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View Full Version : Variable player base, what do you do?



Charity
2008-05-20, 06:48 AM
I run a game of 3e at the moment and to try to get it to a grand finale before the advent of 4e I've set a rule to play every week regardless of some players not being able to attend.
(we are all quite busy folk and there is often an absentee)

The issue is as the play is often stopped in the middle of nowhere, or on occasion in the middle of an epic fight scene how do you account for players comming and going from one week to the next.

I tend to hand wave some sort of mysterious accident/illness but it is rather unsatisfactory.
another option that I can see is having a designated driver for characters of absent players, though this runs afoul of accidental absentee character death or mismanagement. Also most all of my players don't leave up to date character sheets with me.

The most contrived and awful solution I've ever encountered is an erstwhile DM of mine used to insist on all characters returning to town at the end of every session. It was an utter arsehat to be honest. Everyone hated it, our characters would trapse through 4 random encounters on the way to a adventure site only to turn around and go home... week after week after week... well we quit that game for that and many other reasons, but I got thinking about it again this morning and so i thought I'd poll the lot of you.
Ooo err missus
What do you do?

Kurald Galain
2008-05-20, 07:04 AM
Depends on how combat-heavy the game is.

If it mostly isn't, I would rule that the absent players' characters are walking along but simply not doing anything relevant.

If it mostly is, I would ask each player in advance which, if any, of the other players should be given the task of playing his character when he isn't there, and if the answer is "none", I would run the character as a DM (and in the former case, I would veto abuse, of course). Either way, the character is not expected to do anything special, but he would e.g. attack or heal as he normally would.

An alternative solution is to handwave it. I have a warlock character that has been said to have the free invocation of "summon party member", which has the sole function of recalling characters from the inn (or wherever) if their player was absent the last session. This is the functional equivalent of storing the character in a pokeball.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-05-20, 07:48 AM
The game has to be episodic. That can work even in a character-driven game. Take a page from any TV show - some episodes focus on some characters while ignoring others.

You may need stock excuses for each character to explain why they're not available this session, but that's not too hard - just give each character a life outside the party; maybe even a career. Memberships in guilds and other ties are quick and easy fixes - Sir Brave is called off on a crucial solo quest (and thus gets XP at the same rate as others), or Magister Mulroney has to take the Conjuration 202 class on a field trip to another plane.

Alternatively, you can just ask everyone to accept this, and "play around it" - this is also seen on TV, and in comics. For some reason, nobody thinks to call on Icedude to help fight this episode's Fire Dragon Monster. Who cares?

A Justice League -style structure can work well. (D&D is basically "fantasy superheroes" by structure, anyway.)

Tying up each session is probably necessary, but that doesn't mean every plot has to be self-contained. Again, TV shows are a good example - Babylon 5, The Shield, Sopranos, etc. There's episode plots and running plotlines.

Project_Mayhem
2008-05-20, 07:48 AM
I have to say, if anyones off, we just play something else - i.e a Dnd oneshot, CoC, the gamecube etc.

ryuteki
2008-05-20, 02:36 PM
We have semi-successfully dealt with it in two ways. The first and more realistic was to have someone dead-head the character through conflicts. This works best for small playgroups where you are missing one, maybe two players. The other way, used for a larger group (9 players if we had everyone there at the same time, which we pretty much never did) was to handwave the missing characters as "off taking a leak." We did end up with one character who never came back, we decided they had died of a severe UTI. :)

Matthew
2008-05-20, 02:51 PM
Generally, either I run the absentee's character or somebody else does (preferably somebody else). I keep a copy (often the only copy - damn lazy players) of every character sheet, so no obstacle there. If a player starts taking liberties with somebody else's character, I over rule them. Generally, a given party has a number of henchmen and hirelings, so it is not really much different from how we treat those.

valadil
2008-05-20, 02:52 PM
We usually just let another player take over the absent character. It's not a very combat heavy group though, and player death never happens so we don't have to worry about absent characters getting killed. Also, it lets the DM use spells that remove PCs from combat without boring the player whose character failed a save.