How do you handle players who arrive late and players who leave early?

[nai_cha]

It's crazy hard to for my group and I to find a good time for everyone to get together. For the next session, one of the players will be arriving late (business meeting) and another will be leaving early (prayer meeting). It's either work with this or wait for another long weekend to roll around.

I've figured out how to explain away the late player's character: the first bit I've got planned for this session is a skill challenge to escape from the town without being detected, so her character gets "lost" and reunites with the rest of the party outside the town later on. In another game with another group where a player was also late, the DM had the BBEG kidnap her character and make it a quest for the rest of us to rescue her. Thing is, given our group's wacky schedules, I see this is going to happen a lot (accept that someone's going to be late and work around it, or not play at all). Does anyone have any other ideas on how to handle this in game so that I have back up scenarios prepared? I don't want to always say "you got lost" or "you got kidnapped", and it would also be good to have an alternative to "So-and-so will play for you until you get here." I'd also just like to read about how other people handle this situation in general.

As for the player who's going to leave early, I can't think of anything else except (1) have someone else play her character (she was cool with that last time it happened) or (2) have her kidnapped (like above). Any scenarios you guys can think of as alternatives to these?

Thank you very much in advance.

 

[surfarcher]

Make companion Characters out of them all. If you are late arriving or leave early you turn into a CC and get "driven" by the party.

Well that's what I'd do, anyway.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

We use convenient bouts of dysentery to explain absences. The late dwarven fighter runs up holding her pants up with one hand and swinging an axe with another, and we complain about the stench of cinnamon from the eladrin wizard.

Brad

 

[Minifig]

You arrive X minutes late..

You miss out on ANYTHING the group gets, from the xp to the gear to the perks.. that means drops, armor or gold or weapons given by NPCs.


You leave X minutes early..

You forfeit half your xp, and all of the loot.

 

[the Jester]

I handwave it.

The pcs "fade in" or "fade out" as needed.

 

[Holy Bovine]

You arrive X minutes late..

You miss out on ANYTHING[/B][/I][/U] the group gets, from the xp to the gear to the perks.. that means drops, armor or gold or weapons given by NPCs.


You leave X minutes early..

You forfeit half your xp, and all of the loot.

I really hope you are joking here. I can't think of any group I've met or heard of doing something like this.

 

[Mad Hamish]

You arrive X minutes late..

You miss out on ANYTHING the group gets, from the xp to the gear to the perks.. that means drops, armor or gold or weapons given by NPCs.


You leave X minutes early..

You forfeit half your xp, and all of the loot.

You've got a great way of losing players setup there.

 

[Minifig]

I really hope you are joking here. I can't think of any group I've met or heard of doing something like this.

You've got a great way of losing players setup there.

If your DM says you arrive at -x- time and you're 30 minutes late when the group is in DEEP, I assure you, certain DMs would go to such an extreme... and if you're going to leave an 30 minutes to an hour before it's time to leave and your class is critical to the campaign, why would you even bother coming in the first place? It's a waste of the time to the DM to even include an arc for your character to be there.

Yes, my example was a bit extreme, but the times could be stretched and worked around and so could the modifiers of XP / Loot loss.

It's an understandable punishment for when you have an established weekly game.

Especially if you say you're going to be there on time, or for the whole time that the game is supposed to be on.

You owe it to your fellow players AND DM to be committed.

 

[Ahrimon]

We trust the rest of the group to run our characters so we just hand them over and get email updates later on.

You arrive X minutes late..

You miss out on ANYTHING the group gets, from the xp to the gear to the perks.. that means drops, armor or gold or weapons given by NPCs.


You leave X minutes early..

You forfeit half your xp, and all of the loot.

Wow. I'd never play in a group like that. One player's job takes him all over the world so he misses some game days and I have to leave early on occasion. I work from six to six, game until midnight, drive home then up again at 4:30 am to work from six to six again. If I got treated that way I'd drop the group in a heartbeat.

 

[malraux]

It's an understandable punishment for when you have an established weekly game.

The idea that you need to punish players for infractions is at best counter to the idea of a game. You know what the punishment for being late to a game is? It's getting to play 30 minutes less than everyone else. Why do you need an additional penalty?