Inconsistent Players

[Erock]

As a DM, or just a person who gets groups together, how do you deal with people who show up inconsistently or are often late? I've taken to the trick of telling these people to arrive X amount of time earlier than those who are punctual. It grows annoying, but I don't want to exclude these people.

[Yuki Akuma]

Have their character fade into the background. If anything comes up that requires their PC to act, run it as an NPC for that short period and then let it fade into the background again. When they show up, inform them of what happened, and then continue on.

Also get all your players to give you up-to-date versions of their character sheets to help facilitate this. Although you should have those anyway...

[veti]

Have their character fade into the background. If anything comes up that requires their PC to act, run it as an NPC for that short period and then let it fade into the background again. When they show up, inform them of what happened, and then continue on.

Also get all your players to give you up-to-date versions of their character sheets to help facilitate this. Although you should have those anyway...

This. Just focus on keeping your sessions entertaining, make sure people want to be there. There's nothing you can do to force them. Keep in mind the old military maxim, "a wise officer never gives an order unless there's a good chance of it being obeyed".

I recommend you keep all character sheets between sessions. Don't rely on players to remember to bring anything that's vital to play. (If the players want to make a copy to take home that's fine, but make it clear yours is the authoritative version.)

Also, assume the problem will get worse, not better. People tend to pick up more commitments and interests as they go along, not lose them.

[RochtheCrusher]

I have pretty much exactly this problem... the real issue, for me, is that four of my five players are parts of couples and the last comes with one of those couples, so if anyone misses the game doesn't happen. That happens... kind of a lot. As a DM, this is... dissappointing.

Further, the sessions only last about three hours at a time and my players are, for the most part, unwilling to do paperwork during the week (to level their characters or whatnot). I therefore end up making a lot of choices for them... picking out the two viable choices for feats for them so we can level in 10 minutes and not an hour, that sort of thing. This ends up hurting their investment in the characters, I think, but with so little playing time I just can't afford to let them see all their options for the first time when they show up...

The unfortunate fact is that your players will not always be as dedicated as you are to making this all happen. They won't always be willing to make sure they show up on time, or work their schedules around the game, or handle their boring paperwork on their own time, and... that kind of has to be okay with you, if you want to play at all.

You have to fight for your hobby sometimes, Erock. It... doesn't always come as easy as it should. Telling them to arrive earlier and being able to start without them are good starts, and finding a secondary, simpler game you can run if you're too short-handed to cope with might help you reward those players who do show up consistently.

I've had a lot of success in preparing smaller, premade parties which passed this way a few years ago (they lost the item you're looking for, or they tried to clear the place out and failed). Get to know those players and the items your main party will inherit from them, give the old party some successes, and then let them fail after the players lose control again. Then, give the regular party XP for the whole afair by them "reading about it" or some similarly thin excuse.

The old party can then come back in as corpses, ghosts, or the like. Your consistent players may know more background than their delinquent counterparts, and will therefore have a richer experience, but everyone can still play.

That whole detour can be a LOT of work, though.

[Malimar]

I once ran a campaign (http://luduscarcerum.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-flux-storms.html) centered around one solution to this very problem.

Teal deer version: all PCs are afflicted with the flux, which functions as time hop, except it can last any length of time, you are affected with no saves or checks, and it can happen at random. Except by "at random", I mean "a character is affected whenever their player isn't present".


(In practice, it wound up just making delinquent players less invested in the game, and eventually they stopped showing up altogether. Which is about as well as it could have worked out, I guess!)

[veti]

(In practice, it wound up just making delinquent players less invested in the game, and eventually they stopped showing up altogether. Which is about as well as it could have worked out, I guess!)

Good solution. If the players aren't enjoying themselves, then you're both better off if they drop out.

If the players really want to be there, then talk to them, see if you can't work something out between you. Maybe you can improve their attendance with a scheduling change.

Maybe you'd do better with longer, but less frequent, sessions. In my opinion, the ideal D&D session is at least eight hours long. Reckon on spending the first 30-60 minutes chatting, socialising, recapping, answering questions and generally "not actually playing", until a quorum of players turns up - but that doesn't matter if you've still got 6+ hours of playing time ahead.

[Irenaeus]

I mostly just don't play with them. People with consistency issues get invited to one-offs and the like, but aren't part of my campaigns.

I don't really play a session in a campaign unless all players are present, or there is some very good in-game reason for their characters being absent.

[tasw]

Living in Las Vegas I've dealt with this a lot. People here work all kinds of crazy hours, having your schedule changed with no notice is fairly common and an unfortunate number of people are on call (sometimes including me).

So having everyone show up on time each week regularly is basically impossible.

What i've done is get comfortable with bigger groups. there will always be a few consistent players and a few inconsistent ones. But if you have 8 or 9 people switching in and out during the campaign theres a decent change at least 4 or 5 of them will actually show up on any given night.

[peteramthor]

I like to set down a layout what is expected of players before I start running a game. Being on time is one of the things I tell them need to happen. Everybody runs behind at one time or another so that is excusable but, as you said, the ones who do it often are the problem. Here's what I've done with varying results.

Give out experience for the last game at the beginning of the next session. If you aren't there you don't get any. One person started showing up on time another thought it wasn't fair and just stopped showing up.

If you show up late you don't get to play so don't bother showing up at all. Did this once and the person just decided to stop showing up altogether.

Finally I based the amount of experience awarded partly based off how much of the game you were there for. This caused a person to start showing up on time for that little bit more.

Your mileage may vary.

[Karkos]

This along with health concerns and college drove me away from actual physical groups both as a DM and a player. It's been 3 or 4 years since I've played, but I plan on going Skype only (something I've never experienced). This way I have atleast somewhat of an assurance that the players want to be there. Though after watching several Skype groups on youtube it seems flaky/easily bored (herp derp I wunna kill sumfin) are still there, but atleast most of them bow out after a session or two.

Getting together for a bimonthly game should not be that big of hassle. Discuss work schedules. If you get called into work that day I understand, but atleast have the grace to bow out if it's going to become a regular issue.

[Thrudd]

I have pretty much exactly this problem... the real issue, for me, is that four of my five players are parts of couples and the last comes with one of those couples, so if anyone misses the game doesn't happen. That happens... kind of a lot. As a DM, this is... dissappointing.

Further, the sessions only last about three hours at a time and my players are, for the most part, unwilling to do paperwork during the week (to level their characters or whatnot). I therefore end up making a lot of choices for them... picking out the two viable choices for feats for them so we can level in 10 minutes and not an hour, that sort of thing. This ends up hurting their investment in the characters, I think, but with so little playing time I just can't afford to let them see all their options for the first time when they show up...

The unfortunate fact is that your players will not always be as dedicated as you are to making this all happen. They won't always be willing to make sure they show up on time, or work their schedules around the game, or handle their boring paperwork on their own time, and... that kind of has to be okay with you, if you want to play at all.

You have to fight for your hobby sometimes, Erock. It... doesn't always come as easy as it should. Telling them to arrive earlier and being able to start without them are good starts, and finding a secondary, simpler game you can run if you're too short-handed to cope with might help you reward those players who do show up consistently.

I've had a lot of success in preparing smaller, premade parties which passed this way a few years ago (they lost the item you're looking for, or they tried to clear the place out and failed). Get to know those players and the items your main party will inherit from them, give the old party some successes, and then let them fail after the players lose control again. Then, give the regular party XP for the whole afair by them "reading about it" or some similarly thin excuse.

The old party can then come back in as corpses, ghosts, or the like. Your consistent players may know more background than their delinquent counterparts, and will therefore have a richer experience, but everyone can still play.

That whole detour can be a LOT of work, though.

For your particular group, maybe a game system that does not require so much preparation overhead would be better for them. Like AD&D, or a retroclone, which has very few to no choices to make at each level. Takes very little time to make a new character, and almost no time to level a character, so you can get right into playing when everyone is there.

[huttj509]

I like to set down a layout what is expected of players before I start running a game. Being on time is one of the things I tell them need to happen. Everybody runs behind at one time or another so that is excusable but, as you said, the ones who do it often are the problem. Here's what I've done with varying results.

Give out experience for the last game at the beginning of the next session. If you aren't there you don't get any. One person started showing up on time another thought it wasn't fair and just stopped showing up.

If you show up late you don't get to play so don't bother showing up at all. Did this once and the person just decided to stop showing up altogether.

Finally I based the amount of experience awarded partly based off how much of the game you were there for. This caused a person to start showing up on time for that little bit more.

Your mileage may vary.

It depends a lot on why the person's late. Work ran over? Not that cool to penalize for it. Bad traffic? Allowable, depends on situation (for me, there's one intersection I pretty much need to go through that's PACKED since it's rush hour, I've taken to just assuming i'll get there 30-40 minutes early, and bringing a book so I can avoid the crunch, I swear, that intersection at rush hour defies all logic of linear time, there should be some time when I arrive reasonably, but it's always either half hour early or 15 minutes late).

[peteramthor]

It depends a lot on why the person's late. Work ran over? Not that cool to penalize for it. Bad traffic? Allowable, depends on situation (for me, there's one intersection I pretty much need to go through that's PACKED since it's rush hour, I've taken to just assuming i'll get there 30-40 minutes early, and bringing a book so I can avoid the crunch, I swear, that intersection at rush hour defies all logic of linear time, there should be some time when I arrive reasonably, but it's always either half hour early or 15 minutes late).

I agree with you here. I always assume that when discussions like this come up we're not talking about the folks who have jobs that may run over or the person who is late once or twice because they are waiting on a babysitter. But instead were talking about the ones who have really no reason for showing up late when they stated they can be there on time. The guy who's always late because he was playing GTA, the one with no responsibilities at all who can't seem to read the time. Those kinds of people.

[NichG]

This along with health concerns and college drove me away from actual physical groups both as a DM and a player. It's been 3 or 4 years since I've played, but I plan on going Skype only (something I've never experienced). This way I have atleast somewhat of an assurance that the players want to be there. Though after watching several Skype groups on youtube it seems flaky/easily bored (herp derp I wunna kill sumfin) are still there, but atleast most of them bow out after a session or two.

Getting together for a bimonthly game should not be that big of hassle. Discuss work schedules. If you get called into work that day I understand, but atleast have the grace to bow out if it's going to become a regular issue.

Online is worse for this. For an in-person gathering, people sort of have to block out time to go there and plan for it. For a lot of people, once it becomes online that feeling of scheduling becomes much weaker.

I've been running a skype campaign for the last two years roughly, with the same people I played with in a face-to-face campaign, and it definitely exaggerates the tendencies of the more inconsistent players.

What I generally do is say 'okay, if you show up on time and people are missing, you get to decide what the plot is today/what the party is going to pursue today'. Sadly no one ever takes me up on this.

[Mr Beer]

I don't do anything about it because I don't have players to spare. If I did, I would start shuffling out the less committed people. I do have a 7 hour game window though, so people being late isn't a huge problem.

The only thing I do is cut their XP in half if their character is adventuring with someone else running them or zero it if they are not played at all. That's not something I do to coerce people though, it's just a measure to be equitable.

[Erock]

I agree with you here. I always assume that when discussions like this come up we're not talking about the folks who have jobs that may run over or the person who is late once or twice because they are waiting on a babysitter. But instead were talking about the ones who have really no reason for showing up late when they stated they can be there on time. The guy who's always late because he was playing GTA, the one with no responsibilities at all who can't seem to read the time. Those kinds of people.

Yes. It's not so much that the player doesn't want to play, and I could understand uncontrollable situations, however the player seems to lack respect for time. I've decided to just continue on with things, so if he shows up great, if not then oh well. Thank you all for the help.

[Jay R]

I have a DM who gives an XP bonus to each player who is there on time with the character sheet updated and ready to play.

[BWR]

Sometimes people have lives outside of the game, with other priorities. It doesn't mean they don't want to play.

For instance, a friend of mine.
He's a family man with two youngish kids (about 4 and 7), and he, for some strange reason, puts his family first, coaches football (real football, not American), has other friends and family to see, so he's lucky if he gets one session a month, and even those he's usually a few hours late because of family matters.
He still enjoyes playing what little he can and he's still our friend, so punishing him for making an effort with what little time he has is not something we contemplate.

We also have another friend who works weird hours and prioritizes stupid card tournaments or fighting game tournaments over gaming sessions. It's annoying but we still like to have him around.

Bascially, people have lives outside of the gaming table. Punishing people for not having the same priorities or possibilities as you is just not cool. Learn to play without them. Have their PCs off doing other stuff or (as my group has been doing for 20 years) have other players run their PCs. If your group is so small that you can't survive the lack of one player, try to expand it.

[NichG]

Sometimes people have lives outside of the game, with other priorities. It doesn't mean they don't want to play.

...

Bascially, people have lives outside of the gaming table. Punishing people for not having the same priorities or possibilities as you is just not cool.

All of this depends on your reason for play. If gaming is something you do to involve specific friends but not for its own sake, sure. But if you specifically want a high quality game, then I think its perfectly reasonable to ask people who can't commit to a certain degree of reliability to simply not join your group.

There's no reason that someone 'has to' play with you, even if they can't devote as much of their time to it. People who have very busy lives that constantly prevent them from maintaining a regular gaming time may simply not be the best people to involve in your group. Thats nothing against them having busy lives, its just a bad fit.

If anything, its unfair to players who are dedicating a lot of their time and energy to the game to invite someone who can't bring the same degree of dedication.

[Erock]

As I said, I would completely understand if the player was late for work reasons, family reasons, etcetera. The problem isn't with people doing things the need to get done, it's with the people who're, as peteramthor said, "always late because [they're] playing GTA, the one with no responsibilities at all who can't seem to read the time". In game dealing with late players is easy, the problem is when players are late all the time for no reason it begins to slow games down, and everyone grows less focused if we wait, assuming we'll have everyone together in ~15 minutes, when in reality 15 minutes can become hours.

[nedz]

I once ran a campaign (http://luduscarcerum.blogspot.com/2012/07/on-flux-storms.html) centered around one solution to this very problem.

Teal deer version: all PCs are afflicted with the flux, which functions as time hop, except it can last any length of time, you are affected with no saves or checks, and it can happen at random. Except by "at random", I mean "a character is affected whenever their player isn't present".


You could have just had their characters pop out to answer a call of nature.

[GybeMark]

As a DM, this is... dissappointing.

Amen to that...


I've had a lot of success in preparing smaller, premade parties which passed this way a few years ago [...] That whole detour can be a LOT of work, though.

It does sound like a huge amount of work, but if some players are as invested in the game as you are then it sounds great! I'm in the boat where 2/7 people in my gaming group are there to "play" and the rest are there "show up for an excuse to drink beer and hang out". Myself and the other interested guy take turns DMing but I try to remind myself that it's still good to hang out with friends. Hell, I know I'm not as into [hockey/video-games/golf] as most the other players are...

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that your pain is felt... :smallsmile:

[Karkos]

Online is worse for this. For an in-person gathering, people sort of have to block out time to go there and plan for it. For a lot of people, once it becomes online that feeling of scheduling becomes much weaker.

I've been running a skype campaign for the last two years roughly, with the same people I played with in a face-to-face campaign, and it definitely exaggerates the tendencies of the more inconsistent players.

What I generally do is say 'okay, if you show up on time and people are missing, you get to decide what the plot is today/what the party is going to pursue today'. Sadly no one ever takes me up on this.

That's somewhat disheartening to hear. Still...........I want to try. I've never used a grid before, and it's nice having all the modules right there online for you.

When I start my job I'm definitely going to buy the books for either 5th ed or PF and get to learning them. The last time I DM'ed 3.5 had just come out :smallbiggrin:

[NichG]

That's somewhat disheartening to hear. Still...........I want to try. I've never used a grid before, and it's nice having all the modules right there online for you.

When I start my job I'm definitely going to buy the books for either 5th ed or PF and get to learning them. The last time I DM'ed 3.5 had just come out :smallbiggrin:

Well the plus side is that in principle finding new players is much easier, but you also have a much bigger unknown when inviting a new player than you would for in-person games where you might know them outside of game.

For what its worth, in my game I did not do any broad recruiting on the internet; everyone is someone that I or another person in the game knows in real life. So your mileage may vary.

[Incorrect]

(As a GM)
Do not wait for players who are late, just start the game. You acknowledge them when they arrive, but there is no time for small talk, and only the briefest of introductions. This way they can see that they missed out, and that their friends were already there having fun.

I usually allow for 15 minutes of small talk, people arriving, finding their stuff, etc. Then I sit down at the table and just start playing. Most people quickly learn the subtle signal.


Personally, my problem is that every week I need to ask each player if he can make it on our usual weekday, and if not I try to reschedule and coordinate between each player. Its just so tiring having to pull answers from them, just so I can allow myself to entertain them

[hymer]

@ Incorrect: We usually coordinate our gaming with finddato.dk - it's free (and spam free) and pretty useful. It could save you some work.

[BWR]

All of this depends on your reason for play. If gaming is something you do to involve specific friends but not for its own sake, sure. But if you specifically want a high quality game, then I think its perfectly reasonable to ask people who can't commit to a certain degree of reliability to simply not join your group.

There's no reason that someone 'has to' play with you, even if they can't devote as much of their time to it. People who have very busy lives that constantly prevent them from maintaining a regular gaming time may simply not be the best people to involve in your group. Thats nothing against them having busy lives, its just a bad fit.

If anything, its unfair to players who are dedicating a lot of their time and energy to the game to invite someone who can't bring the same degree of dedication.

I suppose we shall have to agree to disagree. While detailed and engrossing games are nice, having fun with friends comes first and I don't want to put a game ahead of friends. If they don't have a lot of time to spend but make an effort, I'm not going to be a **** to them.