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We've all had that week where everything's set for a game, but someone bails at the last minute. Not a worry for most GMs. Some give the missing player's character sheet over to another player. Other GMs run the PC that week. Still others have the PC conveniently fade into the background. But one GM I played with a few years back explained away such absences as the manifestations of an unpredictable and remarkable Curse.
The story had to do with some great clash of wizards in the ancient past that disrupted the fabric of reality in such a way that the wizards' threads of existence, their very ties to reality, became frayed, as did those of many of their ancestors. The result was that, occasionally and without forewarning, individuals so affected would periodically wink out of existence. Sometimes such a disappearance would last only a matter of hours, sometimes days or weeks, and sometimes the victim would never be seen again. Most of the time, though, the curse sufferer would snap back into reality after a short absence, and when he did it would be in close proximity to an anchor of his bloodline's reality, aka, an individual or, even more likely, a group of curse sufferers.
Obviously, every PC was a curse sufferer, and every time a player missed out on a session or jumped back in, the PC winked out or back in. It had little to no effect on the players and alleviated the GM of the the concern of dealing with the unmanned character and guessing what the missing player (and, often, his missing character sheet) had subtracted from the group's total resources. At first this seemed a bit forced, but after a few weeks, the curse became just a fact of the world, one more oddity in a world of oddities. Also, once accepted, this explanation lent the game a degree of verisimilitude lacked by some other solutions - like a character mutely fading into the background for a session.
RPGs like Pathfinder account for thousands of eventualities and possibilities that can drive fantasy storytelling, but simply overlook others, particularly metagame (out of game) concerns like the one in the example above.
So I'm wondering, has anyone - or has any played with a GM who has - concocted some elaborate in-game explanation or rule to handle metagame concerns?
I'm not looking for opinions on such systems or insights on why you don't need them - of course they're optional, of course you can just not let such things bother you, of course you can handle things in more traditional ways (heck, I do myself) - rather, I'm interested in hearing how some GMs might have adjusted their games and altered their worlds to accommodate the occasional realities of gaming.
This can go beyond ideas like "The Curse" too, so if you have a special in-world explanation for re-specing your character using new options, or ignoring rules you don't want to deal with (encumbrance? carrying rations? ammo? eating? drinking?), or whatever, I'd love to hear about it.
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My main group says that anyone who isn't there is rolling around on the ground just off-scene going "wheeeeee".
In deference to the Gamers, we put the PCs of absent players in Mark the Red mode. (they're physically present but mentally absent)
Usually, in combat the DM will lock the absent player's PC in one on one combat vs something and the outcome of their fight is the same as the main fight.
Works well enough, as long as the majority of the players show up...
Usually, in combat the DM will lock the absent player's PC in one on one combat vs something and the outcome of their fight is the same as the main fight.
I tend to do something similar, whereas the missing player's character is always too busy with something else to actively participate in the players' decisions (including combat) yet always participating in the characters' efforts to accomplish their quest/mission/adventure.
'findel
"Damnit. The wizard went into curse-fade with the plot token again."
What do you do when a cursed individual vanishes with an important mcguffin?
"Damnit. The wizard went into curse-fade with the plot token again."
What do you do when a cursed individual vanishes with an important mcguffin?
I don't believe we ever had a MacGuffin to worry about in that campaign. But totally valid question, that would have to be addressed. It would not be wise for a GM to stymie his own plot with his other artifice.
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Some ten years back, one of my best longterm players began to lose interest, and he was showing up less and less (he doesn't play anymore, sadly; he was a great player).
He was playing a cleric, and the party was engaged in a longterm campaign against a dangerous cult. It was one of those "trying to summon their evil god back into the world" thingies.
I took advantage of the character's class to introduce the notion that the more power this cult gained, and the closer they came to summoning their terrible deity, the more the balance of divine power was affected. Thus, every time the player did not show up, his character fell comatose, hit by a blast of divine energy that put him into a trance.
We'd roleplay his agony as the blast hit him, then he'd fall and the party would do their best to secure him, or bring him to a place of safety. Eventually, the player just stopped showing up, and the character was left at a monastery.
The side effect was that nobody wanted much to play a cleric. But healing duties were eventually taken over by a druid.
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So, in my longest running, highest-level epic campaign, when I worked at Barnes & Noble in 3.5, things started out simple enough - we had five players (a little large, but definitely manageable) - and everyone was on the same schedule for their off-time. Occasionally someone's changing schedule would cause conflict, and we'd do something else, but mostly it was cool. We started at third level. Things went fairly smoothly right up until around level 10, at which point the (up until then slowly) divergent schedules just could not support the party being a single party any more (and we'd ballooned into nine players).
So, I basically began using character hooks for things that were established (templates granted and other character plot hooks) to split the party into two relatively related groups individually going after different objectives in order to achieve the same ends. Then I did so again due to schedules. And again. Finally, with fourteen players, and six parties, I had "groups" ranging from one to three varying by week, effectively creating unique and individual plot elements to explain why character X was in location Y attempting to achieve objective Z.
As terrible as it was for my free time (full time manager job, church volunteer, running roughly six different highly mutable parties) it was glorious and I never once had any complaints about plot contrivances (even when I asked) but instead generally received compliments. I actually charted adventures around the projected alterations of the schedules based on past history so I would have a story to say when players A and B ran into each other and/or party C and why player D had to split suddenly. (There were only one or two cases where I was truly blindsided and had to go "I'm sorry, but your MacGuffin and/or Princess is in another castle... carry on one-to-three more weeks, thanks, and sorry.")
At the end, I contrived for most of their various groups to utilize where they'd gotten and reconvene at the same general point - the abandoned city with corrupted-then-purified Shadow Mythallar in which the adventure had started (now a flying city), but it was still split into two - one group effectively took care of the war one PC had started between three city groups that had spread beyond his intent to the entire region (it was part of an aborted attempt to claim power; he'd also opened a super-powered and super-sized series of gates to the elemental plane air at the bottom of the ocean... without first making any lid or foundation for his "planned" underwater city... and had gone from N [starting] to NE-or-CE [actions] to LG [atonement] to CE [subsequent actions] and from worshiping Mystra to worshiping Cyric and finally to being an NPC when the player didn't like him any more and switched out for a hound archon); and the other group effectively did the ultimate plan all along and used all their various unique magical items, three mythallars, and a few major and minor artifacts to create a brand new god (who was, unbeknownst to them an evil god to be used in the next campaign that hasn't happened yet, due to lacking all but one member of the previous group).
Some story elements off the top of my head:
* Save your dragon girlfriend from the ethereal doppleganger's layer while everyone else finishes this! (taking care of two PCs at the same time)
* Go on a quest to redeem yourself after being filled with darkness! (worshiper of Selune taking on the shade template in a bid to sheer power off of Shar)
* Rescue the largest gathering of your people since Blingdenstone! (a svirfneblin PC, obviously)
* Your hidden masters have suddenly given you new orders - a threat to your operation in this city has become very active... assassinate him! (a Harper/Scar Enforcer half-elf who was conveniently torn between following the two organizations)
* Your not-so-hidden masters have given you information on a new threat - a Sharran cultist of Shadow Weave users is near, and you must finish them off! (a Halruan Mage Hound sorceress)
* Your lover is not as dead as you (and everyone else) thought: go rescue him! (a swashbuckling PC who'd gotten involved with an NPC)
* The ruined city is currently under siege: you (and your large number of followers) must fend off the invaders long enough to allow your fellow PCs to get the MacGuffin that can actually save you! (PC with leadership)
* Becoming a god[dess] isn't as easy as you thought: in order to get the power you need to ascend (and only a god[dess] of <insert specialized thing here> can <insert necessary thing here>) you must do <insert special epic quest here>. Hurry, though, as time is of the essence! (This took care of three different PCs at the same time, each doing their own thing, each whose future special power was needed power for bypassing or overcoming certain things).
* You must find the unfindable: pass through the maze of endless annihilation and get to the library of limitlessness to attain the knowledge of how to raise gods! (a different leader-PC from before basically expended their entire leadership score on sending people to their deaths here - yay!)
In addition to unique, individual story reasons, there were several "sudden death" (emergency) reasons I kept on retainer:
* a hole in space-time has snatched <person> away/dropped them off! (not actually as unusual as contrived as it sounds, since the area they were in had reality and magic literally melting around them - made it very dangerous to cast too many spells at once and similar things were happening to NPCs and unprotected objects and locations too)
* suddenly... the Demons/Tarrasque/Cyric/Other Epic Threat! (the great thing about working against Cyricists: they're fabulous epic illusionists and can create the most convincing things)
* actually, you used that machine incorrectly - you're now somewhere else... (even more) dangerous [and alone <use as appropriate>]! (this allowed me to smack my players occasionally for doing stupid things and completely abandoning the plot on occasion)
* Shar hates you. Have fun in "Eternal Night (redux edition again)" {about half a dozen ways to interpret this, all of which are useful in different situations}. (well, the entire game was about defeating Shar, and she had entire cults that had grown up around destroying the PCs... it happens sometimes that they actually succeed; this could also be from Cyric, Malar, or Talona, although the last wasn't really a major concern)
* You all realize that <MacGuffin> in <MacGuffin-land> is necessary for <a part of/the next/the final> <the process/step/ritual> you are attempting to accomplish and only <insert person or persons here> can do so... due to powerful EPIC wards only <insert number here> person(s) can enter!
All of this worked because the PCs knew fairly early on that they were literally racing against the end of the world (well, "the world as they knew it", but they just thought it was the end period - funny how few think to double-check ancient prophecies and "wise" NPCs). They also knew that time was of the essence (and actually two groups ended up time-travalling, one doing so twice, using up their "three times back" gift they'd been given by <mysterious force>).
So, yeah, I was pretty proud of all that. It represented a huge amount of work on my part, but it worked out well, in the end. I loved it, and most of my players did too. With plenty of in-game reason (and constant half-set-backs or minor set-backs due to opposing/conflicting forces, but always successfully accomplishing something - three steps forward, one or two back kind of thing), it allowed them to play on their schedule, allowed their characters to always have something to do, and allowed the story to flow well, but none of them to have a full grasp on what was happening, until they met up again and swapped stories... and realized it was bigger than they thought. Every time some new facet was revealed to them they hadn't seen or thought of and surprised them with the complexity and scope. It was great.
A game was scheduled during a time when I had class to attend. The class ended one to two hours after the session started, so I missed a bit of the game, but not much, as the players typically just sat around waiting for me. I was playing a tetori monk with crane style, reflavored as a practitioner of the brutal wyvern-emulating style of his homeland.
I asked the DM if I could be challenged by my kung-fu rival at the beginning of each session, and catch up with the party later, explaining that another of our bouts ended in a stalemate from which he fled, vowing once again his undying vengeance upon myself and my family. The DM refused, I was sad, as that would have been fun and given him a recurring villain to use.
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Whoa! Some VERY cool ideas in here guys. Special thanks to Tacticslion for the NOVEL! Keep 'em coming!
RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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When a character sheet is availible, we have another player run the character, with GM able to overrule any abuses such as having the missing player's character open all doors, trigger all traps, and use more than normal expendible items on other party members.
When a character sheet is not availible, I rule that the character catches a very bad cold or flu, and drifts into the background in misery - somewhat like having the nausious condition. I figure that under normal gameplay, no one ever just gets sick unless it's a specific dissease attack or hazard, so you get sick whenever your player isn't around. If the sick character has an ability that is expected in the group out of combat, I'll let the PC struggle through their illness just long enough to use it, so if the party is used to having the wizard teleport them back to town after an adventure, he can do that still, or if the cleric normally prepares a restoration spell and someone gets energy drained, that's okay too. For combat and other encounters, they're just too sick to participate.
On a similar 'metagame concern' note, I sometimes re-fluff magical items to change size category.
Adventurers find a old elven treasure. They find a magical elven long-bladed dagger, which the gnome character claims. As soon as the gnome claimed it, it transformed (mechanically speaking) in a small sized short sword.
I know there are rules for using inappropriately sized weapons but I'm happy to play that in game, its a medium sized dagger but mechanically speaking, its a small sized short sword as long as the gnome claims it as hers.
... and now that I think of it, I had an absent player's (planar) character gated by a prime cleric in a Planescape game once...
'findel
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Were you one of my players Wesley? If that is your real name....
I used the same basic conceit. Two mages forever battling. The both had half of and artifact of summoning. One summoned only single large high level creatures. The other summoned only multitudes of low level creatures. So early in the campaign the low level pcs were summoned by the second guy who put them use for defense. As they got higher in level they were summoned by the other guy. When the player came back the appropriate amount of time was expended. I usually had the character appear in the middle of a battle.
They swore that when they hit 20 they would track those fellows down. Unfortunately, I had to move.
I once played in a campaign, where a similar mechanic to that described in the original post was used. It was an Arthurian Legends setting and the GM had characters of missing players go into the Fairyland. At first, it felt a bit contrived, but the GM has managed to weave it very well into the campaign and sometimes stuff would even happen to them there to enhance the plot or generate side-plots.
Personally, when I know the absence of a player is going to be long-term, I have the character temporarily leave the group. For example, I had a cleric summoned by her church authorities to assist in performing an important ceremony/ritual, when her player left for a few months.
When a player's absence is expected to be short-term, I temporarily assign the character to another player for the session(s), though I retain the right to veto/choose actions for the character.
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Quite simply, I tell the group this.
"We are jumping into a parallel reality in which Character X never existed, and all that he has done was accomplished by Character Y. When Player X returns next session, we will return to the original reality."
Works for me.
Admit it - you stole that idea from DC Comics!
Well, thanks for the compliments! And yes, I write... too much.
* Players: nine players left (one moved away, I'd thrown out one, one literally disappeared off the face of the earth, and the other four changed jobs/schedules too radically for even me to handle)
* (demi-)Gods/Demon Lords/etc Killed/Otherwise Taken Care of: Twelve, maybe? Somewhere close to that (with seven more guaranteed to be taken down shortly, for good or ill).
* (demi-)Gods Created: Eight or near that (three were party members and two were former party members).
* FR NPCs Met/Killed/Owned/Rescued/Acknowledged/Otherwise: twenty-one or maybe a bit more
* Scope of Change in Forgotten Realms: Most of it, but especially the Vilhon Reach, Halruaa, the Illuskan lands (plains of purple dust) and a few layers in the Abyss (though the Dalelands, the Swordcoast, and Tethyr were about to feel massive waves of change due to the events that occurred, and Shade gained a massively powerful rival floating city with a triple-strength Mythallar-like-effect(s) with no Mythallar needed); the Drow Pantheon and the deities mentioned above all suffered pretty heavily and the Elven pantheon was poised for a serious problem soon and would likely mostly parish (though the players didn't know this) and the Gnomish pantheon was annihilated (but a PC replaced Calladran Smoothands); gnomes (aside from the svirfneblin) almost all fell into Cyrics sway and went completely insane as Cyricists
Now, to make sure that no one ever knows that I ("made half of my adventures up on the fly [by the seat of my pants <insert as appropriate>]" and/or "ad-hoc'd 3/4s of the bad-guys' stats" and/or "totally repainted adventures they'd already completed but added a different <MacGuffin-and/or-boss stats> so they never knew") in that campaign! Those secrets will be safe with me forever!
(I totally planned out the over-arching story, the short term arcs, and key events, but heavily relied on my firm grasp of the monster manual, the player's handbook, the DMG, and a few pre-published modules, as well as a few random generators and dice to keep it running - the players fortuitously never realized how slipshod it really was behind the scenes.)
Also, if any of you are ever in central FL, feel free to "join" a game (that I'll likely "invent" [read: 'repaint'] on the spot)... my last group pretty much evaporated, so...
I'm running a party of 5 characters through Carrion Crown, and we just finished the main part of Haunting of Horrowstone.
I was faced, however, with a couple of problems, That party had reached level 3, and needed about 2200 exp to 4. But that's no biggie, I can just set up some nice encounters for them either on their way to the next plot location, or w/e.
The Second problem I had was the desire for the entire party to own all of Horrowstone, I figured it would be harmless, and it helped solve the first problem. However, during the session where they would essentially be working to procure the rights to own the abandoned prison and get to level 4, two of the players couldn't make it in town early enough after Thanksgiving.
1. There is a rat infested tower on the north west perimiter of Horrowstone that the party discovered. They decided to leave it alone and let the rats be.
2. I ran the first set of guys w/o having any idea as to how I was going to either justify the absence of the other two characters, or even have a vague idea as to what they'll end up doing
3. The party is portraying itself as a general contracting company, so they have plans to go big and make a name for themselves. They want to use Horrowstone as a kind of HQ for their (at the moment 5 person) company
So when I run the first three dudes they go through the paces of cleaning up Harrowstone and scouting for talent. Long story short, they win their first two recruits by beating them in a drinking contest. The Drunken Monk then thinks it would be the greatest idea to prank the two new recruits by suiting them up in the weapons and armor looted from the dungeon and then covering the room they're in with massive amounts of blood, so that when they wake up, the party can vaguely hint at their exploits of their first night at work for the company.
Then I start the combat encounter for the session, and one of the players asks how I'm going to explain 2 party member's absence? My response was this:
"Isn't it obvious? It doesn't take 5 dudes to dress up a couple of blacked out drunk in chain-mail, so they decided to go ahead of ya'll to the rat-infested tower with some buckets so they can get a start on collecting the blood necessary for the prank. How hard could rats really be, even if they're dire?"
we usually have a magic backpack of player storing,
should I ever GM a group where player presence is more casual I'm sure going to steal ... inspire myself on that big wizard curse thingy.
Thanks for sharing.
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So I'm wondering, has anyone - or has any played with a GM who has - concocted some elaborate in-game explanation or rule to handle metagame concerns?
I played one long-term AD&D campaign in high school under a DM who was a big J. Michael Straczynski fan. He took a technique Straczynski used when writing Babylon 5 and applied it to our games.
Every player character had a couple "back doors" that were set up in advance and it was our responsibility as players to keep them up to date. Since these back doors tied into our character's personality/history/goals we had near free reign to develop them in any way we wanted. One back door was used to explain pre/post adventure absences. For example:
That way if we stopped the game in a reasonably populated area and someone didn't show up the following week there was a reasonable explanation why that character fell behind. Plus, it gave the DM a way to introduce new plot threads ("You weren't here last week, so this is what you discovered while the rest of the party was in the dungeon").
The second back door was something we kept in reserve in case the character left for good. Either because we wanted to switch to a new character, because the character died, or because the player left. That way if a character left with vital knowledge or an important plot item the rest of the party could get to it. For example:
Since we were all used (I would even half-jokingly say "well trained by the DM") to setting up an "out" for our characters it was surprisingly easy for us to cover someone leaving/arriving mid adventure. They were taking treasure back to the base camp, they were rearguard while the rest of the party went ahead, they were separated in the fighting, etc. In the event of a sudden mid-dungeon disappearance where we couldn't come up with a logical explanation for why the character wasn't there then the DM would take over that character for the week until we could "get back to civilization" but that was a rare thing.
So the DM left it up to the players to write themselves in and out of the adventures and it worked wonderfully.
In situations with my group if one player can't make it we either just kind of fade the character that's not there into the background (usually with comments like "hey that combat went smoothly, was the sorcerer not blasting us with fireballs?") or we have a stock set of lower level PCs to play to either fill in background history of the campaign, or to advance the plot in small ways. My last experiment with that was making a party of all goblin female spell casters, call it Drix's Archons (a cheap goblin style rip off of Charlies Angels) and have them do silly things that both advanced the world plot, let the players learn more about a campaign world, and have them try some of the new spell slinger classes.
So I'm wondering, has anyone - or has any played with a GM who has - concocted some elaborate in-game explanation or rule to handle metagame concerns?
A couple of years ago, I ran my own Forgotten Realms campaign that involved a great overarching plot about shadows and Ravenloft and an ancient evil returning to the world yadda yadda. There was a point where the party could have entered Ravenloft and the game would have taken a different tack, but they decided against going through that particular portal.
Anyway, I digress. In that campaign, I used a similar schtick as Wesley's arcane curse to explain player absence. Essentially, the mists of Ravenloft would whisk that PC away where they would experience something tied to the larger campaign. Usually it involved strange locations or encounters that hinted at the larger plot, but on their own were often confusing riddles. Heh. When the player returned for the next session, everyone else would be keen to find out what they had learnt (if anything). It got to the point that I think some of them were hoping someone would be away every session!
In my current Jade Regent campaign, it's easy to explain away absences as PCs can simply return to the caravan or (if already with the caravan) can become ill from Ameiko's cooking and motion sickness. Since we have six players who (understandably) can't play every week, it's very useful to be able to do that with some degree of believability.
I used to run a game at a game store and one of the players had a weird schedule that made it hard for him to show up. I came up with this idea where a wish would go horribly wrong and it would affect his character in a seemingly weird way. So I placed the ring of wishes, with only one wish remaining, and he wished that he would be idolized forever. I turned him into a figurine of wondrous power. It seemed to work randomly for the party. They couldn't figure out the command word and they couldn't stop it from activating. There wasn't any set duration. They just knew that their friend was trapped inside so they kept it with them. Part of the campaign was trying to figure out how to reverse the effect.
There was an adventure where the party was captured and all their gear was taken. The figurine was taken by one of the captors. Imagine his surprise when it changed into a fully armed and confused barbarian.
Bob that is awesome. That is all I have to say on the matter.
We use the magic floating bubble trick. Everyone who fails to show up goes in the bubble. Other dms I've run with have used the your character is suddenly stricken mute, but performs their base functions without comment or query while controlled by, roll a d6, you Ted.