What is your favorite excuse why a character is not in the adventure?

[Sunseeker]

No excuse required. The character continues to operate as it always has, run by those players who are present. This is made clear to all up front: miss a session if you like; if you pass along any instructions they'll be followed when and if they make in-game sense, but your character is otherwise at the mercy of those who show up. And the DM isn't going to change a thing.

Lanefan

Unless a player says it's OK for Bob or Sally or any particular player, even the DM to run their character, I never let my other players run the character of the missing player. I would hate to come back to a game to find that something happened while I was away and my character is irrevocably changed or damaged or played in a manner horribly against what I would have done.

I do think it's important to trust at least your DM well enough that they might run it, or your best friend in the group, but outside of situations where everyone in the group is my friend, I'd never let a group have control of my character.

That...and I usually take my sheet home every night. Kinda hard to run a character whose stats you can't see.

 

[Wycen]

Currently it depends on the situation. In the past I think they simply went "2 dimensional"; that is they were present but completely useless and invulnerable.

In one group, if the player isn't there we kinda ignore them, except a couple times the players, children, were present but not playing so we kinda sort did stuff with them, but I don't think we ever had them fight. I could be wrong. We've certainly used the 2 dimensional term at least once.

In my other group, if you don't show up and we were in the middle of something, your character develops a split personality. Our wizard missed 3 sessions while we were out adventuring and so the DM provided us with a stand-in NPC wizard. He gave us the Battle Mage stats from the npc gallery. So suddenly the wizard became "BM" for short. The player actually missed enough experience that the BM version is higher level than the original, though with less treasure and gear because we split the big treasure 3 ways instead of 4. Similarly the cleric missed a session so we had a stand in Cleric of Besmara to represent him.

Now, if they had missed sessions when we were in town and headed out, then they would not have been present during that portion and probably would magically appear when we all showed up again. Or maybe not magically, but "arrives just in the nick of time".

Edit: Ok, now that I've come back later and reread the thread title, I guess I didn't quite address the question. The excuse most recent in memory was something like gastrointestinal distress or tummy troubles.

 

[Sunseeker]

Come to think of it, I once came up with a reason for this that was to be the foundation of an entire campaign.

The entire world, every man, woman, beast and child is under a "curse", wherein they periodically vanish from reality for a random amount of time. It allowed me to conveniently explain away player disappearances and added an interesting element to world affairs. High King's could vanish at any moment for a minute, or for years, randomly returning centuries later and wondering WTF happened to their kingdom, lowly peasants may vanish in the middle of a drink. Mostly it was invented to explain away player disappearances, but thinking about it over time, it seemed like a creative campaign idea. Never acted on it though.

 

[Li Shenron]

I use the "fade to background" option by default.

Thus the missing player's PC is assumed to come along with the rest of the party, but is inactive and doesn't participate in combat or other actions. An exception is made for healers, so that the DM takes care of letting them provide cure spells or similar, typically at the end of the day, but definitely not buffs. A similar exception can be made if the party is stuck and the missing PC would have an ability to make them unstuck (such as the ability to unlock a door), but only if this is really really needed, and usually this is not the case, since there is always another way...

The missing PC is given "diplomatic immunity" i.e. cannot be killed, captured, injured, affected by a spell or other effect, unless the entire party is (but if something like a TPK or TP-capture happens, we can talk it out together and decide whether it would be more interesting for the missing PC to share the same fate or to survive/escape and then become the key person to save the others).

The missing PC doesn't get any XP, and may or may not get a share of treasure (this is more complicated since I generally don't spread treasure equally by the encounters... it's quite normal in my adventures to get most of the treasure at the end).

 

[Elf Witch]

It depends. If we can plan for it then the PC is off doing something else. The last time we knew a player was going to be out of town his PC ended up in jail. If it does not make sense then the PC becomes an NPC and the DM runs him except during combat then a player does. If that happens the player gets full XP.

The longest we ever had a player out was a good friend who had to be in Georgia for his job for months on end he often came back during the weekend. So basically THE DM played him as an NPC and when the player came back he played him. I think the main reason the DM did this was because he was the only cleric we had and this made more sense then bringing in an NPC that didn't fir the story. We sent him emails of what was going on and he would let the DM know if he wanted anything special.

 

[bbjore]

I always go with what fits the PC or story best, but my favorites are the ones that reflect the PC's personalities. The orc warrior is drunk, the halfling rogue is chasing something shiny, or the promiscuous bard is off slutting it up.

I know that our imaginary world frequently has to take a back seat to real world obligations, and my players like to try out more than a single build over the course of a year or two long campaign, so I structure the campaign around that. The campaign isn't about just a small group of 4-6 adventurers, it's about a nebulous group of interconnected adventurers, each with their own motivations and outside interests. That way if someone isn't there, we just resolve what they've been up to with the small ruleset I developed for running organization and other downtime obligations on the part of the PCs. And the fluid party makeup allows for multiple different interactions between the PCs, and it allows the group to oppose disparate threats in the game world, and best of all, it prevents them from having all their eggs in one baskets, so they can mount a rescue when things go bad.

Mostly though, I rarely find that somebody is missing at a point where we can't come up with an acceptable excuse for the PC's absence. I mean, what else are PCs supposed to do with all their extra gold other then enact their own schemes or carouse it away? But when it does happen, the party just plays their PC, because we all know it's a time sport. But usually it's just a matter of the group returning victoriously and exciting their tale of adventure to a hungover orc or to the bard's new friends #300 and #301 (the bard never bothered to learned names, just gave them numbers...).

Mostly though, since real life is more important that fantasy land, we just go with whatever works. There's no point in over complicating things because somebody's kid had to have their tonsils removed or they have to travel for work.

 

[S'mon]

If it's the start of an adventure, the PC is off on other business.

If it's the middle of an adventure, the PC may be:

Watching the horses.
Reporting back to base.
Hit on the head with a rock/shot by an arrow and unconscious.

If player is absent, PC is always absent, and won't normally die in that session.

XP: This depends entirely on the campaign. My current preferred models are

(1) There is a single 'party XP' tally I maintain; every PC is assumed to have this amount of XP no matter how many or how few sessions the PC is played for. I use this in my 4e D&D campaign.

(2) XP is entirely individual, earned in play, so of course absent PC earns no XP. There is a starting XP total for all new PCs such as 0 or 5,001. I use this in my Pathfinder Beginner Box and AD&D campaigns.

 

[MortalPlague]

No excuse required. The character continues to operate as it always has, run by those players who are present. This is made clear to all up front: miss a session if you like; if you pass along any instructions they'll be followed when and if they make in-game sense, but your character is otherwise at the mercy of those who show up. And the DM isn't going to change a thing.

Lanefan

I did this once, back in 2nd Edition. It was our first real campaign, and the guy playing the fighter couldn't make it. Alas, poor Nemo the fighter... the party disturbed some nasty critters, and the unfortunate fighter was slain in the battle. Not the only casualty, but the only PC casualty.

It was not my finest moment as a DM.

 

[delericho]

Excuses? Don't be silly, I don't accept excuses. If a player isn't there, his character crumples up and dies. I find that an effective way to maintain attendance at my games.

Seriously...

If I can write the character out of the game without any great hassle, I'll do so. In general, though, we just quietly ignore the fact that the PC was here one minute, gone the next, and may be back in a while. It's not even a "fade to black" situation - the character literally disappears from the universe and nobody mentions it.

Regarding XP: all characters get XP for all sessions, whether the player was there or not, and whether the character was there or not. Mostly because I don't want to have to deal with characters of a different level from the rest of the group.

Regarding treasure: I don't get involved in allocation of treasure; that's a matter for the players. However, they appear to have settled on a convention that if the player wasn't there, the character gets no share of the treasure found in that session. That's not how I would do it... but as I said, it's not something I get involved in.

 

[Gilladian]

I use a combination of different things that have been mentioned above; best is if I can write the PC out for the missing period of time; often this means that if the adventurers are in town, or in the woods, or anywhere the PC could easily depart from, then we say "oh, Jasper decided to spend the day being diplomatic with the dopplegangers while the rest of you continued on", and when Jasper's player gets back, he "arrives in the nick of time" to be involved with the next scenario.

Other times, if I have the PC stats, the party runs the PC as an NPC. PC death is fairly rare in my world, so I've never had a character die when the owner wasn't present; if it happened, I'd let the dice fall where they would. Generally, we'll discuss how the PC would act as a group, if there's a question about "behaving in character".

And lastly, if there's no good story-reason for the PC to be gone, but I don't have the PC's stats and can't guesstimate him, then he goes "semi-invisible" and sort of tags along without contributing until the player rejoins us.

I actually HAVE done major story things to account for disappearances, but almost always it was either a player who left, or a character that the player got bored with and "retired" into NPC status.