My group varies by night (we only play once a week). Two of us are the core and another 2 are hit and miss.
Since we don't play that often we don't want to slow down our progress by "practicing" when it's a 2 man night, and then playing the same scenarios when everyone is present. The other guys are also not likely to play solo or catch up when they are together.
Is there a homebrew rule that works will to Proxy players who are not there? I know we can plow on without them and they can always join when they can, but then they'll be weaker. I also don't want to be consistently replaying scenarios...
Thoughts?
I'm in a group of 6. Most of the time everyone is there, but we play when only 4 can make it. We grant the feats we earn to all the characters, even the ones that aren't there. They just don't improve their decks.
My group is similar to Hawkmoon's, it seems. There's about 7 or 8 who sometimes want to play with 3 that are consistently there. So we have 6 characters made up in the box. If someone doesn't show up after a maybe a month, I write down what they have and put their cards back in. If someone misses a week where we upgraded a feat, they mark it the next time they play.
You can't always have the same band of adventurers on the same quests, so I figure that the character who missed a week was doing something else equally heroic.
We haven't had to do it yet, but that's how our group of 6 will play it as well. If one of us cant make it, they can get the reward for the scenario even if they weren't there, so there isn't a large disparity between characters.
I like the thematic idea that the missing characters were off on their own sidequests during those games!
The house rule I've been using in my irregular gaming group is this: when we win a scenario, in addition to the usual rewards, any character who is behind on feats gets to tick an additional feat (though not of the same type as you just got from the scenario). Also, you get your role card when you tick your fourth power feat.
This rule isn't my original idea; I read it on BGG. It helps new characters catch up to the group and keeps infrequent players from falling too far behind.