How many Missed sessions till a game dies?

[ph0rk]

After 3 consecutive sessions, a missing player should be booted. If they do come back, they'll be behind on the plot, (probably) behind on the XP, and acting foolishly on their way to certain doom due to any combination of those two factors. Remove their character from the game and when their life has settled down to the point where they can re-join, then have 'em bring in a new character that they know will be kicked out for 2 consecutive missed sessions.

That's absurd. Most people have wild and crazy lives where things happen, and these things are not always according to plan. Your method sounds like a great way to get players to quit your group.

It is a game, not art. If a player is a tad behind on the plot, so what? Are you playing to have fun or to shove your artistic plots down the party's collective throats?

Unless you're paying me to be there, I can't imagine skipping funerals, emergecy pages, and nookie (when single) for a game session.


Back to the original poster, I'm not certain if you mean killing a particular campaign, or killing a group. Either are possible, I suppose, but both would ultimately depend on the people involved.

 

[Breakdaddy]

After 4 missed sessions I suspect I would see a significant drop in the game's coherence. People would tend to forget details, places, and NPC's. Now I suspect in a lower detail game this would'nt be much of an issue, but in a game with a high degree of detail it might not even take 4 sessions unless copious notes were taken during the games. It also depends on the span of time between games. More frequent games would tend to suffer less from missed games than a game that only took place once a month.

 

[Djeta Thernadier]

After 4 missed sessions I suspect I would see a significant drop in the game's coherence. People would tend to forget details, places, and NPC's. Now I suspect in a lower detail game this would'nt be much of an issue, but in a game with a high degree of detail it might not even take 4 sessions unless copious notes were taken during the games. It also depends on the span of time between games. More frequent games would tend to suffer less from missed games than a game that only took place once a month.

Or games that have people with hectic lives who never know when they'll be able to play again. We are like that. We tend to take excellent notes (we have a guy who is a writer who does the best game notes ever) and it doesn't always take us long to get back into things.

 

[Haradim]

After around 4 missed games, my campaigns are pretty much over, particularly if the campaign is just starting. Players lose interest quickly, and more critically, *I* lose interest (at least when it comes to actually running). I tend to be somewhat fickle with my hobbies, and if I'm not being engaged at a fairly consistant rate, my mind wanders to other things (this has not improved since I got to college ).

If a player misses a game (and there is no cancellation), then that character simply doesn't advance/get loot/go anywhere/etc. Consistantly missing games (without notice) will lead to an unusable character, and a player who doesn't know what's going on. Providing a couple day's forwarning, or letting me know if an emergency has occurred, can avoid this 'character freeze', but even then consistent absences will eventually lead to a character that is really no more than a companion to the rest of the party; they will have been extracted from the plot and kept firmly in the background, so that things can keep going when the player is absent.

I would probably not actually boot a player after X number of absences, but I would have to make it clear that they likely won't have much to come back to.

 

[Wormwood]

Three.

 

[WayneLigon]

I'd have to say 'a lot', if we were actually missing entire sessions. I think that if suddenly things were to go to peices for everyone in the group all at once, we'd pick a different day or.. something, other than stop playing.

We have a consistant group of mostly older people, with only two single people in the whole group. We're all older, well established in careers with regular hours and routines. Friday night is part of the routine. Almost all of us will make schedules around game night for pretty much anything with the exception of death, or an unexpected emergency. And then the rest of us will still play.

Generally, the practice is 'leave your character sheet', and the person will be run as an NPC so you don't lose a great deal of XP or such; we have two people running about 1500 points behind the rest due to not leaving the sheet.

All of us would have to miss quite a few sessions to call a campaign. We might start up again or we might now be in the mood for something different and so just start something else entirely.

 

[Henry]

I say "no limit" - it is only dependent upon the expectation of the players to play it again. Sometimes, you KNOW a campaign is cancelled when the players show little enthusiasm in playing it again, but never outright say, "I don't want to play that again."

My current FR Campaign has not been played in about 6 weeks, but I fully expect it to return at some point in the near future, because there is still fondness and enthusiasm for the characters and the stories being told. In the past few weeks, we've played other FR campaigns, and a bit of Feng Shui, just hopping around genres because the whole group is going through a tough time keeping together right now, and the weekly roster changes from week to week. One of the replacement games we played was an FR campaign that has been on hiatus since August of last year! One AD&D homebrew I once ran played solidly for a year, then went on hiatus for a year due to problems getting together, and then came back for six more months before finally petering out.

So it's not a set time when you say, "oh, well, we've missed 5 games of this, I might as well throw away my notes."

 

[the Jester]

The game never dies, it only evolves.

Sometimes there are new players- sometimes even entirely new groups- but it's all connected together.

 

[Creamsteak]

It's probably a function of the group dynamic, continuity of the campaign, consistency of the sessions, and the total span of sessions that the game has been running.

Game has been running for 1-2 weeks? Missed four to six sessions? It's close to dead.
Game has been running for 1-2 years? Missed four weeks? No problem.
Game has been running for 1-2 years? Missed four weeks? Someone in the group moved? One player has become infrequent in attendance? Much closer to dead.

 

[Scharlata]

Hello, there!

Suffering from a severe game addiction as a DM who regularly plays with "his" group once per week I must confess that I was a little concerned about the "showing-up" of players.

"My" group decided in the past that not showing up at the game qualifies for a loss of XP for that session for the character in question but the character is not supposed to take the risks of fighting and since then gains lesser loot.

This means that failing to show up at the table several times (in a row or not) drops your character behind the expected XP goal for all making him weaker and in consequence "less valuable" for the rest of the group (oh my Gawd, this sounds very fascistic, but that's only maths). On top of that the chances of accidentally finding death in an inevitable fight are rising.

In this system, a player whose character died gained only 80% of the accumulated XP of his late character. That was because I thought that would make a player more concerned how to play his character and not seeking death when the player wasn't happy with the results of his dice rolls that built his character.

We exercised that option several campaigns only to be teached by the above mentioned rules of math that this system is "just" but really "unplayable". You missed a game and you gain no XP. You miss a game trice and you gain 3x0 XP. Then you drop behind the other character's potential. You fight (and role play) to gain XP but accidentally die and you gain only 80% from the fromer XP. So you drop behind again and the vicious circle gets you....


So we decided for the new campaign that a player who cannot attain to a game session to gain 50% of the XP for the session in question. His character is supposed to fight and possibly die. We didn't change the 80% XP rule after dying. This system helped to consolidate the powers of characters whose players have missed a session.

And - that's the interesting thing - I'm no longer concerned about the missing players. They know that not attending to the game means their characters take 100% risk but only gain 50% XP (no longer 10% risk and 0 XP).

So I would say that missing more than 7 games in a row kills your character but not the game.

Kind regards