What do you do when players can’t make it to a game? How many players need to be missing before you change your plans for a session? Thanks so much to Dscryb for sponsoring this video! Visit dscryb.com/supergeek and use the code SUPERGEEK at checkout to get 10% off of your first subscription payment. dscryb.com/supergeek
My current campaign has a rule of 2 people missing then we cancel. 1 person is fine and we have a running group chat to plan and keep each other in the loop
For better or worse, we tend to have a rule of "If a player feels they need to be there, and they can't, we cancel." It's slowed our campaign--a *wonderful* Tyranny of Dragons I'm DM-ing for, even got a little homebrew PC backstory stuff that's threatening to take over the main pathing!--but it's been well worth waiting for a week once we got back for the next session, every time.
In one of my campaigns, when someone can't make it, we do what we call a "Team Building session". Basically, we pick a place on the world map, or major threat in the setting, build it out a little, and then create a party and their backstories that fit into that place or would be fighting that threat. We collectively narrate out the trials and triumphs of their first major adventure, learn their relationships with each other, name the team, and end the session. The lore we build has ended up coming back into the sessions a few times, and makes the world feel more rich. It's gotten to the point where I usually look forward to those sessions more than normal sessions.
That's actually really cool Flando. It's a great way to also give a reality check to the players in that they are important but they aren't dealing with the only issue in the world. That's sometimes the problem with final bosses because the party can't exactly send an army otherwise it wouldn't be narratively satisfying. Now the guards you walk into seem anxious, like they're spread incredibly thin already. It's amazing world building.2a You can't be frustrated that the guards don't help with this BBEG if you've established that there are 8 issues also happening with less capable people trying to solve them because resources are thin. Also, thank you for all your wonderful work under CR (and I'm sure other things you do), you've been incredibly helpful to so many 🖤
sounds interesting - I was thinking about running a "flashback" for some of the party's entourage... some little conflict they "never got round to mentioning"
We have this issue with a campaign I’m in where the DM will cancel if even one player can’t make it and it sucks cause we play bi-weekly and it’s ALWAYS THE SAME PERSON CANCELLING LAST MINUTE
Get one more player and make the one that is causing the issue "optional". They can join when they can, just add some extra monsters or something, but they are not considered regular player.
@@5daboz if it wasn’t almost the end of the game we would, the DM wants everyone there for the final few sessions but since they always flake we can’t finish
Something like this happened not long ago for me. One of our players wanted to have a bit of a break and we made the foolish decision to hold off until he was ready to come back. Some time passed before we finally chased him up, turned out he'd decided to quit entirely, and hadn't even bothered to tell any of us, so we COULD have continued without him, but by the time we learned this the impetus was completely gone.
Our Roll20 game has 7 players plus the DM. As long as we have more than half, the DM usually will go ahead and run the session, with the missing players "following aling in a fugue state" so they're with us if they can make the next session. We also have a second DM that runs an alternate campaign if the main DM, who is a vet, has to be on call or has an emergency. We DO try to get as many people there for big fights.
This is exactly how my party is. We have 7 players (plus an 8th who's at college now and comes rarely), plus our DM. We'll still typically play as long as we have like 4 players able to come, though we'd probably avoid doing any massive fights or big plot beats during thar time. Our DM will usually narrate the absent players as covering our rear as defense or splitting up with us in a pincer maneuver or whatever. If it's a single character, we'll sometimes have them just kind of following and someone playing them, or if they're going to miss more than a few sessions, they go off to handle their own personal matters.
5 Players, 1 DM. Age between 30-45. We play every tuesday, !no rescheduling!. As long as 3 out of 5 players are present, we play. Otherwise we cancel. We play roughly 45 Sessions a year. Though none of the players has kids.
The obvious solution for a situation like your home remodeling one is for one of the other players to start a campaign that they can play with just the other players. And then that player won't be ready to run that campaign some weeks, so then you have someone else start a third campaign for weeks when you're not there and the other player isn't prepped. Soon enough, no one has any idea what's going on, but they DO get together every week! So if that's the most important part...
Thanks for the shout out Mike, I was actually talking to you so I'm glad you found this one. I am in love with this Quantum Leap into important NPCs concept, great stuff!
I love the roleplay on discord thing, not only because it keeps the RP fun happening between sessions and allows me to be more thoughtful, but the fact it acts as an almost Archive I can look back on as an almost emotional touchstone.
I finally got into DnD, and I've set an honor into being on time at my laptop every week. We've only cancelled once so far in a month of play, but that was due to the DM himself being occupied. And while there have been people who couldn't make it, we've played other things on those nights. Which means I'm now on my third character in about as many weeks. My actual play group, however, had to take a break until the 18th of March, from a descision made on February 9th, because one player had stuff to do until then, and we can't have the room we play in on other weekdays.
There was a group from my local game store who only played 2 or 3 times a year because one player was from Australia and another was from Germany. They only played in person so it was a HUGE event and they would play for the whole weekend. The same campaign has been going for nearly a decade and honestly I'm jealous of how much fun that group has when they get to see each other.
When I needed it most, this video was here! Just yesterday, one of my players announced they need to take a 4-month hiatus from our campaign due to major work commitments, and I've been anxious about moving the game forward without them. In the past with this 2+ year campaign, we've skipped sessions when only one player was missing because we're a really roleplay-heavy group. Watching this affirmed for me it's not just okay to keep playing and not pause the campaign, but it's for the best! Especially since the remaining four players are keen to keep playing, and we all understand why our friend can't be in the game for awhile. Tl;dr: Thank you, Mike. This video is exactly what I needed to hear at this moment in my campaign!
My group usually does a small one shot in a different part of the same world. Often a good opportunity to flesh out what your backup character has been doing. We also get to "hear rumors" about the main party's shenanigans through our backups, which is fun.
There are so many great suggestions already listed here! I'll add my two cents, but I genuinely love how our collaborative hobby naturally encourages shared ideas for problen solving: I grew up with Saturday morning cartoons, afternoon cartoons and "Must-See TV" shows. These stories were mostly self-contained arcs that would resolve themselves in 30 minutes (or sometimes an hour). There were often overarching themes or larger stories that were still consistently woven through, but it was all generally episodic. Occasionally characters would swap in and out, sometimes a story had a "To Be Continued...", but most of the time by the end of the show that specific story/adventure/whatever was resolved. This is how I run my games - people come or go (life happens), characters will join or miss a aession (or maybe only make a quick cameo), and the session focuses on those who are there. I long ago gave up on the idea of trying to make a sweeping LotR campaign, and instead have it all broken into smaller, bite-sized adventures that can be completed in a few hours by my players. It does take some work and everyone has to agree on it, but i found it makes game sessions happen more often, both because we play with whoever is there, and because FOMO seems to at least partly encourage people to show up. As I said, it's just my two cents - good luck!!!
If it's a combat session? No, I can run their character and have it make sensible choices. Any other case (exploration or roleplay focused), I can't really play the game without one of the main characters
My games are generally story-driven enough that unless there's a good reasonable excuse for that character to be apart from the party, I do NOT run sessions with a missing player after level 3-5. Any choices I make on behalf of the absentee player removes their agency in the broader narrative. In the cases where this has disrupted consistency of sessions, it has more often led to the removal of a flaky player than the death of a campaign, as very few situations have arisen where *consistent* absence was due to an actual reason.
A litttle bit of a different scenario, but I had a DM who was going thorugh some personal stuff and kept cancelling sessions at the last minute (they were still interested in playing, but they just hadn't had time to prepare). We (the players) solved the frequent cancelations by coming up with alternate campaigns and one-shots that we were interested in running and then took turns to run something (with our DM joining as a player). We all got to hang out and get our DnD fix and no one felt like they were letting the rest of the group down.
Funnily enough, I've experienced both systems back-to-back, in two campaigns run by brothers. One ran a campaign where he wanted everyone to be present, but thankfully kept the scope pretty small, so even though it took a while, we made it all the way til the end. In our current one, the other brother told us straight up that he wanted to keep going even if only a few of us could make it. Most of the time that meant that if one of us couldn't make it, he just filled in the missing player later on (thanks to some diligent note-taking by yours truly, inspired by Ginny Di). But in one very extreme case, only two of us plus the DM made it. So we played a totally different system altogether, where we each got to play multiple characters on different sides of a galactic war. That actually might've been my favorite session ever! It was fascinating to have characters who had such different goals while trying to figure out how to achieve them all, sometimes at the cost of my own characters. I think the second approach has worked out much better for us, and in cases where a character-specific plot beat needs to happen but the player isn't present, our DM will sort of fast forward over it and then have a one-on-one session with the player at a later date and then fill the rest of us in on how it went, which I think is a fun middle ground. The only times we've actually cancelled are when the DM himself can't make it, which makes sense since we play online--we're all real-life friends who live apart.
I am lucky that I started GMing for Adventurer's League and random one shots. So I've never been bothered about running sessions with people missing. If there is a good story reason for them to be missing, that is brought up. Otherwise, play just moves on without their characters in the scenes. Sure it may not be super realistic that suddenly a PC is missing, but I usually have 6 players in a game, so 4 or 5 is still plenty to keep playing with. In my Dragonlance campaign last week we were down to 3 players in the middle of a dungeon and i knew the next room was going to be really tough even without being short players. So we did the sorcerer's Test of High Sorcery in a dream sequence. The other 2 players played characters that would push the sorcerer to good or evil choices, and in the end we had a Mage Battle! Everyone had a lot of fun and some of the decisions the sorcerer made will make the next room MUCH easier.
Been dealing with this issue quite a bit in a Rise of Tiamat game I've been playing in for the last several months. One of the players has had several scheduling conflicts due to their work schedule and we just cancelled/rescheduled each time, which led to some bad feelings towards that player. The most recent time it happened, the DM and rest of the players came to an agreement to start a mini campaign within the same overall campaign that focused on other plot hooks that the party didn't follow from earlier in the game. Thankfully we haven't had to implement it yet.
My first DM set a precedent I like to follow: 1-2 players being absent is fine, if we get more just cancel. And another thing: if the player who’s going to be absent is in a vital plot role, delay it!! Either the plot point or the session itself. A different DM I had didn’t follow this and we felt bad for the player who was out and had a major character moment. I might end up preparing a side story based on some other adventurers the party has encountered and are about the same level as the player characters for when a plot vital player is out.
Hallowed are the Ori! I do think games are highly vulnerable at the start. I've been in games that died due to just the one ghost. Where you have no game only canceled sessions.
My group and I cancel if any of us can't make it. I dm for 4 players do 1 person is a pretty considerable percent. UT mor than that, my players would just rather wait and play with everyone than have someone mis out. My sessions are few and far between because we're all so busy, so we end up playing for a while so if someone's gone they end up missing potentially 6 hours of stuff and that sucks. So I always make sure everyone can be their for my games
I used to run a group of three, and if we missed someone we wouldn't play because it would completely throw off the party composition. Sometimes, months would go by between sessions. But we did finish, luckily! It just took way longer than it should have. It took five years(!) to reach the conclusion. Now, I run a group of five. If we don't have three players, we don't play. Otherwise, we do! We've only missed a handful a sessions over the course of a bit over a year. I like this a lot more! I agree with you! All present for the final battle and epilogue, the rest can happen with players missing. Ideally, I'd like the introduction to have everyone as well, but you make it work with absentees.
In my current campaign we’re down one player, because he travelled to another country to be with his girlfriend and we’re not 100% sure he’s coming back. So, last session, our DM had his character get turned to stone by a Medusa and we had to fight to get him back into our possession, but now we need to figure out if we can reverse the petrification. That’s probably going to happen off screen while we go and continue our original mission.
At the beginning of the week (mondays usually) I ask my players if we a down to play dnd for Friday/Saturday night. And having the event function on Discord helps a lot with reminding them. I do believe it is up to the DM/GM to always be the one to ask if the players want to have a session or make it clear that there is no session in the following weeks. All the games I DM are 4-6 players . we made the ruling ahead of time that if we have 4 players minimum, we will play a proper campaign session unless they want to run a combat oneshot that we always have prepped ahead of times
I have eight players plus the GM at our table. Our rule is that we have to be down three players to cancel. "Five players is a normal table!" Yeah, but not when you're used to eight. If the character interactions and combat people vs. roleplay people are just out, the dynamic shifts too much. The other issue is "locked in places" and bringing someone along; the old, "I'll play his character", bit. That only works so far. They might handle the combat, but the character isn't there. Again, single sessions, sure, but not multiple sessions. It is better to cancel than have a really sub-fun night. This includes on nights when the DM is to stressed to adequately prep a session.
Just commenting to share a story. After college I got a job in Japan. I'm over half a day away timezone wise from my old friends, who still often hung out together playing games online and streaming movies together on discord, only remembering my existence when they realized they had somewhere to stay for free in Japan, and then only again when they found out that I had experience DMing DnD. Long story short, after months of dedication crafting their world, planned story arcs around their characters' backstories, multiple adventures prepped for this sandbox world depending on where they would go, 100 pages of content typed up in total, one day as I was sleeping, having prepped everything to continue the module we were running as I was finishing writing their next set of potential adventures, getting ready to wake up 6 am Japan time in order for them to play USA evening time, one player who couldn't make it cancelled the game on my behalf just because he couldn't make it. The week before he said there was a chance he wouldn't make it but we had said that we'll still be able to play, we'd done so before for other people, and even if other people can't come too, we'd still at least hang out online since it was going to be the day before my birthday. But the so-called leader of the friend group cancelled the game, and no one showed up, even to hang for my birthday when I asked in the chat where everyone was and waited several hours. And after all that happened and when I let them know later I was upset and if they can't come that's ok, but they have no right to cancel the game on my behalf and that as long as they can understand that and offer an apology, the game can continue. They refused, and that's how a friendship of 15 years ended. It's stupid and it sucks, but just, players, you can tell the DM you aren't coming, you can tell the DM you'd rather they not play without you, but it's not your job to cancel the game when other people are potentially coming to play.
I've never been part of a group that *didn't* cancel if a person was missing (though that may change with the Dragon Heist game I'm in), but part of that is my groups have generally been pretty small (like, rarely have we had more than 4 people, 1 DM and 3 PCs). But my current group's solution was to just make less plot driven games with each 2 person combination of players. So now it's "oh, X can't make it tonight? Rather than our main game, we're doing our desert hexcrawl." "Oh, Y can't make it? Time for our Saltmarsh game"
I tried something very similar with the first adventure I ran. I tried to have everyone meet up and hang out at session date even if we had no session. Did not work quite as I had hoped but we did manage to pretty much end the adventure (even though the last session or two were just narrated since we agreed that we would not play in the hollyday-season and wanted to start the next campaign in the new year). For that second campaign, I took so much time and effort to build the characters tigether with the players and to get to know the characters and what the players wanted from them that I actually just played the PC when a single player could not make it. Unfortunately that group broke apart and half the players never played DnD with - I believe either of us ever again. With the three remaining players I started a new campaign from level 1 and plan to see it through to level 20. Good thing this video reminds me of this issue so I can get things back on track from the irregular sessions we are having lately.
Enough cannot be said for the FOMO aspect it gives players who miss out. Sounds mean to "enjoy" imposing this but it's just true. Those players might feel so bad about missing out on a cool session that they'll put more effort into planning out their schedules and actually make time for the game rather than fitting it in whenever it's perfectly convenient. OR a chronically missing player will eventually just drop out and tbh while I'd miss them I also value a regular game with present players so it's an opportunity to bring in someone else who will make time for it
I usually cancel if I'm down to 2 out of 4, but I recently started a "one shot series" They Came from the Cyclops' Cave game to fill in while I made some major system changes to our main game (Chronicles of Darkness to Storypath) that I'll also run when we're down to two players... when I just couldn't get something together for the main campaign... or when I need a break. I rarely worry about having Everyone at a session, but I have had some where I built a session around a particular player's backstory and had to cancel because they couldn't make it and I didn't have time to prep a new one (I used to do a lot of prep ..backstory, personality notes, bunches of history my players never discover... maps and art I can buy, and the stats are the "easy" part.)
Depending on group size I will set the limits differently. In my smaller groups 4-6 I say when at least 2 people are missing we wont play. in my larger groups 7-9 I up that by 1 to 3 people need to be missing to postpone. To help with sceduling I always tell my players its always on the same day at the same time. When we are missing people for that normal date, we try to find another time during another day so we wont miss an entire session for the duration (weekly, bi-weekly, once a month etc.) I found out that helps a lot. Some people might think this is expecting too much of the players, but I communicated this with them and they are all fine with it. I mean we all want to play D&D a certain amount of Organization and time planning is necessary to do it consistently.
We have a DM that sometimes has to cancel, and we have a player that's willing to step up and run one-shots/side adventures in the same world (coordinating with our regular DM), which works great! On the other hand, when a player has to miss a session, our characters are independent and busy in the world enough (already at level 7!) that it is usually not too hard to find a good reason for the character to be absent. If we leave off in the middle of combat or something, some one else will usually run the character. We also do use Discord in between sessions, but, IMO, it's been a bit of a mixed bag. It's nice to have the outlet for RP, to keep track of other PCs' doings, logistics, etc. -- but not everyone is always equally able to engage with Discord, and when people start using Discord for RP *instead* of doing it "onscreen" during the game session, I feel like the rest of us miss out. It's a difficult balance.
*"Do You Cancel Games When Players are Missing?"* Yes, but only because the game I DM only has 3 players, and the one time I did a session with 2 of them, I felt bad because it meant the last player would be missing out on events. I've told my players if I had a part of 4+ players, I wouldn't be totally against playing with missing members, but it's only 3 players. I'm only willing to do whole party sessions, or run solo sessions for each of the players for this group.
im in 2 groups at this time, one is comitted to never play if someone can't make it, which is generally fair and fine but it has lead to this campaign dragging on way longer than we all expected. We keep joking "this arc will end summer 2023" because our GM originally told us that this was about where he expected the campaign to conclude, but a lot of cancellations and unexpected wrenches dragged this game out way longer and that can be felt by everyone to a degree. Like we made characters and stuff for the next campaign already, I had almost forgotten half my backstory lmao. It's a fine way to run but it has it's downsides if some people are more prone to cancel than others. The other group I'm in I'm the GM and this group started later, so I have made it a rule that if only 1 person is missing we're still playing. I proposed that general rule because, as a player, I know that the excitement to play is a strong and precious thing and losing steam because games keep getting cancelled is poison for your campaign. As a GM I know that one player missing is how much I can handle in keeping encounters balanced. I got 6 players in my game, it is already a lot to juggle, if two players can't make it and my players start an encounter that I designed for all of them, not only is this fight suddenly way more lethal - the chance of hurting or even killing a character of a player who is not there is too high. Even spending their ressources is a touchy subject sometimes, you dont wanna catch up next session and hear that this spell you were saving or potion you held onto has been used by someone while you were absent. In addition, if a players is missing I run their character because my players arent yet comfortable letting others do it. This is already hard to do depending on which players is missing, because my players are 11th level so their sheets are reasonably full of stuff they can do and hard to run, even if you got my years of experience with the system (pathfinder) and general knowledge of the characters, it's a lot. Doing this for two characters, even if they are martial "simple" characters, that's just too much. Plus, 2 people missing is bad for telling a story, catching up one players isn't ideal but it's manageable. So that's my limit. One person missing, we roll. Two people out, it's hangout time. In general I found that this system works best for our group.
I play as normal if we have half or more of the players - so in my current 5 player game we’ll play with 3 players. But given notice I’ll still run for 2. I just run something that’s either a prequel involving their characters, a prequel involving favoured NPCs where I’d like to flesh them out more or a little side action (you remember two sessions back you sent Arborio and Jade the NPCs to talk to the King - let’s see how that played out.) I really try to avoid cancelling the night of doing anything that’s not roleplaying)
I was part of a group where they did cancel a session. The reason? It's because the player character was the "captain" of a ship with a crew on it. And they won't cancel if another player can't make it. And we were playing the Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
i have a hard rule that if any one person is missing, we continue ahead. in character, the PCs have a curse that turns them to stone at random. i’ve been using this as an in character explanation as to why they’re not present. and that’ll be a good solution until they get the curse removed
The entire conflict for my campaign was made so that my players, if they can't make it, just get portaled out. Only times I will cancel a session is when its a big moment that everyone needs to be there. But those moments are few and far between
This video could not be any more prevalent for me. I'm nearing the end of my first campaign (that i run), and we've taken the past 3 weeks off. Next session is going to be the party talking to the Queen of a powerful nation and i haven't wanted to progress to the rp if i was down anyone because i think it's going to be a big social encounter Normally I'll run a game when down just 1 player, unless its projected to be an important session that i want everyone there for as we approach the end. If I'm down 2 or more then i cancel, but will still probably hop on discord for a game night or a one shot (what we did last week). Thank you for keeping up the great work!
my D&D group has 5 players and we will go ahead with sessions as long as we have 4 that can make it! we did have a spot there of only 3 being able to make it due to one player being overseas (we play over discord, but time differences are a pain) and 2 others constantly switching off availability, and we ended up going back to play death house with different characters than the ones we were currently running through strahd!
I'm good for still playing if people are missing in most circumstances such as traveling, exploring an area or small skirmishes with enemies. But if it's a big crucial fight or role play scene, I prefer everyone to be there. I'm willing to keep going if only one or two can't make it and just play their characters myself in those circumstances, but if half can't make it, I reschedule.
When I run into the situation where a session really needs to have everyone, or needs to have the person who has to miss, I call that game and communicate that we are not having that session because of the needs of that session in particular. So far that has not taught the lesson of we must have everyone.
Unless unforeseen circumstances happen so you as a dm yourself can’t run the game for whatever reason or if you’ve already committed to something else and as such you know you’re unable to show up on said date, never cancel a game unless the party as a majority agrees to cancel it. Or even if you as a dm can’t show up, offer for the option for one of the party to be a temporary DM. And wether you’re a player or a dm and this is true for life in general, never overcommit to too many things if you’re able help it.
So... Problem I have with this... is that we have a very small group for DnD. The 4 of us including the DM. Meaning if a player can't make it we go from 3 players to 2, losing a big chunk of the party. I haven't missed a session and I never will, I prioritize my weekend time with everything highly. But it does happens where someone can't make it canceling everything for the week. Which is super bummbing for me
I run my games as one shots in a shared universe which takes a lot of pressure off of my players. It also allows them to have a stable of characters to try out. Players operate out of a massive plane hopping mechanical crab, in much the same way that the show Stargate Universe works. They go on away missions, and if you die or stay behind, that's it for that character. The big downside is that maintaining the overall narrative is difficult.
This killed my last game. And I realize now that, contrary to what I thought, keep the game going despite scheduling issues might have been the way. At least for that table. But I couldn't see how playing without everyone would be an enticing thing and not a reason to skip more game. So. Thanks for all the words you used, I am now going to use this advice when needed , and my gamez will benefits.
Hm. The Stargate thing is tempting. I’m running a Curse of Strahd campaign, but due to work commitments only two of my original players are still in the game, and all three of us are very keen to keep going, but I’m still in the process of recruiting new players. They’ve just found the Holy Icon of Ravenloft, and an out-of-body experience to get one of them to be able to use it could be very interesting.
wibbly wobbly timey-wimey. That's usually the excuse I fall back on and my players are cool with it. Especially because it's what enables them to accomplish what they want to accomplish. If a player is missing for a session I'll still hold the session for everyone else. That player can either tell me what their character want to accomplish and anything simple enough is considered done. Anything they or I want RPed gets RPed at the start of the next session. It doesn't matter if I conclude a session in initiative the next session starts with that player doing the stuff they wanted to do last session. I personally would only reschedule a session if its a pivotal or important boss fight and 2 or more of my 4 players can't make it. The exception to this rule is if the boss has history or a special connection to a single PC who can't make it. I've run sessions for just 2 players, I've run sessions for just 3 players (even when we had a 5 member party).
My thought is that if 1/3 of your players can't make it, nothing should happen that impacts their characters, but some story can still happen. This would be time for lore dumps, a slower progression, shopping, and the like. If 1/2 of the players can't make it, then the story should pause, and you should drop a side quest for the present members that would, for some reason or another, not allow your missing members. For example, consider that the present members all wake up from a long rest to see their companions locked in an eternal, nightmarish sleep. The waking party would then need to find the source and defeat the Nightmare, and turns out it was infecting the nearby village, so they get a bit of a reward for doing so! To summarize, if you have a group of 6 players: 1 player missing: either write them out or sandbag them, continue and remember to fill them in on what they missed 2 players missing: slow down the story, make sure nothing plot relevant happens for their characters, consider having a lore dump or shopping session 3 players missing: pause the story, generate a sidequest for the present players, reward them slightly for being present 4 players missing: check with the last 2 if they really want to have a session if that many people are missing, consider doing a oneshot or playing a non-RPG game. 5 players missing: idk, go to a movie? 6 players mission: read a book, take a nap, work on next session?
I play in two campaigns online where the game span multiple time zones one globally, which is a heck of a thing and the other across the four major time zones in the US (depending on the time of the year got to love Arizona) with that being said, scheduling is obviously tough, but I very much appreciate both of my DM's takes on it and I generally do think it is best for helping the flow and pacing of the games.
I’m dm’ing a game right now with serious scheduling problems. The problem is we’ve never played on a regular basis (we just figure out when the next time that fits for everyone is, it’s really irregular). So I guess I’d have to figure out how to turn this into a regular thing before I can apply any of the advice I’ve seen around scheduling…
For me it depends on how frequently the group plays and how we play. In a weekly online game, I'm more inclined to cancel if two people are missing. If we're playing in person, I definitely still like to meet up and either continue the campaign in some form or take it as a chance to try out a new game. Especially if the group plays infrequently anyway. But the whole out of body experience sounds very interesting. Never tried that, but I think it would fit as an idea in my current campaign. Definitely going to try it out if the opportunity presents itself
If I have more than half of my players (this translates to a minimum of three) I run the session and continue the plot. I do have a couple scenarios where I might reschedule for an absence, though... Like if we've just entered an arc specifically focused around a given character's backstory or something and that's the player that's going to be absent, OR for the end of a major climactic arc/final battle.
I run a 6 person group, and I made it clear that if we had at least 4 people, we'll play. They essentially just don't exist until they show up. It's not super thematic or anything, but FOMO is an incredible motivator and we end up averaging 5 people a session
In my group, we started to have recurring scheduling issues that meant our weekly games were becoming closer to monthly, and I can attest to that loss of enthusiasm. Instead of just playing without everyone, however, we had a different idea that has so far worked really well for us. Basically, we created a setting for a new campaign that revolves around "World Shards," which are basically entire self-contained one-shot dungeons or encounters from across the multiverse. The flexibility allows me to run sessions that are wildly different from anything in our main campaign. For example, I just recently ran a whodunit style murder mystery which would never have fit into the main campaign, but was a ton of fun. This also has lets me explore different styles and themes while DMing, and because the system is so simple and flexible, some of my players have expressed interest in DMing their own Shard ideas as well, with one of them set to run theirs this Friday. I can't deny that it does still suck to have the primary campaign go a month or more without a session, but given that the party prefers to have everyone present for each session of that campaign (as do I), the World Shard setting allows us to still play while also exploring new settings, character ideas, builds, themes, etc. I'm really glad we started doing it.
My current campaign is a west marches one, which means we don't really have this problem. Sessions are only scheduled with whoever is available. And I know this isn't really useful for anyone running a more traditional campaign who is struggling with scheduling, but I just wanted to mention this as an option. I am a freelancer with a very inconsistent schedule, which means a regular game night is basically impossible for me. This is the only way I've been able to dm a campaign for my friends.
We are a group of six. We have the thumb rule, when one player is missing we play anyways, when two people can´t we reschedule. Of course there are exceptions, like we are standing in front of the gates of the hometown of player x and player x can`t be there.
How do you make the text RP chats work without it sucking all the RP out of the actual game? Whenever I've come across it, people start 'not wanting to waste time' RPing in the RPG or want to 'save that for the chat'.
I have back up campaigns that we play if everyone is not there. They are things like the Lost Mines of Phandelver. Things that are not terriblely story intense where we can have players drop in and out and gray blob them if they are absent.
I think maintaining the schedule is extremely important. Canceling can happen but it takes a lot to cancel a session. If one player is out, we press on with that player choosing either to be 'greyed out' or another player handling their sheet in combat. If half the players are unavailable (like yesterday) I run the remaining players through a one-shot with alternate characters elsewhere in the world. If I'm down to only one other player, I'm willing to run a one on one session or cancel. Keeping the schedule is important because it minimizes risk of the game dying out. If players get too comfortable w canceling sessions, it ceases to be a priority and the game is at more risk of stopping and never picking up again.
We rarely cancel - we meet once a month, so we are all rather excited to get to the game by the end of each month. If a person is sick, or there are family responsibilities, that player is run by me, with input from players. We also have those players play over Discord, should they have access to Wi-Fi. When we do cancel/postpone, that is usually around examinations, when some players are writing exams, and other players are setting ang marking exams (we have a 24-hr turnover on marking). So the lesson my players have learnt so far, is around the end of the year, there is some flexibility, but in all other circumstances we play.
Our Roll20 game has 7 players plus the DM. As long as we have more than half, the DM usually will go ahead and run the session, with the missing players "following aling in a fugue state" so they're with us if they can make the next session. We also have a second DM that runs an alternate campaign if the main DM, who is a vet, has to be on call or has an emergency. We DO try to get as many people there for big fights.
I have a very small group (3 players) in a bottle area (an interdiemnsional circus) so it makes it hard to reduce to 2 players, if 1 is missing, especially because we have only had 1 session, so people don't know each other as well yet. This happened on our last session, so I agreed to push until our next scheduled date. I will discuss with them what they feel is good if this happens in future.
My group keeps going so long as the DM and around half the party can make it. We're a group of 7 (including the DM), so if 3 can make it, we're good to go.
"Do You Cancel Games When Players are Missing?" To answer the question for my group? Yes. But there's only 3 players, so missing an entire third of the group makes doing anything fairly difficult.
Me personally, I used to do one of two things if someone was missing for the week. Offer one-shots to give my players a chance to try different builds to mix things up, or ask if anyone of the players would like to run a one-shot so I could be a player. This set up was especially if their character was going through a personal arc at the time. But overtime, I've found it's sometimes just better to continue on and come up with a background reason why they arn't present. Most recent example: Party of my current game just hit level 3. Ranger couldn't make it. So we (myself and the ranger) decided that in world he was busy finding an animal companion (he went Beast Master), hence why his character was not there that day. Of course, personal arcs I still feel a filler until that player returns the next week is best. Gone longer than one? we're moving on. Nothing worse than time killing a campaign.
Personally this would never work for me and my group. D&D night is a social gathering , not a sacred night that MUST happen and takes priority over the fun of the players. If more then one person is missing from the 6 player group, the rest simply will not play unless I brake out a CoC one shot or something else that will not exclude the missing players. This clearly differs from group to group, but not everyone is here for D&D alone, they came to spend time with friends and consider running without said friends at best underwhelming and at worst like a jerk move to even bring up.
I have run a side adventure (sort of a flashback) for a smaller group when we knew one player was going to be unavailable for a period of several weeks. This worked because we knew this well in advance so I could prepare for it. But I know I definitely can't just whip up a side quest or different adventure on a few days notice if someone cancels very close to the session. Prep time takes a lot of work, at least for me, and I also have other stuff to do in life. We've tried playing with an incomplete group, but we found that it caused a lot of issues with people having missed part of the story and not knowing what is going on. For us, we just play only with the whole group. And as a DM for my group, I'm very strict on things I accept as valid reasons for cancelling a session. If a player is too busy to be able to commit to this campaign, that is fine, but then this campaign is not for them and I will replace them with someone who can. I should note we mainly play in person.
Canceled games not being anyone's fault can be hard to swallow when you have an extreme scenario like mine...we used to have a problem player, whose main source of problems was that she never understood that her actions affected other people, in AND out of character. One of her main problems was attendance; she almost never showed up, and when she did show up, she almost never paid attention and even tended to completely wander off without so much as a 'brb.' This resulted in the story arc that had a focus on my character being extremely delayed for *months* because the DM didn't want to go too far ahead without her but she kept ditching last minute. I don't think she even read my summaries of the sessions to catch her up to speed when we did have to go on without her. I still feel a lot of resentment even years after her official dropping out of the game because it was a prime example of how little she was invested in the game, and how much it felt like she didn't even care that that was affecting things I was looking forward to. A different player in that game had some scheduling issues in the past few months that made them miss a few games, and that whole scenario with the problem player has made them feel EXTREMELY guilty about it even though in their case, none of us feel any ill will towards them. TL;DR: in most cases it is absolutely nobody's fault, but I do think that TTRPGs are a commitment and while things do happen, one should at least show respect for that commitment.
It's been over 10 years I don't play weekly anymore. Even when I'm a player. Most of the people I play with don't have every weekend available (including me), and due time zones, it is impossible to schedule games on weekdays. My groups always had well-kept diaries, and we keep the game discussions alive throughout discord. However, we settled on playing monthly. I know it's not for everyone, but it was the way I found to keep playing RPGs, and it worked for my groups.
My usual metric for "need everyone here to play" is important fights with powerful characters ESPECIALLY if I have homebrew it cause I'm not great at judging power levels and I have this, irrational(?), fear of killing someone's character while they're not there. I just don't want players to feel like it unfair to possibly lose a character without having the agency of being present.
Apologies for the long post! I've have 2 players who are routinely absent from sessions. Originally I did cancel sessions, because I felt it unfair to move on when life was getting hard for them. I got a very rude awakening when one of my players left (unquietly) because of this. Maybe 2-3 more sessions in, and I saw the quitting player's point; it wasn't fair to the people who did make it. Now, I run with 1/2 or more, and if it's lower than 4 I run a Slayer's Take contract. Thank you for the idea! I've created new leadership NPC's and done a tiny bit of remodeling due to the end of Season 1, and my players have 2-3 characters each to choose from. I throw high CR monsters at them, see if they make it lol
Ive been cancelling if even one player cancelled because our group is only 4 people including me at this point, so I only have three players and I thought if I played with two that was just silly. Then you directly call out that you should keep playing with as few as 2. So. Yeah, I will reevaluate it. I have been feeling the loss of momentum so I think I will consider talking to my players about still going if one can't make it.
Our DnD group used to have 4 players (+1 GM), and our rule was, if 2 people can't make it, we'll cancel or reschedule. Now we're with 5 players, so if 3 people can't make it, we'll cancel this session. Of course, if the GM can't make it, we'll cancel or reschedule anyways.
For home brew I don't cancel. For Adventure League I don't cancel EXCEPT when I am running hardcovers. During session 0 for hard covers we set a minimum of players to play. In fact we have ignored the min. This helps. I have noticed I will start with a very large group and end with an average group due to work changes, etc. i am currently running two different AL groups. Shattered Obelisk min has be set to 4 people and we started out with 9. And will hit the min of 4 come March due to PCS and other job shifts. Planescape is set to 3 people but Planescape so far looks like I can finish a chapter in a 2.5 hour session. I have homebrew where the Main Character did not show for the important scene. Today, I just don't have one main character.
I have approached this a number of ways: If there is a good reason either myself or the player can think of for the character to be MIA, we move forward regardless as to what is going on. If there's an imminent/unavoidable massive story element or something explicitly tied to the PC that will be MIA, reschedule/skip. If it's repetitive/there's a longer expected absence I'll work with the player to come up with something that will make it make sense when they aren't there in-character and we'll play without them when they aren't available. If there's major combat imminent and more than a third of the party is missing (usually meaning 2 players), reschedule/skip. If the player is heavily invested and there's something I know they'll absolutely hate missing, I might reschedule/skip. Otherwise we go. That all said, this vidyo did give me thoughts as to ways to get around some of these. So thanks!
I have a player who routinely can't make it due to work scheduling. Luckily he tells us ahead of time, so we're not scrambling to make alternative arrangements. So, I'm essentially running 2 campaigns for my group. The main campaign, Waterdeep Dragon Heist for the full group (5), and another for the reduced group (4) using different characters. The second one can also be run if I only have 3 players, but if I only have 2 players, we will cancel or reschedule for another day. We haven't had to do this too many times. I like having these options in place because it does mean we play pretty much every week. The second "campaign" is more loose and wild, where the characters are more broken and we just get together to kill things in some random third-party module I've found. Yes, it's a lot more work for me, as the DM, but I love that about my role. I enjoy reading through modules, planning, and creating maps. I also get to try out weird and wonderful monsters that are maybe a bit busted, and wouldn't appear in our slighty more serious campaign.
Our discord server has several Pathfinder games running, shuffling players and GMs. Most groups are GM+4 players, and if at least one player can't make it - the game is postponed. Even though we play a rules-heavy game, we're still very heavy on the RP, so we don't want to miss things. 3 or even 2 characters wouldn't be enough for us. We once had a very big hiatus of 9 months, mostly due to GM's personal reasons. But we managed to come back to the campaign and finish it, and to this day it's my first and only campaign I played through level 1-20. Ngl, we did lose a bit of momentum, and by the end of this 2-year campaign we were ready to move on, but I think it's only natural? Recently we had another hiatus of 3 months, but as soon as we remembered what had happened before, the game was on. And no one at our table would want to miss a game.
Shout out to a recent campaign 3 episode of Critical Role where Liam's character was just quiet but doing burbees for 4 IRL hours. Also now trying to imagine a fictional plot for the Sick Day stream they did. I guess that would be an alternate universe where The Incident happened again. Weird that Chetney and FCG keep getting raptured together...
I habe kudt been yellig at the screen for spending 1,5 months inviting people, planning 1,5 year campaign, 1 long session every month... making a set schedule. Now one player says i cant make it for 3-4 of the bevauee the only wotte one sunday in his calender and the other is first "i will be missing may.." then at session zero: "what we play for July and August? I can't either"
I became the DM that wouldn't run unless everyone could be there; I'm honestly not sure when that change occurred, because I definitely didn't used to be that way. At the heart of it, I think it may have been a mixture of fear and laziness; easier to reschedule than come up with something else. Now, during session Zero, I will confer with the players about how we (as a group) should handle it when someone can't attend. I will also establish that, as an example, if we have 6 players (not counting me as the DM), I will run with 1 or 2 missing. Good video topic, Mike.
Yes!! Agree with these solutions big time, and recognizing that constantly re-scheduling is a problem. I used to be one of the players who would always push for the whole group being present - but after seeing not one, not two but THREE campaigns slowly die out because we could never get together... well, I have changed. I tend to have some pretty intense FOMO, and always thought "well, I would hate to miss out, so we shouldn't keep someone else out of it either." But guess what? Having to be filled in on information through roleplay is *really* fun. Having an outsider POV on something that happened is super fun to play! I have a long, long campaign that I've been running for a year and a half now. The first year, we kept pushing things up whenever someone was absent. We got maybe 16 sessions in a year - because I also tend to run games bi-weekly, rather than weekly. After a 2-month period without a single session, the group and I concluded that we need to keep things moving - or else the game will die out, or we die before the game is ever finished 😂 For a party of 5 players, I previously had a rule that if more than two people were absent, we would re-schedule. But this video has given some great ideas for how to deal with very small parties! Thanks for the tips, and especially a big thanks for linking to others who have more to say on the matter 😁
We are just experimenting with a new system that might fix the problem. So, my group (4) tends to play together, when we are not, we organize doomed campaign that is a short campaign that develops one of the PC's background or goal. But that was not possible for main campaign because group wants to lvl together, meaning every Exp is shared and you feel wrong if player wasn't even there to share Exp with him / her. So, due to some other reason I offered that we drop levelling altogether. Instead I will track levels, so that I know how far on lvl track they are, but they are being gifted parts of the level by special feats or missions. That way you dont lvl all at once. You got spell slots from a magic gem that dragon gifted to you and they will try to absorb it (1 spell slot per 3 days or 1 spell slot if they roll over 15 till energy drains and they got their levels, if they roll 1, just find another gem, if 20, that was fast). Your rage is deeper as you get closer to the source of your feelings. You found someone willing to train you new special fighting moves in return for a favour. Leveling itself turns into a constant reward instead of once per half a year or so event. It is not one big reward, it is many small and way more meaningful rewards. Just make sure they are around the same level, balance between classes is not a strong part of DnD anyway because optimisation is a thing and it is hard to prevent. Just make sure everyone is more or less similarly capable and if they are not ... just give them a simple lvl-like non-lvl stats or ability boost. Problem solved. Like they just slayed first dragon that was also buffed with dragon comet magic. They touch it and feel how power of the ritual goes into them, expanding their potential for future growth and making them just a little bit more aware, a little bit better at everything (a way to explain +1 proficiency). Isn't that way better than "you wake up and now you can cast 2 new 3rd lvl spells and have +1 proficiency, how cool is that?"? Granted, you need quite a lot of trust and some basic communication with your GM and it is probably great if GM has some experiences with regular levelling system, but ... isn't regular levelling system one of the worst parts of DnD? The main reason why I wanted to change it that I am not at all confident I could pull milestone levelling off (what milestone and how many of them?) and I was just growing tired of players bickering at calculating at the end of each fight or session how much exp they deserve. It was bad. Bad and stressful.
The group I run has 5 people, and we will still play if one person can't make it. But if two people can't then I tend to reschedule. Though I have run it with only three people, it feels off if we don't at least have a party of four. The same rules applied to one of the groups I'm a player in. We at one point has 6 players and a GM, so if three people couldn't make it, we tended to reschedule. The last group i'm in will reschedule if even one person can't make it, but that group is the far more casual of the three. I can totally see the mentality of this breaking the hype for the games, but also as this is a game we wanted to play together it feels weird once that 'together' isn't there. For sessions I absolutely want everyone there for it does tend to be final battles of an 'arc' or the end of a game. But I also tend to want everyone there for a change in direction. Just so that everyone can agree on a way to go and nobody feels left out of that direction change. Though I'm sure most people will go with the flow, I don't like accidentally excluding folks in decisions like that as that's something I hate being excluded from. I had a previous group in the past experience a lot of turbulence because they were disconnected from major story points because they had to miss a session.
What do you do when players can’t make it to a game? How many players need to be missing before you change your plans for a session?
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My current campaign has a rule of 2 people missing then we cancel. 1 person is fine and we have a running group chat to plan and keep each other in the loop
For better or worse, we tend to have a rule of "If a player feels they need to be there, and they can't, we cancel." It's slowed our campaign--a *wonderful* Tyranny of Dragons I'm DM-ing for, even got a little homebrew PC backstory stuff that's threatening to take over the main pathing!--but it's been well worth waiting for a week once we got back for the next session, every time.
In one of my campaigns, when someone can't make it, we do what we call a "Team Building session". Basically, we pick a place on the world map, or major threat in the setting, build it out a little, and then create a party and their backstories that fit into that place or would be fighting that threat. We collectively narrate out the trials and triumphs of their first major adventure, learn their relationships with each other, name the team, and end the session. The lore we build has ended up coming back into the sessions a few times, and makes the world feel more rich. It's gotten to the point where I usually look forward to those sessions more than normal sessions.
Oh hi Flando, fancy seeing you here
Also this sounds awesome!
That is such a cool and interesting idea!!! I want to try this!
That's actually really cool Flando.
It's a great way to also give a reality check to the players in that they are important but they aren't dealing with the only issue in the world.
That's sometimes the problem with final bosses because the party can't exactly send an army otherwise it wouldn't be narratively satisfying.
Now the guards you walk into seem anxious, like they're spread incredibly thin already. It's amazing world building.2a
You can't be frustrated that the guards don't help with this BBEG if you've established that there are 8 issues also happening with less capable people trying to solve them because resources are thin.
Also, thank you for all your wonderful work under CR (and I'm sure other things you do), you've been incredibly helpful to so many 🖤
sounds interesting - I was thinking about running a "flashback" for some of the party's entourage... some little conflict they "never got round to mentioning"
Cameo appearance of flando
We have this issue with a campaign I’m in where the DM will cancel if even one player can’t make it and it sucks cause we play bi-weekly and it’s ALWAYS THE SAME PERSON CANCELLING LAST MINUTE
Get one more player and make the one that is causing the issue "optional". They can join when they can, just add some extra monsters or something, but they are not considered regular player.
@@5daboz if it wasn’t almost the end of the game we would, the DM wants everyone there for the final few sessions but since they always flake we can’t finish
@@acehasgreedgotta put the foot down
@@ZarHakkar I’ve been telling him to but he won’t
@@acehasgreed Host the game at the flaky person's house
Let's see them not show up then
Something like this happened not long ago for me. One of our players wanted to have a bit of a break and we made the foolish decision to hold off until he was ready to come back. Some time passed before we finally chased him up, turned out he'd decided to quit entirely, and hadn't even bothered to tell any of us, so we COULD have continued without him, but by the time we learned this the impetus was completely gone.
Our Roll20 game has 7 players plus the DM. As long as we have more than half, the DM usually will go ahead and run the session, with the missing players "following aling in a fugue state" so they're with us if they can make the next session. We also have a second DM that runs an alternate campaign if the main DM, who is a vet, has to be on call or has an emergency. We DO try to get as many people there for big fights.
This is exactly how my party is. We have 7 players (plus an 8th who's at college now and comes rarely), plus our DM. We'll still typically play as long as we have like 4 players able to come, though we'd probably avoid doing any massive fights or big plot beats during thar time.
Our DM will usually narrate the absent players as covering our rear as defense or splitting up with us in a pincer maneuver or whatever. If it's a single character, we'll sometimes have them just kind of following and someone playing them, or if they're going to miss more than a few sessions, they go off to handle their own personal matters.
5 Players, 1 DM. Age between 30-45. We play every tuesday, !no rescheduling!. As long as 3 out of 5 players are present, we play. Otherwise we cancel. We play roughly 45 Sessions a year. Though none of the players has kids.
The obvious solution for a situation like your home remodeling one is for one of the other players to start a campaign that they can play with just the other players. And then that player won't be ready to run that campaign some weeks, so then you have someone else start a third campaign for weeks when you're not there and the other player isn't prepped. Soon enough, no one has any idea what's going on, but they DO get together every week! So if that's the most important part...
Thanks for the shout out Mike, I was actually talking to you so I'm glad you found this one. I am in love with this Quantum Leap into important NPCs concept, great stuff!
I love the roleplay on discord thing, not only because it keeps the RP fun happening between sessions and allows me to be more thoughtful, but the fact it acts as an almost Archive I can look back on as an almost emotional touchstone.
I finally got into DnD, and I've set an honor into being on time at my laptop every week. We've only cancelled once so far in a month of play, but that was due to the DM himself being occupied. And while there have been people who couldn't make it, we've played other things on those nights. Which means I'm now on my third character in about as many weeks. My actual play group, however, had to take a break until the 18th of March, from a descision made on February 9th, because one player had stuff to do until then, and we can't have the room we play in on other weekdays.
There was a group from my local game store who only played 2 or 3 times a year because one player was from Australia and another was from Germany. They only played in person so it was a HUGE event and they would play for the whole weekend.
The same campaign has been going for nearly a decade and honestly I'm jealous of how much fun that group has when they get to see each other.
When I needed it most, this video was here! Just yesterday, one of my players announced they need to take a 4-month hiatus from our campaign due to major work commitments, and I've been anxious about moving the game forward without them. In the past with this 2+ year campaign, we've skipped sessions when only one player was missing because we're a really roleplay-heavy group. Watching this affirmed for me it's not just okay to keep playing and not pause the campaign, but it's for the best! Especially since the remaining four players are keen to keep playing, and we all understand why our friend can't be in the game for awhile.
Tl;dr: Thank you, Mike. This video is exactly what I needed to hear at this moment in my campaign!
My group usually does a small one shot in a different part of the same world. Often a good opportunity to flesh out what your backup character has been doing.
We also get to "hear rumors" about the main party's shenanigans through our backups, which is fun.
There are so many great suggestions already listed here! I'll add my two cents, but I genuinely love how our collaborative hobby naturally encourages shared ideas for problen solving:
I grew up with Saturday morning cartoons, afternoon cartoons and "Must-See TV" shows. These stories were mostly self-contained arcs that would resolve themselves in 30 minutes (or sometimes an hour). There were often overarching themes or larger stories that were still consistently woven through, but it was all generally episodic. Occasionally characters would swap in and out, sometimes a story had a "To Be Continued...", but most of the time by the end of the show that specific story/adventure/whatever was resolved. This is how I run my games - people come or go (life happens), characters will join or miss a aession (or maybe only make a quick cameo), and the session focuses on those who are there. I long ago gave up on the idea of trying to make a sweeping LotR campaign, and instead have it all broken into smaller, bite-sized adventures that can be completed in a few hours by my players.
It does take some work and everyone has to agree on it, but i found it makes game sessions happen more often, both because we play with whoever is there, and because FOMO seems to at least partly encourage people to show up. As I said, it's just my two cents - good luck!!!
If it's a combat session? No, I can run their character and have it make sensible choices. Any other case (exploration or roleplay focused), I can't really play the game without one of the main characters
My games are generally story-driven enough that unless there's a good reasonable excuse for that character to be apart from the party, I do NOT run sessions with a missing player after level 3-5. Any choices I make on behalf of the absentee player removes their agency in the broader narrative. In the cases where this has disrupted consistency of sessions, it has more often led to the removal of a flaky player than the death of a campaign, as very few situations have arisen where *consistent* absence was due to an actual reason.
A litttle bit of a different scenario, but I had a DM who was going thorugh some personal stuff and kept cancelling sessions at the last minute (they were still interested in playing, but they just hadn't had time to prepare). We (the players) solved the frequent cancelations by coming up with alternate campaigns and one-shots that we were interested in running and then took turns to run something (with our DM joining as a player). We all got to hang out and get our DnD fix and no one felt like they were letting the rest of the group down.
Funnily enough, I've experienced both systems back-to-back, in two campaigns run by brothers. One ran a campaign where he wanted everyone to be present, but thankfully kept the scope pretty small, so even though it took a while, we made it all the way til the end. In our current one, the other brother told us straight up that he wanted to keep going even if only a few of us could make it. Most of the time that meant that if one of us couldn't make it, he just filled in the missing player later on (thanks to some diligent note-taking by yours truly, inspired by Ginny Di).
But in one very extreme case, only two of us plus the DM made it. So we played a totally different system altogether, where we each got to play multiple characters on different sides of a galactic war. That actually might've been my favorite session ever! It was fascinating to have characters who had such different goals while trying to figure out how to achieve them all, sometimes at the cost of my own characters.
I think the second approach has worked out much better for us, and in cases where a character-specific plot beat needs to happen but the player isn't present, our DM will sort of fast forward over it and then have a one-on-one session with the player at a later date and then fill the rest of us in on how it went, which I think is a fun middle ground. The only times we've actually cancelled are when the DM himself can't make it, which makes sense since we play online--we're all real-life friends who live apart.
I am lucky that I started GMing for Adventurer's League and random one shots. So I've never been bothered about running sessions with people missing. If there is a good story reason for them to be missing, that is brought up. Otherwise, play just moves on without their characters in the scenes. Sure it may not be super realistic that suddenly a PC is missing, but I usually have 6 players in a game, so 4 or 5 is still plenty to keep playing with.
In my Dragonlance campaign last week we were down to 3 players in the middle of a dungeon and i knew the next room was going to be really tough even without being short players. So we did the sorcerer's Test of High Sorcery in a dream sequence. The other 2 players played characters that would push the sorcerer to good or evil choices, and in the end we had a Mage Battle! Everyone had a lot of fun and some of the decisions the sorcerer made will make the next room MUCH easier.
Been dealing with this issue quite a bit in a Rise of Tiamat game I've been playing in for the last several months. One of the players has had several scheduling conflicts due to their work schedule and we just cancelled/rescheduled each time, which led to some bad feelings towards that player. The most recent time it happened, the DM and rest of the players came to an agreement to start a mini campaign within the same overall campaign that focused on other plot hooks that the party didn't follow from earlier in the game. Thankfully we haven't had to implement it yet.
My first DM set a precedent I like to follow: 1-2 players being absent is fine, if we get more just cancel. And another thing: if the player who’s going to be absent is in a vital plot role, delay it!! Either the plot point or the session itself. A different DM I had didn’t follow this and we felt bad for the player who was out and had a major character moment.
I might end up preparing a side story based on some other adventurers the party has encountered and are about the same level as the player characters for when a plot vital player is out.
Hallowed are the Ori!
I do think games are highly vulnerable at the start. I've been in games that died due to just the one ghost. Where you have no game only canceled sessions.
My group and I cancel if any of us can't make it. I dm for 4 players do 1 person is a pretty considerable percent. UT mor than that, my players would just rather wait and play with everyone than have someone mis out. My sessions are few and far between because we're all so busy, so we end up playing for a while so if someone's gone they end up missing potentially 6 hours of stuff and that sucks. So I always make sure everyone can be their for my games
I used to run a group of three, and if we missed someone we wouldn't play because it would completely throw off the party composition. Sometimes, months would go by between sessions. But we did finish, luckily! It just took way longer than it should have. It took five years(!) to reach the conclusion.
Now, I run a group of five. If we don't have three players, we don't play. Otherwise, we do! We've only missed a handful a sessions over the course of a bit over a year. I like this a lot more!
I agree with you! All present for the final battle and epilogue, the rest can happen with players missing. Ideally, I'd like the introduction to have everyone as well, but you make it work with absentees.
In my current campaign we’re down one player, because he travelled to another country to be with his girlfriend and we’re not 100% sure he’s coming back. So, last session, our DM had his character get turned to stone by a Medusa and we had to fight to get him back into our possession, but now we need to figure out if we can reverse the petrification. That’s probably going to happen off screen while we go and continue our original mission.
At the beginning of the week (mondays usually) I ask my players if we a down to play dnd for Friday/Saturday night. And having the event function on Discord helps a lot with reminding them. I do believe it is up to the DM/GM to always be the one to ask if the players want to have a session or make it clear that there is no session in the following weeks.
All the games I DM are 4-6 players . we made the ruling ahead of time that if we have 4 players minimum, we will play a proper campaign session unless they want to run a combat oneshot that we always have prepped ahead of times
I have eight players plus the GM at our table. Our rule is that we have to be down three players to cancel. "Five players is a normal table!" Yeah, but not when you're used to eight. If the character interactions and combat people vs. roleplay people are just out, the dynamic shifts too much.
The other issue is "locked in places" and bringing someone along; the old, "I'll play his character", bit. That only works so far. They might handle the combat, but the character isn't there. Again, single sessions, sure, but not multiple sessions.
It is better to cancel than have a really sub-fun night. This includes on nights when the DM is to stressed to adequately prep a session.
Just commenting to share a story.
After college I got a job in Japan. I'm over half a day away timezone wise from my old friends, who still often hung out together playing games online and streaming movies together on discord, only remembering my existence when they realized they had somewhere to stay for free in Japan, and then only again when they found out that I had experience DMing DnD. Long story short, after months of dedication crafting their world, planned story arcs around their characters' backstories, multiple adventures prepped for this sandbox world depending on where they would go, 100 pages of content typed up in total, one day as I was sleeping, having prepped everything to continue the module we were running as I was finishing writing their next set of potential adventures, getting ready to wake up 6 am Japan time in order for them to play USA evening time, one player who couldn't make it cancelled the game on my behalf just because he couldn't make it. The week before he said there was a chance he wouldn't make it but we had said that we'll still be able to play, we'd done so before for other people, and even if other people can't come too, we'd still at least hang out online since it was going to be the day before my birthday. But the so-called leader of the friend group cancelled the game, and no one showed up, even to hang for my birthday when I asked in the chat where everyone was and waited several hours. And after all that happened and when I let them know later I was upset and if they can't come that's ok, but they have no right to cancel the game on my behalf and that as long as they can understand that and offer an apology, the game can continue. They refused, and that's how a friendship of 15 years ended. It's stupid and it sucks, but just, players, you can tell the DM you aren't coming, you can tell the DM you'd rather they not play without you, but it's not your job to cancel the game when other people are potentially coming to play.
I've never been part of a group that *didn't* cancel if a person was missing (though that may change with the Dragon Heist game I'm in), but part of that is my groups have generally been pretty small (like, rarely have we had more than 4 people, 1 DM and 3 PCs). But my current group's solution was to just make less plot driven games with each 2 person combination of players. So now it's "oh, X can't make it tonight? Rather than our main game, we're doing our desert hexcrawl." "Oh, Y can't make it? Time for our Saltmarsh game"
I tried something very similar with the first adventure I ran. I tried to have everyone meet up and hang out at session date even if we had no session. Did not work quite as I had hoped but we did manage to pretty much end the adventure (even though the last session or two were just narrated since we agreed that we would not play in the hollyday-season and wanted to start the next campaign in the new year). For that second campaign, I took so much time and effort to build the characters tigether with the players and to get to know the characters and what the players wanted from them that I actually just played the PC when a single player could not make it. Unfortunately that group broke apart and half the players never played DnD with - I believe either of us ever again. With the three remaining players I started a new campaign from level 1 and plan to see it through to level 20. Good thing this video reminds me of this issue so I can get things back on track from the irregular sessions we are having lately.
Enough cannot be said for the FOMO aspect it gives players who miss out.
Sounds mean to "enjoy" imposing this but it's just true. Those players might feel so bad about missing out on a cool session that they'll put more effort into planning out their schedules and actually make time for the game rather than fitting it in whenever it's perfectly convenient.
OR a chronically missing player will eventually just drop out and tbh while I'd miss them I also value a regular game with present players so it's an opportunity to bring in someone else who will make time for it
I usually cancel if I'm down to 2 out of 4, but I recently started a "one shot series" They Came from the Cyclops' Cave game to fill in while I made some major system changes to our main game (Chronicles of Darkness to Storypath) that I'll also run when we're down to two players... when I just couldn't get something together for the main campaign... or when I need a break.
I rarely worry about having Everyone at a session, but I have had some where I built a session around a particular player's backstory and had to cancel because they couldn't make it and I didn't have time to prep a new one (I used to do a lot of prep ..backstory, personality notes, bunches of history my players never discover... maps and art I can buy, and the stats are the "easy" part.)
Depending on group size I will set the limits differently.
In my smaller groups 4-6 I say when at least 2 people are missing we wont play. in my larger groups 7-9 I up that by 1 to 3 people need to be missing to postpone.
To help with sceduling I always tell my players its always on the same day at the same time. When we are missing people for that normal date, we try to find another time during another day so we wont miss an entire session for the duration (weekly, bi-weekly, once a month etc.) I found out that helps a lot.
Some people might think this is expecting too much of the players, but I communicated this with them and they are all fine with it. I mean we all want to play D&D a certain amount of Organization and time planning is necessary to do it consistently.
We have a DM that sometimes has to cancel, and we have a player that's willing to step up and run one-shots/side adventures in the same world (coordinating with our regular DM), which works great!
On the other hand, when a player has to miss a session, our characters are independent and busy in the world enough (already at level 7!) that it is usually not too hard to find a good reason for the character to be absent. If we leave off in the middle of combat or something, some one else will usually run the character.
We also do use Discord in between sessions, but, IMO, it's been a bit of a mixed bag. It's nice to have the outlet for RP, to keep track of other PCs' doings, logistics, etc. -- but not everyone is always equally able to engage with Discord, and when people start using Discord for RP *instead* of doing it "onscreen" during the game session, I feel like the rest of us miss out. It's a difficult balance.
*"Do You Cancel Games When Players are Missing?"*
Yes, but only because the game I DM only has 3 players, and the one time I did a session with 2 of them, I felt bad because it meant the last player would be missing out on events. I've told my players if I had a part of 4+ players, I wouldn't be totally against playing with missing members, but it's only 3 players. I'm only willing to do whole party sessions, or run solo sessions for each of the players for this group.
im in 2 groups at this time, one is comitted to never play if someone can't make it, which is generally fair and fine but it has lead to this campaign dragging on way longer than we all expected. We keep joking "this arc will end summer 2023" because our GM originally told us that this was about where he expected the campaign to conclude, but a lot of cancellations and unexpected wrenches dragged this game out way longer and that can be felt by everyone to a degree. Like we made characters and stuff for the next campaign already, I had almost forgotten half my backstory lmao. It's a fine way to run but it has it's downsides if some people are more prone to cancel than others.
The other group I'm in I'm the GM and this group started later, so I have made it a rule that if only 1 person is missing we're still playing. I proposed that general rule because, as a player, I know that the excitement to play is a strong and precious thing and losing steam because games keep getting cancelled is poison for your campaign. As a GM I know that one player missing is how much I can handle in keeping encounters balanced. I got 6 players in my game, it is already a lot to juggle, if two players can't make it and my players start an encounter that I designed for all of them, not only is this fight suddenly way more lethal - the chance of hurting or even killing a character of a player who is not there is too high. Even spending their ressources is a touchy subject sometimes, you dont wanna catch up next session and hear that this spell you were saving or potion you held onto has been used by someone while you were absent.
In addition, if a players is missing I run their character because my players arent yet comfortable letting others do it. This is already hard to do depending on which players is missing, because my players are 11th level so their sheets are reasonably full of stuff they can do and hard to run, even if you got my years of experience with the system (pathfinder) and general knowledge of the characters, it's a lot. Doing this for two characters, even if they are martial "simple" characters, that's just too much.
Plus, 2 people missing is bad for telling a story, catching up one players isn't ideal but it's manageable. So that's my limit. One person missing, we roll. Two people out, it's hangout time. In general I found that this system works best for our group.
I play as normal if we have half or more of the players - so in my current 5 player game we’ll play with 3 players.
But given notice I’ll still run for 2. I just run something that’s either a prequel involving their characters, a prequel involving favoured NPCs where I’d like to flesh them out more or a little side action (you remember two sessions back you sent Arborio and Jade the NPCs to talk to the King - let’s see how that played out.)
I really try to avoid cancelling the night of doing anything that’s not roleplaying)
I was part of a group where they did cancel a session. The reason? It's because the player character was the "captain" of a ship with a crew on it. And they won't cancel if another player can't make it. And we were playing the Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
I can see the first officer taking over command of the ship though but that's fair
i have a hard rule that if any one person is missing, we continue ahead. in character, the PCs have a curse that turns them to stone at random. i’ve been using this as an in character explanation as to why they’re not present. and that’ll be a good solution until they get the curse removed
In my campaign we’re in the middle of a time loop at a ball and were missing a player last session. We did a flash forward one shot. Very fun.
The entire conflict for my campaign was made so that my players, if they can't make it, just get portaled out. Only times I will cancel a session is when its a big moment that everyone needs to be there. But those moments are few and far between
This video could not be any more prevalent for me. I'm nearing the end of my first campaign (that i run), and we've taken the past 3 weeks off. Next session is going to be the party talking to the Queen of a powerful nation and i haven't wanted to progress to the rp if i was down anyone because i think it's going to be a big social encounter
Normally I'll run a game when down just 1 player, unless its projected to be an important session that i want everyone there for as we approach the end. If I'm down 2 or more then i cancel, but will still probably hop on discord for a game night or a one shot (what we did last week).
Thank you for keeping up the great work!
my D&D group has 5 players and we will go ahead with sessions as long as we have 4 that can make it! we did have a spot there of only 3 being able to make it due to one player being overseas (we play over discord, but time differences are a pain) and 2 others constantly switching off availability, and we ended up going back to play death house with different characters than the ones we were currently running through strahd!
I'm good for still playing if people are missing in most circumstances such as traveling, exploring an area or small skirmishes with enemies. But if it's a big crucial fight or role play scene, I prefer everyone to be there. I'm willing to keep going if only one or two can't make it and just play their characters myself in those circumstances, but if half can't make it, I reschedule.
If more than half of the players can't show up that's when I usually postpone or reschedule.
When I run into the situation where a session really needs to have everyone, or needs to have the person who has to miss, I call that game and communicate that we are not having that session because of the needs of that session in particular. So far that has not taught the lesson of we must have everyone.
Unless unforeseen circumstances happen so you as a dm yourself can’t run the game for whatever reason or if you’ve already committed to something else and as such you know you’re unable to show up on said date, never cancel a game unless the party as a majority agrees to cancel it. Or even if you as a dm can’t show up, offer for the option for one of the party to be a temporary DM. And wether you’re a player or a dm and this is true for life in general, never overcommit to too many things if you’re able help it.
So... Problem I have with this... is that we have a very small group for DnD. The 4 of us including the DM. Meaning if a player can't make it we go from 3 players to 2, losing a big chunk of the party. I haven't missed a session and I never will, I prioritize my weekend time with everything highly. But it does happens where someone can't make it canceling everything for the week. Which is super bummbing for me
In my group we never continued playing big campaigns whenever a player is missing, we either play one-shots or hang out playing tabletop games
I run my games as one shots in a shared universe which takes a lot of pressure off of my players. It also allows them to have a stable of characters to try out. Players operate out of a massive plane hopping mechanical crab, in much the same way that the show Stargate Universe works. They go on away missions, and if you die or stay behind, that's it for that character. The big downside is that maintaining the overall narrative is difficult.
Ha! Just go to the Stargate part of your video.
This killed my last game. And I realize now that, contrary to what I thought, keep the game going despite scheduling issues might have been the way. At least for that table. But I couldn't see how playing without everyone would be an enticing thing and not a reason to skip more game. So.
Thanks for all the words you used, I am now going to use this advice when needed , and my gamez will benefits.
Hm. The Stargate thing is tempting.
I’m running a Curse of Strahd campaign, but due to work commitments only two of my original players are still in the game, and all three of us are very keen to keep going, but I’m still in the process of recruiting new players.
They’ve just found the Holy Icon of Ravenloft, and an out-of-body experience to get one of them to be able to use it could be very interesting.
wibbly wobbly timey-wimey.
That's usually the excuse I fall back on and my players are cool with it. Especially because it's what enables them to accomplish what they want to accomplish. If a player is missing for a session I'll still hold the session for everyone else. That player can either tell me what their character want to accomplish and anything simple enough is considered done. Anything they or I want RPed gets RPed at the start of the next session.
It doesn't matter if I conclude a session in initiative the next session starts with that player doing the stuff they wanted to do last session.
I personally would only reschedule a session if its a pivotal or important boss fight and 2 or more of my 4 players can't make it. The exception to this rule is if the boss has history or a special connection to a single PC who can't make it.
I've run sessions for just 2 players, I've run sessions for just 3 players (even when we had a 5 member party).
My thought is that if 1/3 of your players can't make it, nothing should happen that impacts their characters, but some story can still happen. This would be time for lore dumps, a slower progression, shopping, and the like. If 1/2 of the players can't make it, then the story should pause, and you should drop a side quest for the present members that would, for some reason or another, not allow your missing members. For example, consider that the present members all wake up from a long rest to see their companions locked in an eternal, nightmarish sleep. The waking party would then need to find the source and defeat the Nightmare, and turns out it was infecting the nearby village, so they get a bit of a reward for doing so!
To summarize, if you have a group of 6 players:
1 player missing: either write them out or sandbag them, continue and remember to fill them in on what they missed
2 players missing: slow down the story, make sure nothing plot relevant happens for their characters, consider having a lore dump or shopping session
3 players missing: pause the story, generate a sidequest for the present players, reward them slightly for being present
4 players missing: check with the last 2 if they really want to have a session if that many people are missing, consider doing a oneshot or playing a non-RPG game.
5 players missing: idk, go to a movie?
6 players mission: read a book, take a nap, work on next session?
I play in two campaigns online where the game span multiple time zones one globally, which is a heck of a thing and the other across the four major time zones in the US (depending on the time of the year got to love Arizona) with that being said, scheduling is obviously tough, but I very much appreciate both of my DM's takes on it and I generally do think it is best for helping the flow and pacing of the games.
I’m dm’ing a game right now with serious scheduling problems. The problem is we’ve never played on a regular basis (we just figure out when the next time that fits for everyone is, it’s really irregular). So I guess I’d have to figure out how to turn this into a regular thing before I can apply any of the advice I’ve seen around scheduling…
For me it depends on how frequently the group plays and how we play. In a weekly online game, I'm more inclined to cancel if two people are missing.
If we're playing in person, I definitely still like to meet up and either continue the campaign in some form or take it as a chance to try out a new game. Especially if the group plays infrequently anyway.
But the whole out of body experience sounds very interesting. Never tried that, but I think it would fit as an idea in my current campaign. Definitely going to try it out if the opportunity presents itself
If I have more than half of my players (this translates to a minimum of three) I run the session and continue the plot.
I do have a couple scenarios where I might reschedule for an absence, though... Like if we've just entered an arc specifically focused around a given character's backstory or something and that's the player that's going to be absent, OR for the end of a major climactic arc/final battle.
I run a 6 person group, and I made it clear that if we had at least 4 people, we'll play. They essentially just don't exist until they show up. It's not super thematic or anything, but FOMO is an incredible motivator and we end up averaging 5 people a session
In my group, we started to have recurring scheduling issues that meant our weekly games were becoming closer to monthly, and I can attest to that loss of enthusiasm.
Instead of just playing without everyone, however, we had a different idea that has so far worked really well for us. Basically, we created a setting for a new campaign that revolves around "World Shards," which are basically entire self-contained one-shot dungeons or encounters from across the multiverse. The flexibility allows me to run sessions that are wildly different from anything in our main campaign. For example, I just recently ran a whodunit style murder mystery which would never have fit into the main campaign, but was a ton of fun. This also has lets me explore different styles and themes while DMing, and because the system is so simple and flexible, some of my players have expressed interest in DMing their own Shard ideas as well, with one of them set to run theirs this Friday.
I can't deny that it does still suck to have the primary campaign go a month or more without a session, but given that the party prefers to have everyone present for each session of that campaign (as do I), the World Shard setting allows us to still play while also exploring new settings, character ideas, builds, themes, etc.
I'm really glad we started doing it.
My current campaign is a west marches one, which means we don't really have this problem. Sessions are only scheduled with whoever is available. And I know this isn't really useful for anyone running a more traditional campaign who is struggling with scheduling, but I just wanted to mention this as an option. I am a freelancer with a very inconsistent schedule, which means a regular game night is basically impossible for me. This is the only way I've been able to dm a campaign for my friends.
Idea for a character building video: build first
You take one of those DnD Shorts weird combo builds and make them into an actual character
We are a group of six. We have the thumb rule, when one player is missing we play anyways, when two people can´t we reschedule. Of course there are exceptions, like we are standing in front of the gates of the hometown of player x and player x can`t be there.
Whenever one of us can’t make it, we cancel the campaign. However, we run “filler episodes” or one-shots and that ends up being a great time for us
I've made a 1 on 1 session work in one, very particular circumstance. But mainly, yes I would play for 2 if I could get at least 2 of them.
most games I run or play in work on the one-man-down rule, we play if one person is away but not if more are
So TNG "The Inner Light" but important to your lore. I could see it.
How do you make the text RP chats work without it sucking all the RP out of the actual game? Whenever I've come across it, people start 'not wanting to waste time' RPing in the RPG or want to 'save that for the chat'.
I have back up campaigns that we play if everyone is not there. They are things like the Lost Mines of Phandelver. Things that are not terriblely story intense where we can have players drop in and out and gray blob them if they are absent.
I think maintaining the schedule is extremely important. Canceling can happen but it takes a lot to cancel a session.
If one player is out, we press on with that player choosing either to be 'greyed out' or another player handling their sheet in combat.
If half the players are unavailable (like yesterday) I run the remaining players through a one-shot with alternate characters elsewhere in the world.
If I'm down to only one other player, I'm willing to run a one on one session or cancel.
Keeping the schedule is important because it minimizes risk of the game dying out. If players get too comfortable w canceling sessions, it ceases to be a priority and the game is at more risk of stopping and never picking up again.
We rarely cancel - we meet once a month, so we are all rather excited to get to the game by the end of each month. If a person is sick, or there are family responsibilities, that player is run by me, with input from players. We also have those players play over Discord, should they have access to Wi-Fi. When we do cancel/postpone, that is usually around examinations, when some players are writing exams, and other players are setting ang marking exams (we have a 24-hr turnover on marking). So the lesson my players have learnt so far, is around the end of the year, there is some flexibility, but in all other circumstances we play.
Our Roll20 game has 7 players plus the DM. As long as we have more than half, the DM usually will go ahead and run the session, with the missing players "following aling in a fugue state" so they're with us if they can make the next session. We also have a second DM that runs an alternate campaign if the main DM, who is a vet, has to be on call or has an emergency. We DO try to get as many people there for big fights.
Mikes segues (I always want to write segway, because not native speakert) are the best. They are so good, it takes me a couple seconds to identify it.
I have a very small group (3 players) in a bottle area (an interdiemnsional circus) so it makes it hard to reduce to 2 players, if 1 is missing, especially because we have only had 1 session, so people don't know each other as well yet. This happened on our last session, so I agreed to push until our next scheduled date. I will discuss with them what they feel is good if this happens in future.
My group keeps going so long as the DM and around half the party can make it. We're a group of 7 (including the DM), so if 3 can make it, we're good to go.
Maybe you could use this as a chance for downtime in game like have players invent new spells or build magic items.
Depends if it's going to contain story beats or just traveling/dungeon crawling. Also never if more than one person is missing
"Do You Cancel Games When Players are Missing?"
To answer the question for my group? Yes. But there's only 3 players, so missing an entire third of the group makes doing anything fairly difficult.
Me personally, I used to do one of two things if someone was missing for the week. Offer one-shots to give my players a chance to try different builds to mix things up, or ask if anyone of the players would like to run a one-shot so I could be a player. This set up was especially if their character was going through a personal arc at the time. But overtime, I've found it's sometimes just better to continue on and come up with a background reason why they arn't present. Most recent example: Party of my current game just hit level 3. Ranger couldn't make it. So we (myself and the ranger) decided that in world he was busy finding an animal companion (he went Beast Master), hence why his character was not there that day. Of course, personal arcs I still feel a filler until that player returns the next week is best. Gone longer than one? we're moving on. Nothing worse than time killing a campaign.
Personally this would never work for me and my group. D&D night is a social gathering , not a sacred night that MUST happen and takes priority over the fun of the players. If more then one person is missing from the 6 player group, the rest simply will not play unless I brake out a CoC one shot or something else that will not exclude the missing players. This clearly differs from group to group, but not everyone is here for D&D alone, they came to spend time with friends and consider running without said friends at best underwhelming and at worst like a jerk move to even bring up.
I have run a side adventure (sort of a flashback) for a smaller group when we knew one player was going to be unavailable for a period of several weeks. This worked because we knew this well in advance so I could prepare for it. But I know I definitely can't just whip up a side quest or different adventure on a few days notice if someone cancels very close to the session. Prep time takes a lot of work, at least for me, and I also have other stuff to do in life. We've tried playing with an incomplete group, but we found that it caused a lot of issues with people having missed part of the story and not knowing what is going on.
For us, we just play only with the whole group. And as a DM for my group, I'm very strict on things I accept as valid reasons for cancelling a session. If a player is too busy to be able to commit to this campaign, that is fine, but then this campaign is not for them and I will replace them with someone who can. I should note we mainly play in person.
Canceled games not being anyone's fault can be hard to swallow when you have an extreme scenario like mine...we used to have a problem player, whose main source of problems was that she never understood that her actions affected other people, in AND out of character. One of her main problems was attendance; she almost never showed up, and when she did show up, she almost never paid attention and even tended to completely wander off without so much as a 'brb.' This resulted in the story arc that had a focus on my character being extremely delayed for *months* because the DM didn't want to go too far ahead without her but she kept ditching last minute. I don't think she even read my summaries of the sessions to catch her up to speed when we did have to go on without her. I still feel a lot of resentment even years after her official dropping out of the game because it was a prime example of how little she was invested in the game, and how much it felt like she didn't even care that that was affecting things I was looking forward to. A different player in that game had some scheduling issues in the past few months that made them miss a few games, and that whole scenario with the problem player has made them feel EXTREMELY guilty about it even though in their case, none of us feel any ill will towards them.
TL;DR: in most cases it is absolutely nobody's fault, but I do think that TTRPGs are a commitment and while things do happen, one should at least show respect for that commitment.
It's been over 10 years I don't play weekly anymore. Even when I'm a player.
Most of the people I play with don't have every weekend available (including me), and due time zones, it is impossible to schedule games on weekdays.
My groups always had well-kept diaries, and we keep the game discussions alive throughout discord. However, we settled on playing monthly.
I know it's not for everyone, but it was the way I found to keep playing RPGs, and it worked for my groups.
My usual metric for "need everyone here to play" is important fights with powerful characters ESPECIALLY if I have homebrew it cause I'm not great at judging power levels and I have this, irrational(?), fear of killing someone's character while they're not there. I just don't want players to feel like it unfair to possibly lose a character without having the agency of being present.
Apologies for the long post!
I've have 2 players who are routinely absent from sessions. Originally I did cancel sessions, because I felt it unfair to move on when life was getting hard for them. I got a very rude awakening when one of my players left (unquietly) because of this. Maybe 2-3 more sessions in, and I saw the quitting player's point; it wasn't fair to the people who did make it.
Now, I run with 1/2 or more, and if it's lower than 4 I run a Slayer's Take contract. Thank you for the idea! I've created new leadership NPC's and done a tiny bit of remodeling due to the end of Season 1, and my players have 2-3 characters each to choose from. I throw high CR monsters at them, see if they make it lol
This has to be one the best if not the best advice in your channel and I really appreciate it. I immediately shared it with all my groups.
Ive been cancelling if even one player cancelled because our group is only 4 people including me at this point, so I only have three players and I thought if I played with two that was just silly.
Then you directly call out that you should keep playing with as few as 2. So. Yeah, I will reevaluate it. I have been feeling the loss of momentum so I think I will consider talking to my players about still going if one can't make it.
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
Our DnD group used to have 4 players (+1 GM), and our rule was, if 2 people can't make it, we'll cancel or reschedule. Now we're with 5 players, so if 3 people can't make it, we'll cancel this session. Of course, if the GM can't make it, we'll cancel or reschedule anyways.
For home brew I don't cancel. For Adventure League I don't cancel EXCEPT when I am running hardcovers. During session 0 for hard covers we set a minimum of players to play. In fact we have ignored the min. This helps. I have noticed I will start with a very large group and end with an average group due to work changes, etc. i am currently running two different AL groups. Shattered Obelisk min has be set to 4 people and we started out with 9. And will hit the min of 4 come March due to PCS and other job shifts. Planescape is set to 3 people but Planescape so far looks like I can finish a chapter in a 2.5 hour session.
I have homebrew where the Main Character did not show for the important scene. Today, I just don't have one main character.
I have approached this a number of ways:
If there is a good reason either myself or the player can think of for the character to be MIA, we move forward regardless as to what is going on.
If there's an imminent/unavoidable massive story element or something explicitly tied to the PC that will be MIA, reschedule/skip.
If it's repetitive/there's a longer expected absence I'll work with the player to come up with something that will make it make sense when they aren't there in-character and we'll play without them when they aren't available.
If there's major combat imminent and more than a third of the party is missing (usually meaning 2 players), reschedule/skip.
If the player is heavily invested and there's something I know they'll absolutely hate missing, I might reschedule/skip.
Otherwise we go.
That all said, this vidyo did give me thoughts as to ways to get around some of these. So thanks!
I have a player who routinely can't make it due to work scheduling. Luckily he tells us ahead of time, so we're not scrambling to make alternative arrangements. So, I'm essentially running 2 campaigns for my group. The main campaign, Waterdeep Dragon Heist for the full group (5), and another for the reduced group (4) using different characters. The second one can also be run if I only have 3 players, but if I only have 2 players, we will cancel or reschedule for another day. We haven't had to do this too many times. I like having these options in place because it does mean we play pretty much every week. The second "campaign" is more loose and wild, where the characters are more broken and we just get together to kill things in some random third-party module I've found. Yes, it's a lot more work for me, as the DM, but I love that about my role. I enjoy reading through modules, planning, and creating maps. I also get to try out weird and wonderful monsters that are maybe a bit busted, and wouldn't appear in our slighty more serious campaign.
Our discord server has several Pathfinder games running, shuffling players and GMs. Most groups are GM+4 players, and if at least one player can't make it - the game is postponed. Even though we play a rules-heavy game, we're still very heavy on the RP, so we don't want to miss things. 3 or even 2 characters wouldn't be enough for us.
We once had a very big hiatus of 9 months, mostly due to GM's personal reasons. But we managed to come back to the campaign and finish it, and to this day it's my first and only campaign I played through level 1-20. Ngl, we did lose a bit of momentum, and by the end of this 2-year campaign we were ready to move on, but I think it's only natural?
Recently we had another hiatus of 3 months, but as soon as we remembered what had happened before, the game was on. And no one at our table would want to miss a game.
Shout out to a recent campaign 3 episode of Critical Role where Liam's character was just quiet but doing burbees for 4 IRL hours. Also now trying to imagine a fictional plot for the Sick Day stream they did. I guess that would be an alternate universe where The Incident happened again. Weird that Chetney and FCG keep getting raptured together...
I habe kudt been yellig at the screen for spending 1,5 months inviting people, planning 1,5 year campaign, 1 long session every month... making a set schedule. Now one player says i cant make it for 3-4 of the bevauee the only wotte one sunday in his calender and the other is first "i will be missing may.." then at session zero: "what we play for July and August? I can't either"
I became the DM that wouldn't run unless everyone could be there; I'm honestly not sure when that change occurred, because I definitely didn't used to be that way. At the heart of it, I think it may have been a mixture of fear and laziness; easier to reschedule than come up with something else.
Now, during session Zero, I will confer with the players about how we (as a group) should handle it when someone can't attend. I will also establish that, as an example, if we have 6 players (not counting me as the DM), I will run with 1 or 2 missing.
Good video topic, Mike.
Yes!! Agree with these solutions big time, and recognizing that constantly re-scheduling is a problem.
I used to be one of the players who would always push for the whole group being present - but after seeing not one, not two but THREE campaigns slowly die out because we could never get together... well, I have changed. I tend to have some pretty intense FOMO, and always thought "well, I would hate to miss out, so we shouldn't keep someone else out of it either."
But guess what? Having to be filled in on information through roleplay is *really* fun. Having an outsider POV on something that happened is super fun to play!
I have a long, long campaign that I've been running for a year and a half now. The first year, we kept pushing things up whenever someone was absent. We got maybe 16 sessions in a year - because I also tend to run games bi-weekly, rather than weekly.
After a 2-month period without a single session, the group and I concluded that we need to keep things moving - or else the game will die out, or we die before the game is ever finished 😂
For a party of 5 players, I previously had a rule that if more than two people were absent, we would re-schedule. But this video has given some great ideas for how to deal with very small parties!
Thanks for the tips, and especially a big thanks for linking to others who have more to say on the matter 😁
We are just experimenting with a new system that might fix the problem.
So, my group (4) tends to play together, when we are not, we organize doomed campaign that is a short campaign that develops one of the PC's background or goal.
But that was not possible for main campaign because group wants to lvl together, meaning every Exp is shared and you feel wrong if player wasn't even there to share Exp with him / her.
So, due to some other reason I offered that we drop levelling altogether. Instead I will track levels, so that I know how far on lvl track they are, but they are being gifted parts of the level by special feats or missions. That way you dont lvl all at once. You got spell slots from a magic gem that dragon gifted to you and they will try to absorb it (1 spell slot per 3 days or 1 spell slot if they roll over 15 till energy drains and they got their levels, if they roll 1, just find another gem, if 20, that was fast). Your rage is deeper as you get closer to the source of your feelings. You found someone willing to train you new special fighting moves in return for a favour. Leveling itself turns into a constant reward instead of once per half a year or so event. It is not one big reward, it is many small and way more meaningful rewards. Just make sure they are around the same level, balance between classes is not a strong part of DnD anyway because optimisation is a thing and it is hard to prevent. Just make sure everyone is more or less similarly capable and if they are not ... just give them a simple lvl-like non-lvl stats or ability boost. Problem solved.
Like they just slayed first dragon that was also buffed with dragon comet magic. They touch it and feel how power of the ritual goes into them, expanding their potential for future growth and making them just a little bit more aware, a little bit better at everything (a way to explain +1 proficiency). Isn't that way better than "you wake up and now you can cast 2 new 3rd lvl spells and have +1 proficiency, how cool is that?"?
Granted, you need quite a lot of trust and some basic communication with your GM and it is probably great if GM has some experiences with regular levelling system, but ... isn't regular levelling system one of the worst parts of DnD? The main reason why I wanted to change it that I am not at all confident I could pull milestone levelling off (what milestone and how many of them?) and I was just growing tired of players bickering at calculating at the end of each fight or session how much exp they deserve. It was bad. Bad and stressful.
So, do we as DMs need to prepare extra content that might not be story focused to continue having a session?
The group I run has 5 people, and we will still play if one person can't make it. But if two people can't then I tend to reschedule. Though I have run it with only three people, it feels off if we don't at least have a party of four. The same rules applied to one of the groups I'm a player in. We at one point has 6 players and a GM, so if three people couldn't make it, we tended to reschedule. The last group i'm in will reschedule if even one person can't make it, but that group is the far more casual of the three. I can totally see the mentality of this breaking the hype for the games, but also as this is a game we wanted to play together it feels weird once that 'together' isn't there.
For sessions I absolutely want everyone there for it does tend to be final battles of an 'arc' or the end of a game. But I also tend to want everyone there for a change in direction. Just so that everyone can agree on a way to go and nobody feels left out of that direction change. Though I'm sure most people will go with the flow, I don't like accidentally excluding folks in decisions like that as that's something I hate being excluded from. I had a previous group in the past experience a lot of turbulence because they were disconnected from major story points because they had to miss a session.