Hey all, my friend is starting a new game. We have some newbies joining and their attendance maybe hit and miss, with work schedules and life. What are some creative ways your groups have managed missing players outside of someone paying for them one session?
For the most part, the campaigns I’ve been in have just sort of mutually agreed “don’t think about the character who’s not here.” We just ignore that they’re not present - they don’t do anything and they don’t suffer any negative consequences. Sometimes that doesn’t quite work and we have to fiddle around a bit, and sometimes when there’s an extended absence we’ll come up with a more solid in-universe explanation for why the character’s not there, but usually our games are fairly informal and this works for us.
This has become my favorite way to deal with it. Some games (5e) I would have someone else run the character since they would be important in fights. Other games, just have that character fade to the background.
Occasionally if they have an item in their inventory or some particular skill that makes a big difference we’ll have the absent character do that “in the background.”
The only times it gets really troublesome is if we’re doing some kind of plot-heavy adventure that genuinely needs that character to be there for it to make sense. In those cases things get squirrely, and I’d actually be willing to call the session if something can’t be worked out to work around it.
True, there are times when the story really calls for everyone or a particular character to be present.