Tough DM call - how would you run it?

[WhosDaDungeonMaster]

Ah, side quest wins out! YEAH!

 

[Bawylie]

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.

No it doesn’t. But it does change those risks. When I said “you show up, you play,” that’s just to explain how I arrive at my suggestion in the subsequent paragraph.

That said, the reversal process could have come with lingering consequences: reduced movement speed from lingering lead foot, a limb they couldn’t quite cure, deep debt to a powerful and perhaps malicious benefactor.

The stakes and risks don’t have to disappear if you don’t want them to. They just need to be different than loss of character.

Having said that - if you want a deadly game and your player(s) don’t, then I suggest finding a way to get on the same page. Often, I use “adventures in the underworld” in the kids’ games because the kids are often attached to their characters. So death just puts them in the realm of the dead and they have to have some adventure there before they can earn their way back to the mortal realm.

 

[iserith]

Situations like this show why I think it's good to have the players make more than one character and play them all from time to time. It makes it easy to insert a backup PC into the game as needed, especially if the group expects one or more players to miss sessions. Having played the other characters before, the player has at least some investment and enough context has been established in previous sessions to have it make sense for the character to jump in.

Alternatively, the players could all stick with one character, but death or long-term disability (e.g. petrification) is taken off the table in favor of some other kind of cost. I'm doing this in my upcoming Eberron campaign where part of the concept is that the characters will be on par with comic book heroes - death doesn't happen to the character unless the player chooses it as the failure condition.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I’d just ask the players what their plan would have been if they’d known the missing player would have been able to play in the next session. Then, I’d let them work that out as if they’d taken that approach from the jump.

Or, if too much happened after petrification, I’d have someone in town know how to make a potion of unpetrification, and the rare ingredient is something they have, and the NPC is down to barter for the service, bc her landlord is a total slumlord who is trying to extort her over supposedly unpaid rent, or somesuch. Visit landlord to talk “sense” into him, and you find him in the midst of something dangerous and illegal, and he attacks.

I’d have the potion work before the fight, so the absent guy can play. If the group is the type that might take the potion and bounce, have it require multiple treatments for the effect to stick.