Tough DM call - how would you run it?

[Sword of Spirit]

Temporarily jump ahead in time for a side quest that isn’t affected by other campaign elements. This side quest is set after the character has been de-stoned. Afterwards, return to your regular campaign date. At some future session after you actually cure the character, have an <insert already played side quest here> moment.

 

[Jester David]

Was the statue still with the character?

I’d have the other PC restored by another band of much higher level adventurers off camera. Perhaps asked to help them out in payment or effectively made to be a hireling. (Also justifying giving him a little extra xp so he’s not as behind everyone else.)

Given the player is active between games, I’d ask them to give me suggestions or adventures they were a supporting character in and maybe help flesh out the other adventuring party, who might be rivals or competition. Or even borderline evil.

 

[the Jester]

5ish.

Or maybe, "5, but also..."

While the regular pc is out, let the player either make a new character to play in the interim (and then to have as a backup pc), play an npc, or play monsters.

 

[Bawylie]

Hm. If you show up to play, you get to play.

To pull from soap operas, I’d suggest amnesia. “The rocking deck and brisk wet sea air wake you. You’re on a ship you don’t recognize among people you don’t know. A letter in your effects says your passage has been paid and you’re returning to your comrades. The last thing you can remember was the creeping numbness of petrification. You feel fine now, but recall nothing of your time as stone nor of your recovery. In a week’s time you reunite with your friends.”

Maybe throw in a bit about a debt to be paid back later. Or a strange new tattoo. Something weird.

 

[iserith]

The character shows up to join the party, having been on other adventures. He or she is not aware of the events leading up to the petrification and was doing something else at the time.

As it turns out, the petrified adventurer is a doppelganger infiltrator that took his or her place on the team. It's an agent of a current villain, or one soon to be revealed.

 

[CydKnight]

From the situation you have described, with the player apparently very invested in the character, I think it should be a cumulative solution largely between that player and the DM. The solution should satisfy the player that owns said character but also making sense to the other player characters in the group. If time (in actual game weeks) is the major hangup, then something needs to be done to remedy that.

You may need to be willing to modify the adventure to speed that timeline up or perhaps change the potential order in which some things occur. One thing that still often surprises me is how often unforeseen things happen that lead to improvising changes to a pre-conceived session structure. I try to look at it from the player's point-of-view and, for me personally, I would not want to play an NPC for several sessions after working so hard on the PC I had and learning from the DM that it was absolutely possible to bring that PC back. I also know that if that is what the DM said I had to do, I would do so without verbal reservation but still would not like it one bit. That is potential for animosity (perhaps even moreso with a new player known only a short time) the next time things go unexpectedly if it hadn't already occurred with this one. This is why I would do all possible to accommodate the player now while hopefully not over-burdening the other PCs with the solution. It can sometimes be tricky, but a happy table is one where all are having fun.

 

[jmartkdr]

My thinking is - since the player will be hit-or-miss on attendance anyways: they find a good, quick, cheap solution, but afterwards they find a catch. From here on out, the pc will 'randomly' turn back into a small stone figurine. One that's small enough to carry around.

 

[FXR]

If I were the DM, I'd discuss it with the player prior to the game, providing the player is creative and mature enough.

The player has to give you an explanation for how his character got turned back from stone, from which you can work out some complication for later on. You can give him some XP (since his character is probably behind the others) if it is interesting.

If this is not an option for you, you can try the following:

Example: The petrified character was found by a tribe of primitive creatures who decided to worship the statue, as some embodiment of divinity. A few months afterward, a traveling cleric decided to convert the tribe to the worship of his god and turned the statue into flesh to show that there was nothing divine about the statue. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect: the tribe is now convinced that the character is a living god, while a certain religious order is looking for answer about the whereabouts of their cleric.

For an additional fun, have the other characters travel back to where they left the petrified character and have them meet in in the flesh with his new followers.

 

[Blue]

Hm. If you show up to play, you get to play.

Doesn't that take all risk from death (and petrification)?

He could have rolled a new character and played, but he was a new player who was really getting into his character, been working on him while he wasn't able to play, and that just wasn't the D&D experience he was looking for.

 

[Blue]

Thanks for all your thoughts. It's been asked what our DM did and I wanted to hear all your great ideas before putting it out.

First, the DM knew the player was completely okay with spending a bit of time stoned and having a cool story about coming back.

So the DM had one of the ways we had researched come through with an alchemical solution - that needed one last ingredient: wyvern blood. For a party of 6th level, Wyverns would be a fun fight - especially since we we're at our strongest against flying foes.

He put two sources in quick (wall clock time) reach. Wyverns at an oasis we could find out about and kill, or some wyvern blood at the queen's apothecary. The queen whom we had antagonized last session, so we would have been crawling back to her OR a heist. He estimated 30 minutes of our 6 hour session to have either one worked out quickly, with a heist taking longer.

We rolled really poorly (and didn't ask the right people which would have been an easier DC) trying to find about wyverns. We did find out about the queen's apothecary. We also came up with another idea he didn't think of but he rolled with when we pursued it, which was a alchemist might have one. We found one, but ti would basically have taken all of the coin treasure we had accumulated since the start of the campaign, a scroll of silence, a dragon tooth and a unicorn horn (the items were ones we had to get the price down to just "everything we had").

Would have been done within that 30 minutes ... except that our party "leader", a barbarian who thinks himself king of a forgotten land, killed the alchemist. The scream was heard outside the shop, someone outside called for the guard, and suddenly whistles started to blow.

This turned into a two hour event as one part of the party distracts the guard and leads them off elsewhere in the city (mind you, we had antagonized the queen the day before - this could have been really bad if caught), the others broke into his storeroom and found the wyvern blood then tried to escape with bystanders and guard about. Disapproving of the random killing our cleric ended up reviving him (using about half our stash of diamonds we had gotten in case to use on us) and convinced him she saved him. (The barbarian hadn't been seen with us before - it was the bard and the cleric who had found the alchemist - we had split up trying to get the blood).

All in all it was 2 hours of session to escape, but the new player has quite the story to tell about how he got turned back to flesh, which he enjoyed.