NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Trudy" data-source="post: 7208873" data-attributes="member: 6902545">I understand this is frustrating, but I do encourage you to have some empathy for your players. There were a few weeks this year where my depression was so bad that by Friday (when our in-person 2e game was running), I could barely manage the drive home from work, let alone the drive to the game store where we played and 3-4 hours of social interaction. I didn't want to cancel or disappoint my friends, so every week, I told myself: "This will be different, I'm going to go, no matter how bad I feel!", but sometimes The Depression was so great that it led to some last-minute cancellations. (I'm doing much better now and rarely miss a session.)If you're going to continue without them and you are concerned about how to make the story work with the same characters absent all the time, you may want to send those players an email and brainstorm ideas as to why their character is frequently absent. There are plenty of fantasy stories with "flaky" party members who disappear and show up on a whim because trouble has just shown up, or because they have obligations outside of the party. Coming up with an in-character reason for why they're not always with the party might alleviate some of your frustration with wanting to tell a story with half the party absent, while still giving them the opportunity to participate/contribute to that story. It's also a good opportunity to draw them back into the game; I know after missing a few game sessions earlier this year, I wasn't sure how I'd feel going back. Feeling a little more connected to what was going on would have helped.It's harder to do this with last-minute cancellations, but if you do decide you don't want to proceed without those characters, one of our DMs put together a side-story when one of players in our tight-knit Thursday game couldn't make it for two weeks.  She drew up characters for all of us, and we all played the villains of our current campaign twenty years in the past -- when they encountered the magic item that set them on their current path. I can tell you right now -- after playing my villain for the past two weeks, I'm enormously attached to him, and man, will it be tough to kill him when/if it comes to that. It also gives the DM the opportunity to tell more of the story to the players without infodumping on them later on. It's also been really, really fun -- and since we still have more to go, we've opted to continue playing this side-story whenever someone's out, and since the DM has everything drawn together already, there won't be a problem if there's a last-minute cancellation.Hopefully this helps -- best of luck!</blockquote>

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