Do you kill PCs of players who do not attend a session?

[jdavis]

The character ends up "guarding the horses", he is in no danger ever, he gets no experience, and he gets no treasure. For our group gaming is a luxury, it is very rare that we get everybody together, the game take into account that the party will rarely be at full power, the storylines are never character intensive, It's not uncommon for us to game with 3 people missing out of a group of 7. It's just how it has to be for us, the real world takes precedence. It doesn't matter that much that the character misses out on the experience as missing is quite common, the characters never get that spread out. We have one person who has missed the last 8 or 9 sessions, it's not his fault that his Father-in-law is extremely sick so why punish his character, when he shows up he plays when he can't make it he sits in the wagon and guards the horses. It's more serious of a game than you would think but not near as indepth as we used to play 10 years ago (where missing a session was frowned apon).

 

[Danzilla]

This thread reminded me of something that happened a few weeks ago...

First a little backstory concerning our playing other peoples characters...

When we miss playing sessions, another player plays that persons character as close to the owning players style as they can...though sometimes we just can't act or do things as stupid as they do ) )...If enough people have to miss the game, we just get together and play something else...

Back to where I started this post...a few weeks ago one of our players was late (this player works on our game nights and generally shows up about 3 hours later than the rest of us so we work around his schedule) and I was playing his character at this time due to my current character being out of the action for a bit...

I had started the evening off with a question that had occured to me on the way to the game...what if a person were playing another persons character and that character were to die...how would we handle that (at the time this was a hypothetical question)

To my motification, I was playing the character as close to the players style as I could (we generally kept an eye on each other and if we saw another player messing up by doing actions that the character shouldn't do or not doing actions that should we would tell the player) I found myself rapidly falling to a -8 hp and wishing I hadn't started the evening with the questions I had.

Anyway, we bailed the character out of his predicament and laughed about the situation, but not before I handed the character over to the player and told him of his characters condition...sort of a welcome to the game, your character's unconcious and about to die type thing...


Dan "still a bit mortified" Zilla

 

[WanderingMonster]

Emirc eht tif tnemhsinup eht tel.

Why punish the character? If the player misses a game, it's not some fictional entity's fault. If a player misses, we all kick the living crap out of him the next session. If it becomes a habit, then of course we poison his pets. And if he leaves the group...well. No one leaves our group.

 

[Danzilla]

And if they DO leave the group...well, we'll always keep a piece of them inside ourselves...


DanZilla


BTW, who knew fragmentation grenades threw bone shards like that?

 

[francisca]

Do you kill PCs of players who do not attend a session?

Only if it was his/her night to buy pizza.....

Serioulsy, no. And they do not adventure either. Which means I as a DM have to come up with some reason for their absense. This has led to some good story elements, however.