Meteors. Zombie swarms. Conventions for Japanese cartoons. Jesus. There are probably a thousand things that can prevent a player from attending the session, and I’ve heard two-hundred thirty-eight of them. So when something explodes and a player can’t attend a session, what can you do to keep things steady?
Assume for a second that you’re not just canceling the session. If you know you’re going forward, there area a few options depending on you, your players, and your campaign’s story. Each requires a different amount of time and effort, and each has its own drawbacks and advantages.
The quickest and laziest method is to treat the character like they aren’t there. They disappear at the beginning of the session and arrive again at the beginning of the next session, and there’s no explanation. The character could also be there, not participating. We call this Mark the Redding, after the character in The Gamers. It means that players can pop in and our of the campaign without worrying about anything else, and it means that nothing happens to the character while the player isn’t there. But it’s a huge story break, and it leaves a bunch of unanswered questions about what the character is doing, where they are, and why no enemies have an opinion about them. It also swings the session balance in a different direction, as the party is suddenly without their healer or diplomat.
Another idea is to have the DM or another player run the character of the missing player. This requires that somebody has the character sheet or other information beforehand, but it means that the character can continue to lend their talents and gain experience and loot like normal. It does, however, mean that the character can die or spend resources without their player’s consent. Also, this works with some systems and some characters better than others; most players can pick up a 3rd Edition fighter and play him without a lot of knowledge about the character’s intricacies because it’s factored into the sheet. But picking up a spellcaster, a high-level character, or basically any 4th Edition character can be a huge pain if it’s the first time you’ve seen them. In general, the more powerful the build is, the harder it is to run it on the fly and the less this method works, and players love making unnecessarily complicated characters in the name of power.
A method I’ve been using lately is to leverage the companion characters from the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2. Basically, they’re half-characters, in that they have roles and some class powers but no equipment or feats and level-based attack bonuses and damage. They’re designed for short-term NPCs, but you can also make a companion version of your PCs, a low-maintenance version of them for sessions where the player can’t attend. They can’t spend consumable resources (unless they die) and they still get experience and loot. It even works in-story as long as you can explain why a character is suddenly, temporarily de-powered (a bad night’s sleep?). It does require that you maintain the characters occasionally, but it’s not hard to put them into Excel or OpenOffice and build most of their stats as a formula based on level. The biggest downside of this method is that it really only works in 4th Edition, because 3E has nothing at all like it.
The most difficult method is to design an NPC to temporarily replace the character. You can make them as simple or as complex as you want, give them whatever equipment you think makes sense, and even give them abilities that you think the party needs. If they die, the party is only minorly inconvenienced, and if they live the party might even get a long-term ally out of it. But preparing an NPC for each situation is time-consuming and potentially complicated for the DM. In a similar vein, players could prepare their own backup replacements. That is, if a player can’t bring their swashbuckler, they have a less-complicated, probably lower-level fighter prepared. This puts the onus on the players, but it means nobody has to create more than one backup character, and the entire party gets a set of backups to perform tasks like maintaining a base or working on lower-level quests off-camera (or retrieving the main party’s corpses after they die).
These are the only ideas I’ve come up with, and each has met with varying degrees of success. In general, I don’t have a lot of respect for the Mark the Red method because it violates the story far harder than my comfort level allows. And I’ve never seen somebody understand another player’s character sheet, even when they’ve watched that character for a year. I like the companion characters, but I really like NPCs and backup characters, especially when the players have a hand in designing them, because it expands the world more and occasionally scratches that my-character-feels-stale itch.
I’m wondering if anybody else has tried anything to deal with a missing player or character. Luckily, this is the intertruck, and I can just ask for stories in the comments.
This is excellent advice. I think the companion and backup characters are probably the best options, because they disrupt play the least, though backup characters still have the problem of the PC in question disappearing.
I’m not as big of a stickler for continuity, so I actually don’t mind a mysteriously missing PC or a Mark the Red. I thought “Robot Vith” was actually kind of entertaining in the Savannah Greyhawk campaign (correct me if you disagree).
The only place where I disagree with you significantly is about NPCs, which I am going to rant about now, so TL;DR warning…
I actually like NPCs traveling with the party, though they shouldn’t be prime actors (the PCs are the heroes after all). I have a problem, however, with the notion that the death of an NPC that has been traveling with the party for multiple sessions is only going to be a “minor inconvenience” for them.
One of the big points in my recent post on how to spice up D&D with indie game principles is that NPCs should matter. Players need to want to develop relationships with NPCs and not just treat them as speedbumps on the way to the next dungeon. GMs need to make their NPCs interesting and compelling and give the players a reason to care about them. If an NPC is tagging along with the party for months of in-game time and gets eaten by a troll and the party’s only reaction is “*shrug* sucks for him” then there wasn’t any point of the NPC being there in the first place. You might as well have given them a bag of potions or a portable ballista instead.
Look at it this way. As DM, you wouldn’t just throw a random trash dungeon at the players – you plan it out (at least a little bit) so that it’s a challenge and enjoyable to explore. You do the same with cities, and even “random” encounters. Why wouldn’t you do the same for an NPC?
Alright, rant over. Sorry about that 🙂
I’ll argue with you when you’re wrong. I’ve found that players get more attached to characters they see over time (the same way players do for video games, or viewers do for TV shows, or readers for comic books). But it’s awfully hard to make players care about a character they met this week because it’s the first time they’ve met an NPC.
In general, I think the scale of “importance to the players” goes (nameless background characters -> one-shot NPCs / random monsters -> recurring NPCs / important monsters -> NPCs that join the party / former PCs / campaign villains -> PCs -> players themselves). That is, (screaming townsfolk -> weapons merchant / kobold -> the party’s regular underworld contact / the kobold captain -> friendly adventuring paladin / Mike, my old fighter / kobold sorcerer with demigod aspirations -> Spike, my new fighter -> me).
As a minor counter example, I think in the tower campaign the group as a whole has become severely attached to the Saddest Crossbow, even though it is a sentient item, the basic tenet of it’s existence is so compelling that we would all be sad to see it go.
Of course you are. It’s an *item*. It’s completely under player control and can perform no actions on its own. To players, it’s the best kind of NPC.
That hierarchy is exactly correct, and to be expected. But some players never get past “me, plus my guy and his stuff”. And some DMs don’t expect them to, or do things that cause players to not want to care about anything else.
It’s one of the symptoms of Abused Gamer Syndrome (well, actually two: A and B). It’s really defensive play on both sides: the players are afraid to expose too many handles the DM can grab to mess with them, and the DM is afraid to put too much time and effort into characters that the players will probably just ignore or kill.
As a DM, I definitely try to create NPCs that the players should – and in many cases, need to care about. It can feel like pulling teeth sometimes, but when it works, I think it makes for a much deeper experience.
As a player, we’ve all been guilty of a number of the AGS behaviors (don’t deny it – I’ve seen you. I’ve seen me!) But I’ve found I have a lot more fun when I put myself out there. It might be that I’ve had good DMs whom I can trust. It may also have to do with play style; my version of escapism is full-body and emotional; other people may be uncomfortable with social interaction in general (gamers are a fairly introverted set) and aren’t going to want to bring that into their fantasy.
So I really can’t judge, especially if some of the “bad” behaviors are defensive reactions to past abuse (IRL or in the game). But I can express a strong preference for one style of play and try to find players who share my attitudes.
(Also, I really, really wish the comments here had a “preview” feature.)
I finally found that post on flags that I was looking for (in the wayback machine – the original site is dead). It’s chock full of good advice, and a much more thorough article than I had remembered: Flag Framing.