How to believably deal with missing players??

[Von Ether]

I have the group tied to an organzation, merchant caravan, or a sailing ship and I make sure this tie has a large cast of characters, just enough that the players don't really keep track of them all. I base the adventures off the thing that ties the group together, not the group itself. (bandit attacks, political intrigue, bad weather, etc.)

Then when someone is missing, or we have an extra player, I can either have the missing PC go back to the "ship/caravan,etc" to deal with a problem or have one of the "crew" come up to assist the regular group.

I also avoid "prophcies" like the plauge. You see, players love to screw with anything that is suppposedly controls them. They will patently ignore their desitnies or just get bored with PC, kill it off, and try to make a new PC that has no divine connection to the game so they can do as they please.

 

[Frilf]

Actually, anything we do is up to us, not you.

Point taken, but you don't need to be snarky about it It's your group, do what you want to with it. I did include a caveat, however: (unless your group are incredibly understanding or else you'd like a particular someone to leave). If your group is understanding of such things, then neato! Good gaming to ya

 

[Chupacabra]

In our current campaign, the DM keeps all of the player sheets after each session. If anyone is missing from the next session, he will hand that sheet to another player to run for the day. We all use the same standardized character sheet for ease of reference, that way we all know where stuff like AC, saves, feats, etc. are located on the sheets (2 pages front and back).

The GM is pretty good at giving the missing PC sheet to someone who already isn't already running that type of character. For example, if my character (Fighter/Rogue) needs to be run by someone else b/c I'm out for the day, he will give it to one of our spellcasters rather than our monk or fighter, just so they can experience a little bit of "how the other half lives". Also, he is fairly strict at making sure that the character is played in a manner consistent with how the missing player ran it. No running the wizard up to the front line of combat if he would never, ever do that if his "owner" player never played him like that. (Unfortunately for me, since I play my Ftr/Rog as a kind of bloodthirsty hothead, that allows the folks who run him in my absence to throw him into all sorts of trouble -- alot of times I'll email the gang after I missed a session asking "How did my character do?" only to get something cryptically scary like "Well, he'll be poisoned at the start of the next session" or "He's lost alot of blood since you saw him last....)

 

[Turanil]

So let's say you have a party of six, and you game a few times a month with a fairly consistent continuous storyline. But if your six players, typically only five can make any given session, and who happens to be the one that can't changes almost every time.

In general, you can still have a consistent story and the missing man can easily get up to speed the next time. But, how do you explain the character's absence in game? Is there any way to make it semi-believable so that it doesn't seem so cheesy that during this important mission the Bard has to study at his college and when the party is summoned by the King, the Cleric has to tend to temple duties rather than come with?

Anyone discovered any creative solutions?

This problem happens nearly every session of the campaign I run!!
I have a player who, as a DM, absolutely doesn't care to give any explanation at all for a PC being not there during a session. However, I don't like it that way. Yet, I have no method to deal with the problem, except through improvisation. Sometimes it is ludicrous, sometimes it gives excellent results. Just two examples, involving the same PC:

Once I told that following the precedent session where the players had left a dwarven clan, the missing player's PC was there with the others, but ill for having drank really too much dwarven alcohol... He was barely able to travel with the group (it was a scenario of travel from A to B for the most part), and was unable to do anything else at all. As such, he was behind, wouldn't fight, or even be really aware of the events.

Another time, the player told that next gaming session he would be absent. So, we worked this during the end of the session: the player's PC disagreed with the others PCs on the course of actions they were going to take (that is: during next gaming session). He told them that he would instead leave them and go gather an army to storm the temple the group was planning to attack by themselves. In fact, this proved to be a brilliant explanation! Next gaming session, in attacking the temple two PCs died, one was captured, and the last one fled. Hence, the gaming session thereafter, I let the player's PC come to the temple with his army and attack it. It was cool for the story.

 

[Hypersmurf]

We generally have another player roll for the PC with the missing player; actions are generally default or informally 'voted on'.

We have one player who's missed two sessions in the last month.

After the first, he came back to be greeted with "By the way, Quinn caught Ghoul Fever last week."

After the second, it was "By the way, Quinn caught Devil Chills last week."

It's the problem with having a low-Fort-save character when we're up against a while bunch of monsters with disease abilities

The DM sent out an email the other day. "Paul can't make next session. Which disease is Quinn going to catch?"

Generally, we play characters as closely to their established personality as possible. But we had a half-orc paladin - 20 Str - who was being played as a complete wuss. And we'd all been exhorting him to 'Act like a paladin, dammit!', to no avail.

So the week that player didn't show up, we decided we'd play him properly. None of this pussy shield nonsense - gimme that greatsword!

It led to one of the coolest moments in the campaign so far, where the paladin, unconscious on -1 at the Bearded Devil's feet, received a Cure Minor from the Cleric (about the only Cure spell we had left!), putting him on 0... and swung his greatsword from prone, dealing enough damage to get past the DR and finally drop the Devil... took his point of damage for acting while staggered, and collapsed unconscious atop his foe's fallen corpse.

That's a paladin. If the player had actually been there, he'd likely have run away a few rounds earlier...

(The running joke in our campaign is that if a player isn't present, his character opens the doors and pays for random party expenses, like mules...)

-Hyp.