How do You Handle Absent Players?

This coming weekend, my group will be playing one of our two regular campaigns without me (I’ll be escaping Utah’s single-digit temperatures for sunny, sunny Florida).

The older I get, the more often the question of what to do in this situation has come up. Fortunately, there are plenty of good, simple choices.

In my group’s case, both campaigns feature levelling by GM fiat, so that’s not a concern, and our Stargate game is mission-based, making it very easy for one character to be somewhere else for a session; D&D isn’t mission-based, so I don’t know what’ll happen there (but I trust my GM to do what’s best for the group).

Here are some of the most basic and popular ways to handle an absent player. Their PC…

  1. Fades into the background entirely.
  2. Gets explained out of one adventure.
  3. Fades out, but pops back in for combat.
  4. Is played by another player.
  5. Is played by the GM as a pseudo-NPC.

I’ve used the fourth option (played by someone else) successfully as a GM, and been on both ends of the second option (explained PC absence), which I quite like. There are so many ways to tackle this, though, that I’m sure plenty of sound approaches didn’t make my quick list.

With level-based RPGs, there’s also a school of thought that absent PCs shouldn’t get as much XP (or any XP) as present PCs. Over the years, I’ve learned that the other direction — no penalty for absence — meshes better with real life scheduling issues and responsibilities, and it’s my preferred approach.

So how about it — what do you do?

GameCraft Forum: Focused on Play

Founded by Levi Kornelsen, the GameCraft forum is an interesting community. Describing his vision for the site, Levi says: “Tabletop RPGs are basically this giant pile of stuff people do, which they have all these different views of. They talk about the views a lot. We’re here to talk about the stuff they do.”

It’s an interesting focus, and GameCraft has a thoughtful, welcoming atmosphere — one example being a post for new members reminding them that they’re already experts at talking about how they play. I admire Levi’s approach, from mission statement to structure and overall feel.

The Toolkit forum seems to include the most threads for GMs, with topics like what constitutes traditional GM prep and starting a campaign. Although it’s still a fairly small community, there’s quite a bit to see.

Actual Play Archives

Via My Play, I just found out about ActualPlay.com, which describes itself as: “…a portal for roleplayers everywhere to find written or recorded accounts of RPG sessions from all different game worlds and systems.”

There are currently 121 actual play accounts listed in the archives, most of them in the form of brief blurbs linked to messageboard threads.

Seeing how other groups play can be a valuable tool for evaluating RPGs and learning new tricks of the trade, and ActualPlay does a good job of making actual play writeups (and recordings, etc.) accessible.

(You might also enjoy the Forge’s Actual Play forum, which — fittingly — tends to focus on accounts of indie RPG play.)

Storyboard, Prep Tool and GM Screen

The other day at the office, I got a catalog from a company I’d never heard of before, Ultimate Office, and they had one product in particular that really stood out: a three-in-one GMing tool.

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Tips for Building Your GM Notebook

In his first post, new forum member Berwick asked a good question: What should go in your GM notebook?

xcorvis responded with a link to GMing resource I hadn’t seen before: Nightcloak’s GM Notebook (274 kb PDF). Thanks, xcorvis!

This free PDF clocks in at 62 pages, and in addition to presenting a section-by-section approach to building a GM notebook, it goes the extra mile by including blank forms and plenty of examples. It’s geared towards fantasy, but should be easy enough to generalize to other genres.

(You might also enjoy the comments on Do You Use a GM Binder? here on TT, and Roleplaying Tips #69, which is also all about creating a GM notebook.)

Fear Checks: Always a Bad Idea

Without exception, in every RPG I’ve ever played that used a fear check mechanic — a roll players have to make to keep their characters from running away — that mechanic is always incredibly frustrating.

“Fear check” is a general term that covers morale checks, horror saves, fright checks — any core mechanic where failing a roll means that your character has to flee.

Fear checks disempower players and paper over game design issues, and they’re never a good idea.

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Making the Gods Matter in Fantasy RPGs

Most fantasy RPGs feature a variety of gods, and those gods tend to play a prominent role in the world. There’s a spectrum, of course, ranging from settings where the gods are in the background to worlds like the Forgotten Realms — where, in the form of their avatars, the gods literally walk the earth.

Either way, though, assuming a pseudo-medieval baseline, the gods are generally pretty important — and by extension, they should be important to the PCs. The problem is that in my experience, this is rarely the case.

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The GM’s Thumb Drive

Not owning a laptop, I’ve found my little USB thumb drive to be very useful when I’m running games at someone else’s place.

It lets me carry support material, like the SRD for D&D, backup game notes and character sheets, and also download stuff that was generated during the session — for me, that’s always been session photos; for you, it might be something else.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s so small that there’s also no real downside — and it’s a great place to back up your campaign data, even if you don’t access it during the game.

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