XP In Absentia

[lotofsnow]

So, the party cleric isn't going to be at our session tonight (got his wisdom teeth pulled last week, and his mouth is bothering him something fierce). Anyway, there really isn't any way the party can leave him behind to catch up. They are going to be fighting some undead, too, so a cleric is nice to have along. My plan was to either play his character myself or have someone else play him. How do I award XP for that? Does he get full xp? No xp?

If all goes to plan, his fellow party members will level tonight. I don't want him to feel that he's being punished when he already feels like crap.

[Jasdoif]

If the character is playing in his/her/its usual role, the character gets full XP.

[Charity]

I have a player who lives a fair way away, and thus cannot make every sesion. i try to sit his character out, with sudden unexpected stomach bugs and the like.

I happily award him catch up XP when he does play, it's just a burden to the game to have a character lagg behind, I advise if you play him, just split the XP how you normally would.

[lotofsnow]

Yeah, that sounds good. It is definitely just a one-time thing, so I'll just award XP as if he was attending.

[Yechezkiel]

If they can't attend/play through no fault of their own, don't punish them. At worst award half xp or let them stay at at the level of the lowest party member (base xp for that level).

If they aren't attending every sessions simply because they've got better things to do, that's another story. I wouldn't award that player xp (though maybe there should be a maximum level/xp he is allowed to fall behind, so he is somewhat capable of playing at the same CR).

In the end I think it's about making the players who put something into the game feel like they're getting something out of it.

[Saph]

The way we do it is that the character doesn't participate in the session but gets half XP. PCs can only act if the player is there guiding them.

On the plus side, if you're not there playing your character, your character can't die.

So, less risk, but less reward, too.

- Saph

[Rad]

However tempting, I came to the idea that using XP to punish bad player behavior is usually a bad idea. If a player has a staggering motivation having his character be less effective is not really making him like the game any more, is it?
Moreover, if there is no fault from the player you should seriously not punish him at all!

Even if a campaign is a long thing, each individual session has to be pleasurable, denying or reducing XP from one session is seriously hurting the enjoyment of potentially every subsequent one! This threatens to be a serious issue on the long run since usually there are some players who are always there and others who will have more complicated lives. If you want to reward the first ones, mind that giving more stuff to them means giving less stuff to the others, since the only thing that really matters is the relative power of the characters, not the absolute one. You can choose to do so, but then do not be surprised (or angry) if the others lose enthusiasm for the game (and then skip some sessions, which makes them yet weaker, which makes their game experience worse, which makes them skip yet more sessions... until they leave the group)

Wow, didn't mean to give a full rant here... sorry about that, it just came out


EDIT: on the minus side, if the character IS there (and gets XP for being there) it also means that (s)he CAN die.

[Saph]

EDIT: on the minus side, if the character IS there (and gets XP for being there) it also means that (s)he CAN die.

Exactly. The way I reason it is:

1) You shouldn't gain full XP without taking the same risks that the rest of the party are taking.

2) If you're taking the same risks the rest of the party are taking, you might die. Having your character die while you're not there sucks.

3) Therefore you shouldn't get full XP when you're not there, but you shouldn't be able to die, either.

So the compromise I use is half XP and no risk of dying. The PC just vanishes out of existence and reappears next week.

- Saph

[adanedhel9]

For a legitimate excuse, and your first time encountering this problem... I don't see any reason why you shouldn't give him a full reward.

I would, however, recomend table rules for this very situation. In college I had issues with certain players my group being sporadically unavailable, with no warning - I wouldn't even have access to their character sheet to use or to give to another player. I have problems improvising stats, so the party would be forced to run the same encounters, even though they were down a man... there were a lot of deaths.

Then I instituted this system: for every 24 hours of warning I have, you get approximately a 10% share of what you would have gotten if you were there, both in XP and treasure.

This pretty much curbed the problem. The players would give me as much warning as they could, so I had time to replan the encounters or get ahold of their character sheet to run as a DMNPC or as an alt PC. Sure, there were occasional times where someone would unexpectedly fail to show up, but the threat of lost rewards mostly kept the problem in check.

[Rad]

For a legitimate excuse, and your first time encountering this problem... I don't see any reason why you shouldn't give him a full reward.

I would, however, recomend table rules for this very situation. In college I had issues with certain players my group being sporadically unavailable, with no warning - I wouldn't even have access to their character sheet to use or to give to another player. I have problems improvising stats, so the party would be forced to run the same encounters, even though they were down a man... there were a lot of deaths.

Then I instituted this system: for every 24 hours of warning I have, you get approximately a 10% share of what you would have gotten if you were there, both in XP and treasure.

This pretty much curbed the problem. The players would give me as much warning as they could, so I had time to replan the encounters or get ahold of their character sheet to run as a DMNPC or as an alt PC. Sure, there were occasional times where someone would unexpectedly fail to show up, but the threat of lost rewards mostly kept the problem in check.

Several groups I played and play in have the habit of leaving all the sheets to the DM all the time and only having them during play. While there is a kind of drawback if you want to tune your build during the week but cannot remember your exact stats, this usually frees us from the problem of remembering/guessing stats of missing players' PCs.

[lotofsnow]

For a legitimate excuse, and your first time encountering this problem... I don't see any reason why you shouldn't give him a full reward.

I agree. I guess I had already decided to give him full xp and was looking for more ideas for "next time."

I would, however, recomend table rules for this very situation. In college I had issues with certain players my group being sporadically unavailable, with no warning - I wouldn't even have access to their character sheet to use or to give to another player. I have problems improvising stats, so the party would be forced to run the same encounters, even though they were down a man... there were a lot of deaths.

Then I instituted this system: for every 24 hours of warning I have, you get approximately a 10% share of what you would have gotten if you were there, both in XP and treasure.

This pretty much curbed the problem. The players would give me as much warning as they could, so I had time to replan the encounters or get ahold of their character sheet to run as a DMNPC or as an alt PC. Sure, there were occasional times where someone would unexpectedly fail to show up, but the threat of lost rewards mostly kept the problem in check.

Next week, when everyone is there, I'll bring this up so we can decide what we want to do. That 10% rule is a pretty good idea, I might propose implementing that.

To Saph, since he's our only cleric, I think my guys would have a tough time with the encounters ahead without turns/healing. I don't like dropping Cure Light Wounds potions all the time either, so someone is going to have to play him.

Thank you all for the feedback.

[asqwasqw]

Another suggestion. Postpone your game, if it is just for once. Come up with a quick one session campaign (or have one on hand) with either premade or existing characters that you can play that session, and when your player comes back, continue with your ongoing campaign.

[Call Me Siggy]

So, the party cleric isn't going to be at our session tonight (got his wisdom teeth pulled last week, and his mouth is bothering him something fierce). Anyway, there really isn't any way the party can leave him behind to catch up. They are going to be fighting some undead, too, so a cleric is nice to have along. My plan was to either play his character myself or have someone else play him. How do I award XP for that? Does he get full xp? No xp?

If all goes to plan, his fellow party members will level tonight. I don't want him to feel that he's being punished when he already feels like crap.

Sorry to be making a pun (I believe that he should just get full XP anyway), but...

...Not going to be a very effective Cleric without wisdom teeth, now is he?

[Valdyr]

I agree with everyone who votes for full xp.

I mean, his wisdom teeth got pulled. I'm sure he'd rather be playing than sitting around with a head full of drugs and pain.

I personally find taking over a player's character sheet as a DM to be too taxing. I generally give the character sheet to the player who knows the rules the best. This will speed up combat (since you're already controlling all the monsters) and the player is already in a character's mindset - thinking survival. Also, this way if expendable items are used, the player who was absent can only blame his fellow players for the loss of the item.

[Damionte]

Then again not everyone may agree.

Our group doesn't award XP when someone is missing. If you're missing you don't get XP.

At the same time, our current GM won't play missing characters. Those charactes go "grey" until the player returns. We kinda just go on as if that character wasn't there in the first place. I don't particularly like that concept as it soemtimes get's int he way. Especially if that character was holding a plot important item.

When I am GMing I also don't award players XP when they're not there. More often than not if someone can't be there and they're really important to the story we'll not play that night. We'll play something else that week or stay home and play LOTRO. :) I'll half play a character that isn't there so they have access to soem of thier resources. I'll just fudge around that character though for most of the night.

[Yiel]

In our game the player usually gets their portion of the base XP if they were used in combat. Sometimes the DM will rule that they are staying behind, or are not entering combat (and therefore not gaining xp). It usually depends on whether we need the extra member, or whether we were close to combat at the end of the previous game.

This being said, when another player does operate the character both good and bad things can happen. We've had players come back to new sets of armour, magic items... and when one of our players left for a few weeks travel he came back to find his character had hijacked a tele-porting church and gone exploring by himself.

As for the bad things? Well we've had a character die, but the player preferred re-rolling to a free true-resurrection the next week. I missed my group's last game due to a personal illness and all I was told was: "Humphrey threw lots of eyeballs at you until you freaked out and ran off into the catacombs crazy and screaming." >_> I've rolled another character sheet up for the upcoming session, just in case they used my absence to rid themselves of the bard.

[Matthew]

Whether you give him no Experience, half Experience or full Experience, he will eventually catch up with his fellows because of the way Experience is awarded (i.e. relative to level). Personally, I would just give him full Experience and not worry about it. If he dies, he probably won't be the only one...

[Penguinsushi]

Generally I don't give xp to characters whose players who aren't present - but their characters aren't there either. If a player is going to be missing but the rest still want to play, I will write that character out of the game for the session and the character will rejoin the party when I'm able to write him/her back in during the next session.

However, when I write out a character - i often (though not always) have something significant/interesting transpire with the missing character while the rest of the party was playing last session - and we might even spend a little of the current session roleplaying that if necessary. In this way, the character often does get XP for what he/she did during the missed session - just a bit late.

~PS

[argentsaber]

something i am trying (tomarrow in fact) is to not tie level to xp. only small bonus xp will be awarded, and it's only use will be for crafting/xp component spells/etc. characters who do not have acess to these methods to spend xp will be allowed to "pseudo-craft" items with it at double the cost. as there is no magic shop or equivalent, this might be the only way for a player to have acess to a given item. this "pseudo crafting" can only be done in down time between major story arcs (and with dm approval of course).

i would have never thought of this in my youth, but i have a large group of people, some of whom are inconsistant due to babies/work schedules/travel requirements/etc.i am still working out how much xp is appropriate in this context, and would love to hear all your ideas. the only real desire i have is that the rate of accumulation should at least allow a character to create an item in the range of what would be allowed by the startign at higher levels section of the dmg.

[Tallis]

In my games I keep a copy of all the character sheets. This makes it easy to keep track of item powers or conditions that the player doesn't necessarily know about, makes adventure planning easier, and if they can't be there for a session, I have their stats if I need them.
If a player isn't there for a session I will leave their PC out if it is reasonable, but if we left off in the middle of the dungeon, then they are still there, so I play their character. They get xp for anything they are involved in, but no RP xp (which accounts for about half the xp in my games).

[Skjaldbakka]

I give absent players 10% of the session's XP. 20% if they give advance notice of being absent. I also give a +10% xp bonus for writing an out-of-game journal/summary of each session from their character's perspective.

[Mike_Lemmer]

My suggestion:

Have his PC participate in the session no matter what, but let him choose between risk and XP:

1. He gets half XP for the session, but his PC can't die. Anything that'd kill him (including deaht spells) only drops him to -9 with auto-stabilize. His PC only dies if the rest of the party wipes.
2. He gets full XP for the session, but his PC can die.

[Skjaldbakka]

NERO uses a rule called 'fate of X'. Pretty much if you go out of character, you suffer the worst fate of any other character in the area that you went OOC in (you go OOC in the tavern, and someone gets ice-blasted, you got ice-blasted too).

you could adapt that to tabletop. If you miss a session, you take 'fate of party'. If someone dies, you die, if someone gets captured, its probably you.

[GoblinJTHM]

award roleplaying xp (though likely not as much as those in attendance would recieve, or maybe more if he comes up with a really good story) for whatever hes up to, like visiting a dying relative, or spending time in the temple tending the sick. You could probably get some first aide and empathy skill bonus points for that too.

dude, where we're you last week?
warmage college!

[martyboy74]

1. He gets half XP for the session, but his PC can't die. Anything that'd kill him (including deaht spells) only drops him to -9 with auto-stabilize. His PC only dies if the rest of the party wipes.

The problem with that is that the rest of the party can use the character as an indestructible, sentient, trap-detector.

[Diggorian]

The problem with that is that the rest of the party can use the character as an indestructible, sentient, trap-detector.

I NPC player-missing PCs as they would play them so that this thing never happens.

I give half XP with the "Wont die" clause as well. In practice, the NPC PC ends up being a back up to the other players, only chiming in when their specific skill set is called for. As Matthew pointed up, they'll catch up eventually.

It sometimes happens that everyone at the table forgets that the PC even exists in this campaign, they're completely unused. In these cases I give no XP to the PC. This works with how I do XP normally, you get as much as you earn in game as opposed to an automatic equal share.

[Recursive]

So the compromise I use is half XP and no risk of dying. The PC just vanishes out of existence and reappears next week.

But you gotta let the character's familiar keep accompanying the party anyway...just so that as the PC *poofs* back into existence at the start of the next session, her raven can welcome her back with:

"Ah, right, of course. My trusted wizard is right here by my side, as she has been this entire time."