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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 2403634" data-attributes="member: 1210">I'm going to answer these in reverse order. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I have a pool of ten players.  I run three games, though one of them is new and is an experimental campaign to explore a number of different rules and tweaks.  Of the ten players, one plays pretty much only in one of the games, but everyone else plays in all three.  One of the main advantages of a large group is that the game goes on.  Only once can I recall cancelling or changing the game to a different campaign because a specific player couldn't show, and that wasn't really necessary, but since it was a session that player had been really looking forward to, and one in which his pc and cohort were both among the central characters, everyone agreed to play our halfling game instead when that player couldn't show at the last minute (for very good reasons, I might add).  Every other time, when we're gonna play, we play.  If we cannot achieve a quorum of three players plus me as dm we won't; but that is very rare- once that I can recall in the last, er, ten years or so.  If a player isn't present, his pc 'fades into the background.'  There's usually an in-game excuse for it- maybe he's sick, maybe he's in the outhouse ("still?  man, that's some constipation, it's kept you out of action all day!"!), maybe he's sick (tricky in a party with clerics or paladins), maybe he's scouting ahead or guarding the mounts or prisoners.Now, as to a continuous storyline with an evolving party:As long as the new characters travel with surviving pcs for enough time to take up the quest, it can still work to follow the original plot.  However, another interesting idea is to advance time.  So none of the original pcs are still around?  All righty, then- advance time five, ten, fifty or even a hundred years, with the villains (mostly) unopposed.  Suddenly they have summoned a powerful outsider/taken control of the kingdom/poisoned the entire lake/enslaved the dwarven kingdom or whatever you like; the bad guys have won.  Now, the new party lives in a stark reminder of their previous failure.  The players will realize that giving up their quest has consequences.  If you tpk them, let them play the successors to the old party, before the grim future they have witnessed, and give them a chance to stop it from happening.</blockquote>

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