Cogs and Gears - Player absence

Introduction

Once you get players past there teens you will find as a GM you will find that you will have to deal with player absence as the players acquire lifestyles incompatible with turning up to a regular games session.

I have over the years come up with a number of ways of dealing with this problem the ones which I favour at the moment are.

The parallel universe method

Not developed by me but by my friend Jamie Wakefield who was up until recently, when real life got in the way and he became unable to attend, running a Parthfinder game using it.

• The game always goes on regardless of who turns up to it.
• The group that turns up on the night is the group that has always been doing that adventure in that universe.
• Players dont exist when absent as they are not in that particular parallel universe.

Over all it works well and the game always progresses however it is sometimes necessary to adjust encounters on the fly if all your heavy hitters don't turn up on the week of the big fight or you are stuck in the middle of a dungeon with lots of traps  and your traps man is unfortunately not present for a session. However it works well enough in the hands of a GM who is able to deal with that and I very much feel that any GM will need to be able to develop that sort of capacity quite early as players are of their very nature often unpredictable. The principle weakness of the system with HackMaster in mind is that it really complicates the way group honour would work and that can be quite complex to keep a handle on.

The alternating game.

This works especially well if a particular character has rather predicable absences.Here you run two games one with the player in to run when they are present and one without to run when they are not. This worked well enough until he player it was arranged for stopped being able to come at all. However it only really works if there is only one potential player being absent and the other players are able to create and run two characters in two different adventures.

The Interlude method
This works by writing the absent players out of the immediate episode but having them near at hand such that they can be written back in easily when needed. I also use it to allow me by running those players as npc's  in writen interludes to have them contribute to the story and in the case of my current campaign build up the area and develop other possible leads to future adventures.