Can you still play D&D with a player missing?
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- čas přidán 4. 07. 2024
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► INDEX
0:00 Intro
1:34 They got arrested
2:46 Somebody screwed up a spell
4:04 One Dollar One Shot
5:14 They're splitting the party
6:25 They were summoned
7:15 They're hungover
8:24 They have jury duty
9:08 Outro
D&D player called in sick? Don't panic! Your Dungeons & Dragons session can keep on Dungeoning and Dragoning without them for at least one night. Here are six fun in-game explanations for why a party member might be separated from the group for a short time.
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I'm sorry Ginni but I consulted the special hat group and you've been fired from the human race for your "clerical error" gag. OOOOOOFFFFF... I smiled, but only because puns are sadism.
One dollar one shot... With the bonus would that be a One dollar double shot?
Had a player that missed a session and we decided that the character's absence was because his pet cat had laid down on top of him and he didn't want to move and disturb them.
Haha that's brilliant!
Oh, wow. I can finally use this, I've had it in my head for years:
"I em sorry. I kennot khelp you... I vould loff to khelp you, but as you ken see, *I haff kyat on lap.* Maybe someday, kyat move, then I khelp you. But for now, is nothing I ken do, because of *kyat on lap.*"
“Sorry, I can’t go adventuring today. I have a cat on my lap.” 😂
He should’ve bring the cat with him, he can play with a cat on his lap
@@Mystiic_Bvv Kyat does not like to move. I em sorry.
In one if my partner's old dnd games, there was one guy who often missed the game. They all decided that this guy's character had narcolepsy, but not in a convenient way... The group had to actively figure out what to do with this guy's limp, unconscious body, dragging it with them while they continued the campaign from wherever they left off when he's absent - like throwing his body at the guards that just showed up at the end of the previous game, lol
that’s great
Love it
That's hilarious! I once had an instance where someone was resurrected in a weird way and that player was absent for the following session. So we did the same idea where he was too weak to regain consciousness and they just had to carry around his limp body.
I wonder how common the limp body thing is done lmao. I do that though I prefer ingame reasons for absences
In my game I am the late/ character due to when my job is over for the day but my character sleepwalks, and is almost always in a state of just waking up (undead warlock) hence his use of readying fire bolt, to use as a heat source to constantly brew coffee.
In our last campaign, one of my character's biggest elements was that he was replaced by the fay with a changeling as child, so in the modern time, said changeling became one of our most heinous enemies. One time I had to miss a session, so since I couldn't make it, the Changeling secretly kidnapped me, and took my place. When I came back the next session, I returned not as my character....but as the Changeling taking on the guise of my character. Then, as the Changeling, I led them to a secret location, where they discovered my character, tied to a post, and one of the biggest battles of their lives upon them, at which point I took back my character, the DM took back control of the Changeling, and we all rolled for initiative.
I love it! That is such a brilliant character arc!
That. Is. AMAZING!
That is a really awesome idea!
Might steal it..
That’s so cool! Did the party know you were the changeling and not yourself when you came back, or did they find out when they found your character later in game?
@@fromthegraysea they didn't know until we came upon my original character tied up.
I died at “Jury Duty.” It’s so wonderfully mundane I LOVE IT.
Sorry, can’t uncover the pending apocalypse, civic duty requires my attention! But instead of being mad everyone’s just like “Yeah, yeah, we get it, we get it.”
What is jury duty?
@@rogerwilco2 in the USA, those facing criminal charges are judged by an impartial panel of fellow citizens. To form said panels, the government mandated that US citizens of age must take part in them when called upon.
Mundane, but a solemn duty rife with roleplay opportunity
I play a lawyer (college of eloquence bard) and I am SO using this the next time I can't make a session.
In my campaign, I introduced a magical location called The Midnight Library, which is basically just "big ol' interdimensional labyrinth of books run by a friendly owlbear". Door only opens at midnight, so the missing player typically leaves a note behind for the party to find after a long rest. Whoever's missing then gets to make rolls for learning info on literally any aspect of the world, since they're surrounded by HEAPS of lore. Makes for a good absence AND they get to dig deeper into the story and find out key info on the sly!
OOOOOHHHH, COULD I STEAL THAT IDEA FROM YOU?
It sounds so good :D
@@radioactivepower600nanaspersec Sure! Heavens knows I stole/mashed it up from a few others (ATLA, memes, The Pagemaster being a few inspos). Go for it, hope it's fine for your table!
@@zigorously
Ohhh, that's why it really felt familiar, ATLA had something similar
But don't worry, I'm sure they won't mind.
We haven't even started the campaign yet, as I'm waiting to have everything in my world a bit more clear and for finals to finish up already for everyone
You're a genius. This is too good
I gave my players an empty genie's lamp that's made of wild magic. It's lonely without it's genie (who was freed by it's previous master), so occasionally will scoop one of the party members inside for company. In character, the party has done everything they can think of to get their friends out, stop the effect from happening, or ditch the lamp, but it has gotten attached
So in my party's first session we did Mines of Phandelver and one of our players was late. She was a sorcerer with a noble background. So we had some fun with it and said that as a noble she's not used to getting up early and was still sleeping. The party set her in the wagon still sleeping and it was great because we had just finished the first combat when she arrived so her character woke up in a wagon surrounded by dead goblins. We all had a good chuckle about that.
In my online game, the reason the DM gives for missing players is they have a tummy ache. Sure, we can fight drow matriarchs, take on the Xanathar's Guild, and even survive death itself! But gotta take some time for self care when that roast disagrees with your tum-tum.
We did the summon thing for our table when a member had a serious health condition and would be gone for a while (possibly indefinitely); his character was summoned to deal with a court case associated with a backstory conflict. When he came back, the changes with the conflict were ones we could bring into the game, so it didn't feel quite so excuse-y.
I DMed for a party with a Zealot barbarian. The one time he knew he was going to miss session, we just had him die at the end of the previous session, since Zealots can come back at no cost.
In my first campaign, one of my players was absent so we just pretended she had wondered into the woods, got blackout drunk and then the party just tied her to the horse and there she stayed for 2 sessions cause she got really sick, I still laugh about it to this day 😂
i play in a campaign at a local game shop, and our running gag whenever someone is absent is that their character is hanging out in the bag of holding. the bag of holding has also been a convenient place for new player characters to spawn from 😂
Now read up on 'the Bagman' in the Ravenloft book.. Scary possibilities!
@@joolsgrommers1466 funnily enough, in the very first campaign i played in the party never got a bag of holding, and when the bagman emerged from our npc ally's bag of holding and tried to kidnap our adopted baby dragon we basically swore them off entirely. so you can imagine my confusion when i started going to game stores and interacting with the online dnd community where people want to get a bag of holding asap and i'm just sitting there like "are none of you people worried about the bagman??!"
I’m lucky to have players that are perfectly willing to suspend disbelief when it comes to player absence.
If I need to come up with an excuse I just say the party member stayed behind to manage/guard the excess treasure the group has collected.
But further than that, if the session is a BIG one, we just reschedule. Even for last minute emergencies. It’s only happened twice and the delay was 100% worth it to have everyone there.
Besides, we got to play Minecraft.
Love your videos. So entertaining to listen to while I work
Before starting DnD I didn’t know this was a common problem, I just knew it would be one with my friends. So I built this into the campaign. Their whole goal is to resurrect an npc who died in the first session, but in order to keep his soul from moving to the afterlife, they have to let him share their body through a tether. So they tethered him to a magic amulet and whoever is wearing the amulet acts like they are in a trance. Whenever someone is missing, they are wearing the amulet, and when they come back, I let them role play conversations they had with their friend’s soul inside their mind.
My missing party members are protected by magical plot bubbles. They’re present with the party, they travel together and experience all the same adventures, in combat they’re fighting a minion off to the side (no actual monster stat block or hit points are tracked here, it’s narrative background combat), and they’re perfectly fine as long as the party isn’t all taken down somehow. This all depends on the DM/players filling in the missing player on what happened, but that would need to happen regardless.
And if the whole party is taken down, are they dead or do they get to keep running their player?
Thankfully we haven’t run into that scenario yet!
This is how I handle it too. We refer to it as 'soft-focus' or 'backgrounding' of their character. They're around if the party desperately needs their skills, but they're also going to be relatively immune to danger. "Unfair!" I hear you cry - nah - they don't get any XP for the session either! That keeps attendance up.
This seems really popular, but yours is the first time I've ever seen a good explanation of how it can be done effectively. Thanks!
I designed my Eberron game to play as a series of one-shots like a television show. If players couldn't come, their characters weren't in that "episode". There were the major episodes that needed the full cast to play out but a minor episode would always be available if anyone dropped out last minute. More planning required for this tactic but since I was very into this idea it was more fun for me. Major episode: casino heist. Minor episode: investigating a murder. Too bad I couldn't keep the group together at all. I had big plans for that campaign.
It’s a shame the toy sales were low and you didn’t get greenlit for season 2
All the way back in sophomore year high school my friends and I had our first player absence, and the GM said "idk he's in the shadow realm or something." This has spread to every other group we play in or DM for and its absolutely hilarious. Player's absent? oh their character's in the shadow realm. The shadow realm doesnt even exist within any game we play. what being shadow realmed actually means is that that character basically ceased existing for that one session, and next time theyre back, no one even acts like they were ever gone to begin with.
This is another common idea that is way more valuable than it sounds at first. If the table finds it funny or effective, yeah, why not? Not all tables NEED canonical explanations.
Alright, do our D&D group share the same brain cells as yours? Because that’s almost exactly how the inside joke started!😂
The only difference is that I (the newest DM in our group) am planning to make it a canon realm/plane, I just need to find a way to implement it in-game.
@@haruhitomaeda4802 that seems cool. I'd be careful about implementing it as something "canon" to your games tho because imo the strongest thing about it is how handwavey it is. the ultimate strength of the shadow realm is that it alleviates the need for an explanation
@@superpsykkko Alright, I’ll keep that in mind when discussing it with my player. Thanks for the advice!
I was already giggling at the "clerical error" joke but the laugh track follow up was glorious.
Considering the character I'm about to play on next campaign, I have a list of options on why she's absent in game
"Ugh! Wake me up tomorrow! I drank too much last night!" (Heavy drinker)
"Sorry guys, I have to make a quick stop at that village over there. Have to fill up this months quota." (Patron related)
We had a player who missed a great many sessions when it was not her fault. She came up with "my character is a raging alcoholic. So when I can't be here, Mitara is drunk."
When we first had an absent player our quest was bringing dwarven ale to our hometown. We acquired the bevrige last time. So the DM said that the rogue tried out the drink, then slept in the cart on our way back. We dropped him off at the tawern and picked up another quest. Since then if a player can't make it we always say that their character drank some dwarven ale and needs time sleeping and curing their eventual hangover.
Similar to #5 (7:15), the character came down with a basic cold. There's always a chance to fail a Fort/Con save, and the party wouldn't want to catch the contagion. It's not critical and no reason to waste spell slots when bedrest will do. Or it's a divine cold! Retribution for some minor slight from a petty, moody god. Then when the player comes back, a miracle! The saving throw was a success!
Had an absent character, decided they weren't absent, they just decided they wanted to make a video diary and they were the camera man. End of session they had not only gained us access into important area because they had a video camera (somehow), they also earned an inspiration point.
During one campaign I was playing with my friend group, we started a running joke that whenever any of us couldn't make a game, our character got transported to another dimension by a giant floating purple alien or something like that, and then by next session they'd pop back into reality as if nothing happened. It was kinda short-lived as a joke but nonetheless funny.
Did your alien have only one eye? Did it only have one horn? Was it giant sized? Did it fly? Did they only eat people? I’ve been on their trail sense 1958.
Grab your ketchup and crunch away my friends.
At our table, we just have the player ask someone else to play their PC during the session. It generally ends up just being for combat due to the demands of roleplaying your own PC as well as someone else's, but it at least helps keep combat balanced for the DM. We have a large table, so people are missing often. I think these are really awesome ideas, though! I like the potential for roleplay that comes along with them. Also, the player doesn't have to worry about things their PC knows that they don't because the PC was there, but the player wasn't.
This is, in itself, another good idea.
I needed this so much. I run a dnd club one day after school, so other kids also have clubs on the same day sometimes. What I've done is very easy so far, but that can only get me so far. One of my players is a fallen time god, story is they annoyed gods, so they got punished, sent to the mortal realm, and given amnesia, and the way I dealt with them missing for their musical practice was saying their time is like tracer, sometimes, they just disappear and reappear randomly. Another player's character isn't part of the main group, as in the mercenary group most of the players work for, so his character is free to come and go as he pleases, and it has worked well so far, but that can only get me so many campaigns of good logic
You're doing it right, though
One of my old games had a fix for this that worked for continuity problems as well: magic world, sometimes people or places would just get stuck in a little vortex that made them vanish. It came back and people were just kinda aware that these things happened some days.
during one of our games, our bard and rouge couldnt make it but we were currently down in the basement of a magic house that we were locked in
our dm was more than happy to have them ghost along side us so that we could still get heals from the bard and not worry to hard about where they went but pretty much the entire party (including the missing players) agreed that it would be pretty funny if the bard was tapping around the wall for the hell of it, accidentally tapped a brick connected to a mechanism and had the wall flip around scooby-doo style, hiding both the bard and the rouge inside the basement walls. there were at least two wonderwall jokes made that session as we imagined the bard, muffled on the other side playing his lute with nothing better to do xP
nice
Bard: "Amontillado?!?"
Rogue: "🙄Oh, don't be so dramatic."
@@khayyin359 LMFAO
For my latest game I purposefully invited a larger group than usual (8 players) with the knowledge that not everyone would be able to make it every time. This lets us still play with a full party and we haven't missed a session yet. I'll definitely be using some of these explanations in the future!
Literally just what I needed, I recently talked to my players about handling absent players since we have major issues with scheduling, thanks again Ginny!
Recently had this problem but there was an easy workaround in my case.
The character is a Swanmae (lycanthropy but you turn into a swan randomly) so I just had her turn into a swan and stay that way for the session.
So she was still able to gain experience and didn't have to be retrieved the next session
I had this come up in the last two sessions I ran (which were the 4th and 5th sessions of this entire campaign).
The first was a travel session where 2/6 players were unable to join due to work, and fortunately those were characters who one needed help and the other swore to help her - they actually approached me and asked if the explanation for their absence during travel was that they decided to travel separately from the rest of the party so they could meet up with some knowledgeable contacts who could help them with their research!
The second was this last game, where we shifted our every-other-week schedule by a week and now have one player who will spend a long time unable to play (but we discussed it before the campaign and made sure she was alright with being a recurring guest character rather than a main party character). We had her character stay behind as a lookout in town to guard a person of interest who's falsely suspected of murder, and in subsequent sessions will probably be having to lay low (framed for a high-profile theft and currently wanted) or hunting down leads for who framed him.
This is incredibly timely. Sadly, one of our players has just announced he's unable to commit to any sessions for the foreseeable future, just in time for tonight's session. Am scrambling for a way to write him out of the campaign that isn't entirely permanent, but is long-term. THANK YOU!!
If I had enough friends, I would love to write a Love Actually style story where only 2 or 3 people need be together at any one time. Have 6 group like this, each affecting each others worlds, but never properly meeting until the grand finale(s) when you conclude the campaign by grouping them all and discovering why there was a power outage for like, six days, in the middle of what seemed like an inconsequential moment, that just proved minorly annoying, only to discover that party 2 had been fighting a monster that ran through the power grid, and they electrocuted him to save earth.
My group used the "Stuck in the outhouse" excuse during a Curse of Strahd campaign. We had a wagon (mobile fortress) that also pulled an outhouse behind it.
Letting an inconvenience not only slide, but shape and contribute to the story is awesome. Definitely something I'm going to advocate for.
Typically when I have a person missing a session for any reason I usually say theyre being effected by the Curse of Lethargy. A horrid curse that prevents people from taking any form of initiative or interaction with others and will typically follow a familiar person or people ( the party ). Typically the character can't do much other than interact in combat or when asked to do a skill check by another player. They snap out of this curse around the time the player returns to the game.
I absolutely did one "They're hungover" except it was "They're extremely drunk and know they shouldn't be adventuring." I arranged with my DM that the next session they showed up with a tankard the size of their torso strapped to their back. Their first words, "I made an excellent mistake."
Our group's biggest issue is that almost everyone is a couple, so it's almost always 2 people out when there's an absence. We've taken to just running one shots when we know it's coming bc explaining away 2 feels a lot harder.
This is an important wrinkle. We need ideas specifically for this.
@@Vinemaple They can just have any combination of 2 from the ones mentioned in the video. Especially splitting the party for some sidequest works for more players (like an escort mission). They can still keep up XP-wise and can gain a few coin while away.
I definitely love the jury duty idea, which makes me want to mention the fact that I always like to have more variety in the forms of government we see in D&D settings. It doesn’t always have to be an absolute monarchy. It would be interesting to have a campaign set in a country that’s some form of democratic republic.
The world in the 1500s had a huge variety of governments, so I don't get why people just put only monarchies in their d&d worlds
Absolutely. There’s a majority elf nation in a setting I’ve been working on that’s a representative democracy with the role of head of state being split between not one but three people, the tria, trian, and triac.
When you mentioned "summoning", I at first thought about monarchs, nobles or other high-ranking people writing someone a letter. Turns out, I'm really missing out on quite some options here since my game doesn't have Gods or teleportation or pocket dimensions. So if someone needs to get somewhere quick, they ride a horse - which means I always need someone close enough to where the party is to be important enough to warrant splitting up the party :/
On the other hand, the same explanation can also work for longer absences--they had to ride a ways longer
You can still do summons! A few ideas off the top of my head:
* If your party is at a point where they're getting fame, any local government official may want to get a report on the goings-on of this group, and the guy who's absent happened to be the first guy to step out of the inn in the morning (or the only one awake at night when the summons came). A note was left so no one needs to be worried.
* Similar to above, if the party seems to be wealthy, the local tax official may demand a meeting under similar circumstances. Depending on the party, this could turn into a "they're in jail" excuse or just a very long, very boring Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare.
* Extended family: if the absent player's character isn't an orphan without relatives, perhaps they have an aunt's husband's second cousin in the area who's DYING to catch up. Sure, it'll be boring as heck, but they won't want to get an earful from Aunt Mabel if she hears this second cousin was ignored. (Conversely, maybe Second Cousin Archie is the most obnoxious person on the planet, but in a way that you can't reasonably confront, and the only sensible way to deal with this by hiding away from anything remotely public while Archie is in town).
* Mistaken identity. The messenger was sent to collect someone, and "I'm not them" won't cut through their stubborn insistence that the character come along.
* Witness to a crime. Your absent player's character happened to walk outside and witness an armed robbery, a kidnapping, etc. The criminal was caught by local authorities, but because that character saw it happen, they have to testify at the trial, and goodness knows how long they have to stay around.
This said, in your game, the obnoxiously mundane and time-consuming errand may be the best option; I had to be absent from a game for a while recently, and our official excuse is that a family lawyer found a whole bunch of new paperwork that's relevant to my character's inheritance, and she had to go home and deal with Court Stuff.
If absolutely nothing seems to work, I'd encourage looking at your worldbuilding to make sure that things aren't designed so that the party isn't too independent from anything that remotely looks like an obligation to another living person or organization. And if your players keep trying to find excuses for your in-game excuses for other characters' absences, it's probably a time for a chat away from the table about letting the story bend to accommodate real life.
"Musta been a clerical error!" 😆
I actually lol-ed!
My group uses a common short term disease we call "Purple Brain Fever". It conveniently renders the character mute and unable to contribute to party discussions and planning, but they are still able to use their basic abilities if combat breaks out and, in a pinch, can contribute further via skill checks. Purple Brain Fever also gives them a keen survival instinct, so if the character is taken down to 1/4 HP or less they immediately disengage as a free action and flee the battlefield to the nearest safe spot.
My favorite absence explanation came from my party’s loxodon fighter. The previous session ended with a white dragon swooping down on the party and initiating combat. Both the loxodon and the dragon did some severe damage to each other, but the encounter ended with the dragon escaping and both parties much worse for wear.
At the start of the following session, to explain the loxodon’s player’s absence, the DM said the dragon left him hospitalized and stuck recovering in a room at the inn. By the time his player returned, the loxodon was back with a vengeance. Thus began a rivalry neither side would forget.
JURY DUTY!!!!! That is brilliant! It works for pretty much any genre. Fantasy/Post-Apacolyptic: A "conscription band" is sent to the area to round up random people to serve on a jury. Sci-Fi/Space Opera: Character is legally obligated to sign-in to a virtual jury on Zoom or its equivalent. This is why I love this channel. I never would have thought of something so basic. But it works. Thank you!
7. Doppleganger. Only works if the party believes that you're running that character for them while they are gone. They pop in next week and confront the imposter.
yeah the two things we use is "They are still with the party but like T-posing behind them, ominously floating. everyone ignores it, it's not a weird thing", "hangover/foodpoisoning/they don't feel so well and stay at home"
The latter is for when we start in a tavern, and plan to stay in town, so they can join back at any point of the story; the former is more when we are already on a mission, in a cave or whatever, then theyre technically still with the party but don't give input and sometimes engage in combat and sometimes don't, depends on the situation, the t-posing kind of became a running gag.
we keep having players missing mid-dungeon crawl, so they usually just get yeeted to the ethereal plane temporarily. or stolen by a demon, in one case.
This is super cool
And speaking as someone who has one of those "I missed DND" horror stories, I'm all for it. I knew ahead of missing it that the usual plan was just to have someone else play your character while you were gone. I did not know that my DM's impression of my character was one solely of being selfless. I had to miss the session because I had final papers due and I needed to work on them.
The session was on tuesday. I handed the papers in on Friday. The DM sent me a message not long after midnight on friday, saying "here's the recording." I started watching it. Two and a half hours later, the DM added "Your character died." Spoiler alert, 2 hours and 40 minutes into the recording is when my monk bit it. He waited as long as he possibly could to tell me.
My first ever character death. And I didn't even get to make the choices that led to it.
Now to be fair, the DM was willing to work things so my monk wasn't permanently dead, especially since they had a celestial as a father and so there was some serious power behind them. But the implication was still permanent consequences for the act of having to miss a session so I didn't flunk out of university.
Due to a throwaway joke, my group had our Party's ranger just inexplicably T-posing for several sessions
Ran a game with friends where there was alot of back and forth absences and we decided that the cause a magic effect where people just disappeared and repeated at random intervals. We called it "schejulling".
As someone who has advocated for just running games with as many people as can make it to a session for a while, these are all charming as recurring character "flaws" for extra busy players that oftentime cant make it or can be easily expanded for longer planned absences. Great video!
Some of my favorite excuses in games I’ve played include:
~in the kitchen baking
~narcolepsy
~decided they didn’t want to go out partying
~back at the tavern doing a Bob Dylan impression
~failed a con save so badly they ended up in a coma
~turned into a wooden statue (aka the garden gnome incident)
~dealing with the consequences of giving a monkey a gun
~trying to discern what their prophetic dreams are about
~retconned so they failed their final death saving throw and the first twenty minutes of the session is a funeral
I was going to run a game for a friend and her cousins, but one of them already knew they wouldn't be able to make regular games. I came up with the idea of their character having what I called a "Blinkdog curse" to explain their sporadic absence. Essentially they'd Blink to the ethereal realm and I'd have the present players share notes with them to allow their character to "see" what was going on even when they couldn't interact. Unfortunately plans fell though and I haven't been able to implement the idea, but I still like it and think it could work.
Skerples has uncontrollable teleporting and dimension shifting as a possible outcome of eating improperly prepared blinkdog.
My favorite variant of this was a GM who had everyone who adventured regularly being carriers for something called the Dungeon Flu that results from exploring ancient spaces which don't get regularly disinfected. Mostly harmless, but it can flare up on occasion and cause some nasty symptoms such as uncontrollable runs, a skin rash, and other general unpleasantness. It's not curable and simply requires a day or two of bedrest to recover.
Love the advice here... We have a couple of players with schedules more random than my dice. I will use many of these. Thanks Ginny! BTW Ordered the Deluxe Calendar. Can't wait to get it.
Had a warlock whose patron was a multiple-personality entity called Cha'at. Took heavy inspiration from streamer/V-tuber culture, complete with genre-awareness, constant bickering with Cha'at, and doing silly challenges for supachats. He regularly referenced other games and sometimes even mentioned starting from a save point and needing to try a different tactic from the last attempt (even though we haven't actually run the encounter yet). Missed sessions were easily explained as connection issues, installing updates, or just streaming other games for a while. Since I had the least predictable schedule of the group, it worked out pretty well.
I had a player who couldn't show up regularly. My solution:
Curse: The character is cursed to occasionally turn into a porcelain doll (any day they couldn't show up) that the party must care for until it wears off. Any time the player could make it the character reverted to its normal form and would need a brief recap of things that happened while it was a doll. I used milestone-based XP, so that the missing player didn't get punished by being outleveled by their peers.
With many holidays coming up, this subject has perfect timing!
These are some EPIC and original absent D&D player explanations. Thanks for sharing this video with us.
Sharing these epic ideas around to our socials post-haste!
I remember when I missed a session during a dnd game and I came up with a really funny way of me getting back to the party. I'm a genie warlock and along the way last session a character found my ring that's my container. At the beginning of the next session I came out of the ring slapped the Rouge who took the ring and followed them
0:40 That plug though. So masterful.
An idea I had for my teifling rune knight Vanguard was born in the the plane of fire, in the city of brass to be exact, and is still technically a slave to a fire giant who made a “retrieval ring” that Vanguard wears as a piercing on one of his horns. If the fire giant wants Vanguard he just has to cast sending onto the ring which triggers a banishment spell… and as some of you know banishment is permanent to entities who are born on another plane. Then once the task is done the fire giant uses plane shift to send Vanguard back to the plane he was on. The criminal sentencing that got Vanguard enslaved was unfair from the fire giant’s perspective and let’s Vanguard “run free” in the prime material plane and calls him back on occasion for said sentencing. This still works if banishment is used on Vanguard in game since banishment lasts for one minute normally, which is the same length of time it takes to cast plane shift; if Vanguard is banished in game his fire giant owner just sends him back.
Or so that’s the idea. I never got to use this character in game yet so don’t know if it will work.
A variation of "Splitting the party" works very well with the few games that do military focused games. I do a lot of Wargaming derived RPG systems, so it actually comes up a lot for me. Units have a lot of chores that need to be done, that aren't any fun to RP. Sentry duty, kitchen help, firewatch, gear maintenance, asset inventory, and of course the dreaded latrine duty. A character is gone today? Obviously they failed to dodge an officer looking for "volunteers".
I have one player that's half-commited to the campaign. We made their character in a way that they can be absent without worrying about explanation. In world, they're a Dragonborn Bard who is possessed by Glasya, Archdemon of the Nine Hells. The reason for this is still unknown to the party, even to the Dragonborn. Whenever they're absent, Glasya takes over their body and assumes all of their abilities and equipment.
It works really well! Funny enough, the PC's like the Archdemon more than they do the Dragonborn.
I’ve used the hangover one lol, but also in a collage setting, they used the excuse of paperwork
I manage a chronic pain condition and my order of the scribe wizard character was perfect for this. Any time I had a bad pain day and couldn't make it to session, my character in game was "unfindable, curled up hiding somewhere, with her face planted in a stack of tomes." And that's just what she was like, so it never phased the party. Whatever exp my party received during the session, the DM would say my character had earned the equivalent via her focused study. That kept me from getting behind my party in levels.
Alternatively, our DM would send us on epic "solo quests" during a missed session.
I love these as they help me quite a bit. keep up the good work!!!!
I appreciate the help you post
Gods damnit, Ginny, you are *determined* to make every aspect of D&D more enjoyable, aren't you? Where do you get off helping us have fun?!
(Sarcasm, just because....you can never tell on the internet these days)
Great video, thank you very much for your work!!!
Keep them coming :)
This sounds a lot more well thought out compared to just saying a character randomly passed out and then stuffing them in the bag of holding for a session
I ran a game with a warlock who's patron would spontaneously summon him to another plain to do something for him.
one of my campaign ideas involve the multiverse stability slowly collapse so if someone is missing they are got randomly teleported to a random different plane and they would have some effect from the plane next session. anything from "they just look burn" to a permanent wild magic effect like "you are now blue, good luck" (obviously asking the player before doing anything anywhere near permanent, but if they are ok with it it can lead to some very fun stuff, especially if i use the fools gold wild magic table and not the vanila one).
My players came up with the idea to put the players that aren’t there into a bag of holding that I gave them and leave the top open so air could get in and out
Really great video for a very common problem!
We've retconned players staying behind at the workshop to finish up the item they're making. Sometimes a character gets lost while foraging on the journey between locations. When they eventually show up, they will have to roll for some interesting or rare ingredients.
"Jury Duty" now I'm just thinking of the time I got IRL jury duty with one of the other players in my group and he snuck a large pocket's worth of jerky to snack on while we went through the screening. He got caught, and I ended up running my mouth at one of the lawyers, so neither of us got picked to serve on that jury, lol.
We've done most of these in our campaigns. One time, the artificer and I were both going to miss a session, so the rest of the party did a side quest while our 2 characters disappeared into the wilderness to (among other things) discover/construct the artificer's steel defender. Other times, we've just had the character be "present" and someone else ran them in combat if it happened.
In the game I DM, the plan is actually to assume that not everyone will be there and scale encounters accordingly. The characters have a base they work out of, so when a player misses a session, their character is just back at the base working on their own thing (the Forge Cleric has been using those opportunities to smith a set of plate armor).
Road to El Dorado was a one shot for a Rouge and Bard when everyone else couldn't make it.
The suggestion I made to my DM, granted we're playing in his homebrew world (although we only use source-books we collectively own since we use D&D Beyond), is to run B- to Z-plots as necessary when the full party isn't available. It means managing multiple characters for some of us, in some instances we're provided with a collection of character sheets and asked to pick (with some ability to make changes to facilitate better engagement), but it's a minor inconvenience at most.
This serves a few purposes, one is to allow the players who are absent to not have the story escape them since the main plot, the A-plot, only progresses when they're there. It allows the players with more time or less rigid schedules to still play in the same world, giving them more lore to chew on or extra back-ground information that is easier to relay to the absent players since it's less pertinent than an A-plot session recap. It allows for trying out alternate character concepts or character components (personality/RP, classes/races/mechanics) in an already established and somewhat familiar setting without having to make sweeping changes to a main character, which we call their "hero character", or having retire or kill them off completely.
A lot of this is only made possible by our DM's insatiable appetite for homebrewing, plot-writing, and desire to run sessions (weekly if he had his way, much to his partner's chagrin, although she plays too). This obviously wouldn't work for a module or pre-written/bought campaign as they're much more rails-y, or with a DM who was substantially less motivated or was more starved for time.
One my group likes to utilise is the fact that hey, your character had the runs this morning, makes for a fun excuse
Wonderful advice!
I missed a session. When i came back I was waking up in a cage next to a new player in the group with 60 mushrooms
As a new DM, these are very helpful! Thank you for this video! I'm currently running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist for my group, and it isn't unlikely that someone will get arrested. I have one player whose backstory is that he is a mail carrier, which not only works excellently in our group, but it also gives them a good reason to be absent every now and then.
Excellent editing for the One Dollar One Shot clip! Well done!
Big fan of theming the in game excuse to your irl excuse. Can’t come to the table because it’s your anniversary? Your character found a cute barmaid they spent the night on a date with. Work running late? Your character finds a quick quest posted that’s too good to pass up. Away on vacation? Your character gets swept into the feywild for the week and comes back with a tan and a hangover
These are so clever! :D Thanks for them!
This is actually pretty usefull, thanks a lot!
I'm running a pirate campain where all the characters are on a boat in the middle of the ocean but I have a lot of missing players which I can't say just wandered off, so right now on the ship there is a break out of a highly contagious flu, everyone is healed but they are still carriers for sometime afterwards, and the ships medic is very strict about quarentine measures, which has been a lot of fun!
„Do the mechanics serve the game? If they don’t just let them go.“ so true!
Characters missing sessions have lead to a great ton of develepoment and sidequests in my games, I always try to give an in game reason for them to be missing, sometimes it doesn't work, obviously, but sometimes it works great. Just last week, a player missed the session, and now the party is at risk of starting a war between kingdoms because of it.
One of the players in my FATE space themed games had to miss a couple of sessions so we replaced him with an NPC saying he was on special assignment, when he came back we had him captured undercover and launched a rescue mission. We gave him a special OPS backstory the group then uncovered and a dangerous space empire chasing the group once they broke him out of captivity.
I think it really helps campaigns that have frequent scheduling issues to always aim to end a session at a "hub", even if that's just a camp-site or the nearest village or whatever, because it makes the explanations a lot easier, e.g- they had other business in town, they're guarding the camp etc.
You can also get away with this for example if you end about to enter a cave/tomb/whatever and have them guard the entrance, or maybe you've advanced in a dungeon but they have to hold a lever on a trap so everyone else can get through safely, leaving them stuck behind (for now).
It definitely helps if a DM can get a knack for ending at places where it's easier to explain things. If you do stop a session right before a big showdown (we all know how long combats can be, so often a boss effect does get delayed), then having the missing player(s) blocked off with magic, or turned to stone or something else you know the party can't deal with without defeating the boss first, then that can be a good way to background characters who *should* be involved until you can get back to the non-combat sections where they're just following along mutely or whatever.
I saw a ship pilot PC player missing a few times in sci-fi 5e. One time the character was just grumpy, didn't feel like talking but flew us around all the same while we side quested. It was actually quite cool.
a term from my warlock’s contract is that if he disobeys a direct order from his patron, he’ll lose control of his body for a while so whenever im absent my warlock is being put in time out for not getting proper sleep when told to by his patron
there was one time i couldnt go in person but could play over a call and i decided to play his familiar instead because technically my warlock still had control over his mind so he could still give orders telepathically
the familiar doesnt speak common and none of the party knows beast speech so it was very fun playing this tiny imp who had to gesture wildly with his little arms to get its point across
How our DM explained a character’s absence was she was trying to sell some taxidermies of enemy heads (long story) so she went in a business trip
If a party member is unavailable, it's usually our Wizard. If we move forward with the main campaign and he's not available, then he's stuck researching something or learning a new spell(s). We normally do some side campaign or one shot if we're only down 1 person.
This video came out at the perfect time! I have a player or 2 missing the next 2 games but want the others to still have a chance to play. I'll use some of these for sure!