What to do when a player goes AWOL?

[Emerald]

I am a new DM and was wondering what the common rule is regarding couple questions?

1. How long do you wait for a player to post before moving the story along without them?

2. If a player has not posted in a while what do you do with him? Do you as the DM put him in NPC status until he returns? Find a convientient reason to remove the PC without a player? recruit someone to play him?

Any other advice regarding this topic would be greatly appreciated.

 

[KitanaVorr]

Hiya Emerald

Well that depends really on the player.

If he doesn't...
1. let you know he is gone
2. you cannot reach him either via email or post or whatever
3. he hasn't posted in over a week in your game but has been posting in other games or threads

I always set up rules when I begin a game on how frequent Iwant them to post. That to let them know ahead of time what you expect and consequences. It sounds hard, but as you can tell, it really is frustrating when a game is put on hold because of one player.

I usually give them a break of a week or so before I start the questioning. Then I put their player on NPC status. After that, I might write them out of the story completely. Its really up to you to decide what you're comfortable doing.

The key though is communication.

Hope that helps!

Kit

EDIT: BTW I have done all the above - put players on NPC, recruited new players to play old ones, recruited new players, and written them out of the story -- they all work fine, so decide which works for you. Feel free to email me or post if you have any other questions.

 

[Manzanita]

AWOL

I hope you're not refering to me, Emerald. It's been rough recently with all the outages. I suspect a number of people haven't posted this past week. You run a great game, Emerald, & I don't think any of our group will drop. (or do you run another game as well?)

Fortunately, I haven't encountered this yet in the PbP I run. I intentionally recruited one extra player in any case, suspecting that someone would drop at some point.

 

[Emerald]

No, it is not you. I was mainly just wondering how long to wait for a player to post and what to do if they go past that time. Luckly, I have not had to that problem, because just when I begin to wonder where someone in my game is, they generally post within 24 hours. I obviously have great psychic powers. My husband has though and we were both curious what the protocal was for such an occasion.

 

[Jemal]

well, to all DM's for my games, whenever it's me that's missing for a while and I'm not posting ANYWHERE on the boards, drop me an e-mail at jemal999@hotmail.com, and I'll tell you which of the two dozen reasons I have for being awol. I tend to be very unlucky and have extremely bad timing.



But just in general, I'ld say if a character's posting other places on the board but not in your game, then give them a quick written smack in one of the ooc threads you see them posting to.

"HEY, post in GAME X, we're waiting for you!" or some such thing.