we could really use him”).
It’s not logical from an IC perspective, but it flows very smoothly as a practical matter. If the missing PC is needed to advance the adventure (“darn, here’s a trap and we really need the rogue”) then I’ll usually handwave the encounter.
I’ve been thinking of doing something more logical for my current Freeport campaign, but I haven’t been confronted with a missing player yet.
I use the have another player run the PC option.
I created a crib-sheet for the character’s player to fill out, listing general actions and associated numbers his PC would do for 5 round of combat:
1)close on nearest bad guy, attack +5 longsword (1d6+5)
2) Full attack until goes down
3) if wizard engaged in melee, move and kill attacker
You get the jist.
It also listed their primary skills and other unique characteristics so the person who took over the sheet for the day was not compelled to be fully conversant with the PC sheet.
We usually have soanother player double up on PCs anymore. Our big group has had a few players who are absent often, so we’ve developed some expertise with our “second” PCs. Some people are not allowed to touch some characters, since the dice don’t seem to like certain combinations, leading to many near-deaths. Our GM has a gentle moratorium on killing non-present PCs, which is possibly why our #1 line-fighter is still with us.
In some games, we have had the absent PCs take up “horse-holder” roles, particularly in my Serenity game– someone’s got to watch the ship when the others head out.
I’ve also found it’s a good excuse to not have to use whatever disease rules are in the game– an absent PC has the flu, or whatever ague is going around, or is just too hung-over to play.
A variant of having another player take over the PC is to enlist a member of another gaming group by the same GM. Often, this person will be friends with at least one of the other players and (if this is a custom world) may be familiar with the backstory enough to minimize lots of prep/discussion at the begining. In our case, both parties are playing in different parts of the same world, and at different power levels, so it’s interesting for the sub-ing player to see some common things from a different perspective.
(stupidranger) This seemed like a great idea when we were all lower levels, but as we’re now all 18th level, it’s sometimes hard to pick up another character sheet and figure out what all that character is capable of accomplishing.
That’s a great point. I know I forget stuff my D&D character can do at 11th — I can only imagine what 18th will be like. And trying to run my PC and someone else’s at the same time would, for me, be a trainwreck.
Trying to run someone else’s complex character is definitely an issue, and in such games, may suggest that finding some way to write PCs of absent players out of scenes may be the best solution.
The problem of players mis-playing someone else’s PC is why I think something between “another player plays the PC” and “the GM plays the PC” is better than having one single person responsible. With essentially everyone having responsibility, it’s less likely the PC will be played horribly out of character.
I think a certain level of script immunity or at least script protection can make sense. At a minimum, if you’re at all unsure if the player would actually have his PC do something, consider using a light hand in resolving the questionable scene.
On the other hand, script immunity can be annoying and disruptive to the game. If players meta-game and say “hey, send in Joe because he has script immunity,” someone is going to become dissilusioned with the game.
The horse guard is a nice solution that maintains reasonable continuity while giving the PC relative protection (so long as the GM isn’t in the habit of actually threatening the horse guard).
Of course this also ties into how XP is handled for these PCs (which has been discussed before on Treasure Tables if I recall).
Frank
Attendance is a rarity (fortunately), but because of work and family schedules, there are occasional absences.
We’ve tried having the PC fade into the background, but since we have a fairly balanced party, they notice when a PC is absent. We then have everyone identify a player they felt comfortable running their PCs if they were absent. This has been going fairly well until we got to the mid-levels. As stupidranger pointed out, things can get pretty busy during encounters. It’s tough enough to decide what your primary PC is going to do without having to think about the second one.
I as a DM, make adjustments as well. I may change the configuration of monsters. I’ll switch out a diplomacy encounter for a combat one if the bard’s player is absent, for example.
I ask the player what he wants done. Historically, this is accompanied by an XP penalty (no XP if you disappear, half if you’re played by someone else), but I’m moving away from that mode of XP. If the player doesn’t say, then his character fades.
If another player is running someone’s character there is always the GM Veto if they get out of hand, or if the player forgets or ignores something the character would know.
We use having the players play the missing characters. We have the characters sheets and now have them all online so a print out can be made if somebody is missing. The groups are pretty tight knit so there isn’t too much of a problem.
During our social contract discussion, we agreed that we’d have PCs of missing players fade to the background, but only if it could be done in a way that wasn’t jarring to the story. If the group begins a session in mid-adventure, then a player takes primary responsibility for the missing-player PC (MPPC?), with the group (including GM) giving input on how s/he would act in various situations.
As for XP, we do it like Telas: 1/4 to zero XP if the PC fades out; 1/2 or more if puppet-ed.
I’m with Walt C – characters just pop in and out of existence and we ignore it IC. It also has the nice side effect that when the Wizard goes missing we’ll have emails, “You ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO MAKE IT FOR NEXT SESSION, please, please, Pleaaaaaaase!!!” OC fun. 🙂
One thing to note is that it’s important for there to be group buy-in on how to handle PC absences, particularly how IC/OOC the effects are. (For example, does the character who spent the night tending the horses get chided for his cowardice the next session.)
Shortly after one memorable campaign I played in had started up, the player of a “dark mysterious loner” rogue did not show up, so the GM decided that the PC simply slipped away from camp in the night without telling anyone… shortly before the gaming session started with our camp being ambushed.
Upon the player returning for the next session and his PC strolling back into camp, he was surprised to be greeted by the rest of the party knocking him unconscious, stripping him of all of his belongings and interrogating him as to his connection to our mysterious attackers.
I’m sure the rest of the players found the situation slightly more amusing than did either the absent player or the GM.
I’ve been playing short one player for 3 games now. the guy’s got problems at work. I’ve just worked him out of the story. It helps that my campaign is modern day city based.
The character’s been getting special lessons from his sensei for the week that has passed. Something about him having missed too many classes for no good reason.
I’m alos playing out by mail with the absent player, what investigations he’s char has been up to in the evenings.
When he finally comes back, I forsee a nice amount of ‘you did what?’ kind of revelations