Everyone knows the standard options for a player having to sit out a session or two because of what my husband calls “Darth Real Life.” Illness, family event, working late, etc. This is hopefully something your group talked over before beginning the campaign. The most obvious is the GM or another player running the PC (“NPCing”). Preferably in such a way that, upon her return, the absent player isn’t greeted with “Welcome back, Friend! Ready to make a new PC? You can do it while I run the surviving PCs through a social encounter–your old PC’s funeral.” Another common one is for the PC to be busy elsewhere. This is the one the Friday Night Skype group prefers. In fact, the GM usually makes an effort to find something that helps the party in the current session/arc, and encourages the rest of the party to make suggestions, and will award some XP to the PC. The session can also be postponed, of course, which is sometimes the best option, like this is a continuation of the previous session.
But these are for once-in-a-while absences. What if one of your players is going to be away for a long time, like weeks or months? It just isn’t feasible to have their character NPC’d for session after session. In small groups, like ours, being short a party member regularly doesn’t work. We’ve found that often the sessions–while still good and fun–aren’t as good and we don’t have as much fun when it’s three PCs (plus GM) rather than our usual four. So what to do? This isn’t a What-if question for Friday Night Skype. One of our players, who also GMs one of the campaigns we alternate, has a great opportunity, but won’t be available to play for several months. Fortunately we know ahead of time, so all five of us can decide how we are going to deal.
First, at least two of our regular campaigns will go on hiatus. This player GMs one of them. He has no reason to worry we will have lost interest in it before his return–we love his original setting. The other is an F&D campaign the rest of us are agreed we want and need to wait on his return. The F&D GM has that campaign much better planned-out than I have mine, which is just one-shots and the odd 2-3 session arc.
Our M&M GM may run a few of his “vignette” sessions (see “Fifteen Minutes of Roleplaying Fame”) to set the stage for the next part of the main plotline, so he can advance it once we have our full group again. This is also an ideal time for our friend’s PC to pursue an important development in his life that player and GM had already planned. I might do a couple one-shots in my AoR campaign, and will be getting with the player to see if there’s anything he wants his Bounty hunter/Gadgeteer to do “offstage,” because I would like to be able to give that PC some XP to keep him from getting too far behind the other PCs.
However, most of what we will play is New Stuff–to us anyways. There is always another system we want to try–but haven’t because we already have four campaigns that we alternate an arc at a time. And we enjoy them enough that no one wants to push back resuming one of our “regulars.” So, with at least two campaigns on hiatus for 6 months, we are finally going to try out some–Numenera and the new 7th Seas are at the top of the list. These will probably be mini-campaigns of a few sessions each, if not just one-shots. If we want to continue playing in a system once our friend is back, it would be a new campaign with new PCs. In addition to these, we might try different mini-campaigns/arcs of games we already enjoy, possibly with new GMs. For instance, my sometime AoR co-GM is talking about doing FFG Star Wars one-shots. If he does, I am going to take the opportunity to play PC specs I don’t normally pick.
Now that we have a plan–which hopefully does survive first contact with Friday Night Skype–we will be able to continue to have good games even while missing our gaming buddy. And when he returns, we’ll have some new games to introduce him to. Plus we can welcome him back to our favorites.
Linda Whitson
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