![]() ![]() Maybe there's really no good in-fiction way to account for the character's absence. Even ham-fisted, though, it's better than cancelling the game. Sometimes these side-treks work well in the story. Maybe they go hang out at the inn because of a bum knee acting up. Sometimes things line up well and they can serve the story even in their abscence. If we can somehow work the absence of the players's character into the story, that's a great way to go. That puts the odds highly in favor of being able to run a regular game. If you can manage to run a game with three or four players, it would take five to six people cancelling before you have to cancel a game. ![]() This is why having six primary players and two on-call players can work so well. Thus, if someone misses a session we should do our best to keep the game going forward. Many people have other priorities in their lives, like it or not. ![]() It's hard for many of us to maintain a regular D&D schedule. We love sharing these stories at the table but real life happens. Getting friends together regularly is worth more than the pure cohesion of the story. About one in ten let the character go on a side quest.īased on these results, here are my own thoughts, experiences, and recommendations.About one in four let someone else run the missing character.About half let characters just fade into the background.I broke this down into a Twitter poll on the topic and got the following results from about 3,100 responses: Cancel the game until all or all-but-one player can make it.In the fiction, send the character off to engage in some other activity.Simply ignore that they're missing and keep going on.The following typical ways came up often: I spent some time digging through the results to try to gauge how DMs tend to handle missing players. To prepare for this conversation I asked on Twitter how DMs handle missing players in their own games and got about 250 replies. What do we do with their characters? Which options offer us the most flexibilty and ensure the most games? Which techniques are most likely to keep people at the table and which might push people away? We'll dig into all of this today. In today's article, we'll look at options for handling the game when players are missing. In a previous article I wrote recommendations for finding and maintaining a D&D group. Finding and maintaining a group is the biggest hurtle for Dungeons & Dragons. Of all of the things required to run a great Dungeons & Dragons game none is harder than getting a group together regularly to play. New to Sly Flourish? Start Here! How to Handle Missing Players in D&D ![]()
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