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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 9758894" data-attributes="member: 6988941">I've played regularly in a couple open table 5e campaigns at a game shop, and run a few sort of open table sessions at a summer camp (the kids who made characters with me were the ones told when it was happening, but of course if a kiddo sees us playing and wants to participate they get to participate). The ones I was involved with just ran on the principles of keeping things pretty loose and casual. Sessions tended to be planned to be centered on one big "monster of the week fight" but if they ended up being something completely different through character choices whatever. Sometimes one or two people show and you do very player driven stuff. Sometimes 12 people show and basically the DM has to tell them what they are doing and it's just the big fights. Groups tend to split off to do their own separate games if the sessions consistently become too big. New characters showing up might get a moment and an explanation if time and story allow, or might not. Characters disappearing is handwaved with a joke.It's not a consistently satisfying long-term experience generally speaking, but can be a lot of fun for a few sessions. And if you hit it off with some of the other folks playing you might stick it out at the open table game for a good long while. I think keeping things pretty unstructured and casual is actually better for a new player experience than having a bunch of rules to make open table play make narrative sense or whatever, because while both options give them the wrong impression of typical D&D, they are more likely to see through the facade of the prior, and more likely to leave just thinking that D&D is even more rules heavy than it is with the latter.At this level of casual usually everyone just rolls up a character of whatever level the group is at when they join and levels up when the DM says so. Some people do end up of a different level because they want to start at level 1 (which I always encourage for brand new players), or they missed the session where level up happened and just don't have time to do it in session. Divergent levels really stop mattering once you've got 7 or 8 players in the mix. Just giving out XP would also be fine I'm sure. The "characters should be at the same level" principle is about not punishing the player who had to miss a session one week since missing it was already the punishment. At the casual drop-in table you get a lot higher "show up on days they feel like it" players to "would only miss due to another engagement" players ratio than at a typical table, so not letting absent people's characters advance is a lot less likely to feel unfair.</blockquote>

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