Intermittent players

dsivis · February 05, 2015, 09:46:17 PM

So it looks like I'll be starting a game soon with players that are mostly intermittently available. Let this be a thread to brainstorm ideas to deal with that -

1: The PCs are trying to repair problems in the time stream, and characters get "randomly knocked out of time" like in the Justice League Unlimited episodes Once and Future Thing.

2: PC has sudden responsibilities turn up (eg a Mechanicus character in Rogue Trader has to supervise emergency repairs)

Omega · February 05, 2015, 10:44:59 PM

Quote from: dsivis;814304So it looks like I'll be starting a game soon with players that are mostly intermittently available. Let this be a thread to brainstorm ideas to deal with that -

1: The PCs are trying to repair problems in the time stream, and characters get "randomly knocked out of time" like in the Justice League Unlimited episodes Once and Future Thing.

2: PC has sudden responsibilities turn up (eg a Mechanicus character in Rogue Trader has to supervise emergency repairs)

Scroll down some and see?

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=31583

Downtime is one way. Healing up, more than just the short/long rest stuff. Crafting, training. 5e adds some optional training time rules so you could say the character had to take a break.

Vanishing in the middle of an adventure is trickier.
Easiest solution is the ol' trap door that drops the character someplace else and they wont rejoin till later.

VacuumJockey · February 05, 2015, 11:00:13 PM

In my high school days, a powerful and mysterious wizard would teleport player characters in and out of the party - depending on who showed up to play that day. It wasn't immersive, but it worked well enough.

mAcular Chaotic · February 05, 2015, 11:20:01 PM

I just pretend the character is there but ignore them completely.

trechriron · February 06, 2015, 01:48:14 AM

Play a style of game that is more "episodic".

Missions begin and end in one session or have logical stopping points per session.

The stable of characters can change - make them part of an organization that makes this more logical.

What genre/game are you thinking of running?

Ravenswing · February 06, 2015, 01:53:07 AM

Well, one way of doing it that way is to have completely self-contained adventures. Any one adventure begins at the start of a session, and is guaranteed to end at the end of that session; none will carry over, and plot arcs are weak at best.

Another way I've known it to be done is that people don't have "their" own characters. There are X number of "pool" PCs, first-arrived, first-chosen. (Or whatever else method of switching them around you might prefer.) Granted, this works best if you don't have a group where three show up this session and seven show up next one.

soltakss · February 07, 2015, 07:44:51 AM

What we normally do is to keep copies of character sheets available, so that anyone who cannot make the game can still take part. Because we have been playing for a while, we generally know what a PC would and would not normally do, so they stay on the fringes and help out.

When a player cannot make several games in a row, we generally freeze the character sheet and then gibe experience when the player returns. That way, the PCV advances in fits and bursts, but does not get too disadvantaged.

However, one player in out current campaign had to work near Reading for over a year, so his character sheet was last updated in 2013. It makes some things very difficult. He's back now, so we should get an updated sheet soon.

The Butcher · February 07, 2015, 08:05:08 AM

If a player misses a session after things stopped in media res (say, inside a dungeon), either the GM plays that character as a NPC, or another player plays both his character and the absentee's.

Otherwise, we just assume the absentee player's character disappeared mysteriously, and in the following session we roll on misterguignol's table (Tales of the Grotesque & Dungeonesque, Book I, p. 87). Of course, if it's not a D&D game, we interpret results accordingly.

dsivis · February 08, 2015, 02:10:54 PM

Quote from: Omega;814308Scroll down some and see?

Whoops - my bad.

Will · February 08, 2015, 03:13:48 PM

I used to run Delta Green, where you have government agents who secretly engage in covert surveillance and fixing of various supernatural threats.

So what I'd do is if a player missed a session, they had been unavoidably called away by their day job. And, conversely, if they showed up later, they had been tapped as extra help.

RPGPundit · February 13, 2015, 01:38:06 AM

Usually, in my games, I demand that players be able to commit to very regular attendance. However, my DCC game (which is a lot less serious) has a lot of players that come and go and come again, from time to time.
I usually come up with the most ridiculous excuses possible, pretty much anything. Often, if they miss the first session of a dungeon crawl, I just had them having wandered off or missed the departure, and then they fall in some hole that just happened to land them near the party. Another common excuse is having been kidnapped by extra-planar creatures.

Ravenswing · February 14, 2015, 04:06:52 AM

(nods) The only campaign I ever ran where I didn't care who showed up or not was a Champions run for a couple years at UMass-Boston in the mid-80s. At the time, I worked just down the street, got out mid-afternoon, and was in a SFB campaign in the evening. So I had four hours to kill of a Wednesday afternoon. I was already running three fantasy groups, so I had zero time or inclination to develop plots or scenarios. I told the players right off the top that plots were pretty much going to be two-dimensional patinas leading up to grand brawls, that powers and abilities based around detective work or problem solving were going to be wastes of points, that sessions would be self-contained, and that my usual rigid attendance rules were out the window.

I went with whomever showed up, increased or decreased the opposition to suit on the spot, and we had a perfectly good time until I moved out of the Boston area.