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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 7542711" data-attributes="member: 20564">Played ina great game today and I think our DM made a great call for a tough situation, and I'm wondering how others would have dealt with it.The situation:  Several (3+) sessions ago, one of our party of 5th level characters got turned to stone.  Purely by the dice, nothing meta.  However, the player of that character also started a new job that had them working Friday nights when we played for an not-short but not indefinite period of unknown length.The characters, not having the ability to change him back, searched for a solution but time wasn't of the essence because it made a great excuse for the absence of the character during the absence of the player.  We had a lead ona  quick resolve, but also had talked about essentially sending the statue back to a powerful patron one character had in another nation via ship.When trying to coordinate around the holidays, we found out that we can do some Saturdays, and the player can be back.  We found this out during discussions at the end of the previous session / firmed up between sessions so there was no in-session time to deal with returning the PC to flesh prior to the player's return.What do you do as a DM?  Picture a spectrum from 1-5:1.  Hand wave the turning to stone and that the players didn't resolve getting them back so that the returning player can pay the whole session.  Acknowledge there was a meta reason for the slow return and assume that the characters would have acted with more haste.3.  Give the characters several quick ways to resolve it building on what little they had done that will take from 10 real minutes to half the session - but they all have costs with the quickest being especially ruinous (basically bankrupting the characters, taking a magic item, and several non-magical but rare trophy ingredients like dragon teeth).  Acknowledge that we want the returning player to play, but not letting the other players off the hook for not having a solution ready, even if it was for meta reasons.5.  Leave it up to the characters and what they had done to resolve, and if the returning player sits out that's on them - they got turned to stone in the first place.  Player agency is king - one got turned to stone because they didn't fight smart enough, and the others didn't resolve how to turn them back.  Don't railroad through a solution.Or maybe a different answer then fits with or in-between these.EDIT:  This came up a few times, let me add it here.  the player is a new player to D&D.  The experience he's looking for is playing his character.  He's been working on him while gone, sketching him and refining his personality more.  So while it's a perfectly valid solution to have a player run an NPC (or spare character if we had one), in this particular case that wasn't an option.  It is a great idea to get them back playing immediately, I don't want to discount it.</blockquote>

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