What are some creative ways for a GM to deal with narrative for when players are not able to attend a session?
Hey all, my friend is starting a new game. We have some newbies joining and their attendance maybe hit and miss, with work schedules and life. What are some creative ways your groups have managed missing players outside of someone paying for them one session?
If you can, end sessions at safe spots (i.e. not in the middle of a pressing adventure) and then just make up a character-appropriate explanation for someone sitting it out.
The dwarf got too drunk at the tavern after the last adventure and is sleeping it off.
The druid is communing with nature to realign herself.
I tried being creative a lot but I have since found that the lost elegant approach is 'they are here, our camera just doesn't focus on them today. Yes, they are there, on the sideline fighting their own monster. Oh no they are 100% with you, maybe you guys even talk, but that scene just isn't in today's episode'
If half of the players cannot make it, we postpone/reschedule. No point in playing if half the group is missing.
If someone misses a session, we ignore them unless they've designated someone else to play their character. They still get xp but as I've gotten older, IRL happens and it's no ones fault if they can't make a session.
If a character must be involved and no one has been designated, I take over for them. I personally don't like doing that because reasons, but some situations honestly call for things like that.
Other than those things, I type up post session recaps and share with them. That way it's a good refresher in between sessions and if someone missed a session, they can read and catch up with what happened. Mind you, we play every other Saturday for 2 hours at a time because IRL and adulting lol.
If you’re looking for a narrative reason, a few come to mind, depending on setting.
The players are bound to a god who can summon them at will. Their gods are fickle and don’t care about the PCs plans when they get summoned.
The world has a phenomenon occurring where people become ethereal at random. They can not interact or be seen, but they can still see what’s happening.
Several dimensions are overlapping and occasionally PCs will be pulled into the wrong one for periods.
My table doesn’t mind too much and accepts that people can’t make it sometimes, and not stress too much about an in game reason.
They’re just off doing other things. If this is a more social/political game, then they’re off in another part of the city or whatever, doing something - ask them when they return what they were doing! Use leading questions like “when the party was investigating Governor Basauna, someone mentioned you were spotted in the Paper District. What were you doing there?”
If it’s a dungeon crawler where you stop at various rooms during the adventure, you can do similar but it’s less interesting. “Hey you wandered off and got lost and now you’re back”
For the most part, the campaigns I've been in have just sort of mutually agreed "don't think about the character who's not here." We just ignore that they're not present - they don't do anything and they don't suffer any negative consequences. Sometimes that doesn't quite work and we have to fiddle around a bit, and sometimes when there's an extended absence we'll come up with a more solid in-universe explanation for why the character's not there, but usually our games are fairly informal and this works for us.
This has become my favorite way to deal with it. Some games (5e) I would have someone else run the character since they would be important in fights. Other games, just have that character fade to the background.
Occasionally if they have an item in their inventory or some particular skill that makes a big difference we'll have the absent character do that "in the background."
The only times it gets really troublesome is if we're doing some kind of plot-heavy adventure that genuinely needs that character to be there for it to make sense. In those cases things get squirrely, and I'd actually be willing to call the session if something can't be worked out to work around it.
The way I've handled it over the years is to run the campaign episodically and keep the party consistently on the move. Think Star Trek, Kung Fu, Power Rangers, etc. Essentially, build up the plot gradually, but have each "episode" focus on the characters who are there and able to act. Focus on the characters present in the episode; then have the others get filled in as they swap in and out. Obviously you can do callbacks, but you don't need to have everyone in every game that way. Heck, you can call back to things a character wasn't present for so that they learn about the event diegetically.
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