So, what do you guys do if a player can’t make it for a session, and there’s no good fictional way for his character to not be there?
I’m considering statting up the the PC as an NPC, with a player-written Drive, and a promise of not being in a significantly worse state when the player comes back..
Having players or even the GM play the character always ends up with hrt feelings, or at the very least a case of ‘I would never have done/said’ that. I don’t like punishing players for not being able to make it, we all have real life shit that gets in the way sometimes.
Personally what I do if I cant find an in story way to have them not be there is I just ‘Ghost’ them. They follow the players around but they don’t say or do much. It’s assumed they help, bit no specifics are really dealt with. They don’t realy get injured or anything, but they will suffer the same fate as the rest of the group. So if they all get captures, so does the Ghosted player.
I may let players utilise unique class moves from the player if they are necessary to advance the plot, but that’s usually about it.
One can almost always create a reason why the character can’t be there. The trick is to let go of the expectation that you will start this game exactly where you left the last game.
Fast forward just a bit and assume some things in your questions.
I always start my games off with questions to acclimate the players to all the fun stuff thats been running in my head since we last played and to get their input for holes that I have left in my preparation.
“When (missing character) got locked in a separate chamber from you, what was the last thing you heard?”
“When missing character said he would scout ahead how long did they say it would take and how long after that did you wait before you started to worry?”
“Since (Missing character) has bunked down in his wagon to perform a ritual what have you decided to do with your time?”
If the players had recently been given indication of multiple fronts perhaps they “decided” to split up. Which one did the group go after and why did the missing character think it better he went on his own?
And so on. Just get the players to buy in and anything is possible.
Happy Hunting!
You can always just ask the player when they get back, “So, what abducted you last time, or did you just run off? Did you get away or are you still dealing with it?” — that sort of thing. I’ve used the ghost method above too.
All good suggestions! The players were about to start a fight with a whole encampment of orcs last time they played.. in fact, they’d just spectacularly failed to sneak up on them. So perhaps they all got captured, and the missing player and a few of the hirelings got seperated…
Or, maybe, in the process of getting captured, the PC in question gets a poisoned orc blade in the giblets, and spends the entire adventure in a dubiously-lucid state.
“My character wouldn’t have done that”
“Not while he was sober. But I assure you, he really wasn’t…”
“My character wouldn’t have done that”
Is no excuse for anything. Your character doesn’t exist.
It’s alright if their char wouldn’t do that. Ask: what would your character have done that might get him or her stuck in an orcish prison covered in eggs and and feathers.
My favorite method of handling this is to structure sessions as excursions, starting and stopping most sessions at the same place.
This is not always possible though. In those cases, I just handwave it. When players are back, their PCs have “caught up.” When they’re not, the PCs just aren’t around. This doesn’t even seem to get in the way of the fiction, in practice, though it seems like it would.
just lampshading it works for me, even though it’s not really fiction first.