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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 3807666" data-attributes="member: 16574">If you're playing "let's play now!" OD&D you should probably be running short self-contained adventures where the characters are assumed to return to their home-base at the end of each session, rather than an extended epic, so cycling players in and out depending on who shows up to each session shouldn't be a credibility-breaker ("as we left off last-time you were holed up in an extra-dimensional space on the Elemental Plane of Fire and suddenly you notice that Krago the dwarf is with the party again, despite having not been seen in 3 months -- he must have been tagging along the whole time and nobody noticed!"). Therefore, the answer is simple: if the player doesn't show up to the session, his character stays home and misses out on the adventure, and if this happens frequently enough his character will begin to fall behind in levels.This isn't such a big deal in OD&D as in later editions, because 'party balance' isn't as important (sure it's usually a good idea to have as broad as possible a mix of classes/races, but not in the sense of "this adventure is impossible unless the party has at least one fighter, one cleric, one mage, and one thief") and mixed-levels also aren't such a big deal -- characters 2 to 3 levels apart can typically still adventure in the same party without either the higher level character(s) totally dominating or the lower level character(s) getting incinerated at the first combat/trap. Plus, given the exponential XP charts and fractional XP adjustments in OD&D, lower level characters will tend to level-up proportionately faster than their higher-level companions, allowing them to close (or at least narrow) the gap. This is, IMO, a much better solution than having the absent players' characters tag along as NPCs.</blockquote>

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