How to Handle a Player Missing a Session
Some solutions for a Game Master who is short a player.
There’s a running joke in the TTRPG community that the greatest monster any party must contend with is scheduling. Like any good joke there’s a hint of truth behind it. The inability to make multiple schedules between four to five adults work is often what ends campaigns. It’s tough to balance your free time with work, family, chores, and other responsibilities. Some days you get half of the group cancelling due to last minute issues.
That becomes a balancing act for the GM and partly for the remaining group. I don’t want to cancel for the players who do show up, and I don’t want to progress the story too far and force the missing players to catch up. It can be a tough all to make.
Thanks to some research online and inventing house rules, I’ve put together a few options you can utilize at your table the next time you get cancellations. These will hopefully keep your next D&D session on track.
Apply Advantage to Proficient Skills
Every character has the skills they’re proficient at executing. Rogues have Sleight of Hand, Barbarians have Athletics, and GMs have Snacking. The best way for everyone to regularly contribute is to have a variety of skills they excel at to make any scenario beatable. But if the Rogue player is sick and the party who is at the table has to steal a key, what are they to do?
A rule I’ve implemented at my table is “Absentee Proficiency” where I take whatever skills the missing character is proficient in and let the party roll with Advantage for those skills using the in-person character’s modifiers. It keeps the character in the story so there’s less hand waving “they were busy with whatever”. It’s essentially what would have happened regardless. This method allows the present players to feel comfortable making moves they normally wouldn’t without their expert.
This takes some of the weight off myself and lets the players split the weight of handling an entire character. I also don’t like the full “Help Action on everything” because it feels too much like a blanket statement and makes the missing player character a stone faced assistant. I want the players to fully be into their characters and what the other characters are thinking. I feel it helps build the role play aspect.
Porter the Wizard
(I was unable to find the exact source of this rule, it is not my invented idea.)
Deep in the archives of the nightmare that is the internet (probably reddit) I stumbled across a post where a GM pitched their solution to missing and unexpected extra players. Porter the Wizard!
From what I can recall Porter was a wizard in their setting who spent all of his time teleporting heroes where they needed to be. It removed the explanation of where a character went when the party was deep in a deadly dungeon, or why a new adventurer joined without needing an extensive backstory. If a player is missing a session Porter would just appear, say something along the lines of “I need to borrow this hero, carry on!” then vanish with that character. It left the players with an in-story reason why their compatriot is not with them. It also removes having to track an extra character for anyone playing.
It’s an elegant solution to what could be a consistent problem. It also cements the element of silliness most D&D groups maintain, while world building with a possible new quest giver in the future. Now they’re aware of this strange wizard who appears seemingly at random across the world. And if Porter has a quest for the party, they’re already aquainted!
One-Shot Placed Elsewhere in the World
I’m a semi frequent listener of Not Another D&D Podcast, a comedy actual play podcast you can find anywhere you get podcasts. I’m not trying to sell you on NADDPOD, they certainly don’t need my help. What I want to highlight is the move the GM used when one of the players went on a short hiatus.
When a player had to leave for his paternity leave the GM paused the main story line and brought in another friend to play with the remaining cast and rolled up new characters to tell a different story from another part of the world. I personally enjoyed this tactic as I got more world building, and new characters from most of a cast I knew and liked listening to. it was a smart pivot that accomadated everyone involved.
There are some constraints to consider if you do this for your home game. Do the remaining players want to create new characters for a single session? Do you as the GM want to write any new story for another part of the setting? I know for my home group the answers for this are usually yes, but it can be some additional work to have the group think of new characters for a new setting that’s only explored when someone misses a session. A bigger ask but possibly the most rewarding of the options presented here.
Hopefully one of these ideas will salvage any game sessions you might otherwise cancel. I’ve already utilized a version of “Porter the Wizard” with a multidimensional pain-in-the-ass named Zaphod Qort. The players love the mechanic, but they hate Zaphod, which means it’s working as planned. Happy gaming!