Dante touched a nerve today in his post on scheduling conflicts for RPG sessions.
I have been playing with a rather stable group for about 8 years. Enough to take us from our early to mid-twenties well into our early Thirties.
Babies were had, house were bought and jobs with traveling occurred.
While my non-gamer wife (who get’s my gaming) is a pearl and is ready to takes over solo parenting duty every Friday and the odd Sunday, it’s not the same for the other fathers around the table (there are 2, Eric and Stef) and often one or the other is missing from a game. It’s even become an inside geek joke to say that they both can’t exist in the same time-continuum.
I have the same ‘miss a player, play all the same’ policy that Dante mentions having. And it worked for some time. But it now seems like we’re missing at least 2 players on a more regular basis (our 2 bi-monthly sessions became once-per-3-weeks things twice already since our annual summer Hiatus).
I have no intention of penalizing the players, its not their fault. Unfortunately at 35, real life often Trumps RPG night. But it irks me that I can’t get to play my favorite game as often as I had planned to. Furthermore, when we play with a missing player, we don’t want to burden ourselves with playing the character and it’s sometimes hard to ‘accept’ that the character just faded in the background. But as with any Storming events in our gaming group, there’s nothing a little Norming won’t fix :
- We’re starting a new McWod backup game, with Franky as GM to be played on weeks where the player Quorum is not reached. We’re also inviting a new player, PM, to join us so he can experience 1st hand RPGs and our group dynamic.
- I’m moving the game to more episodic content where one evening will, hopefully, cover a whole adventure. I’ll focus on the 5-room Dungeon model and adapt this to my Ptolus/Planescape campaign arc.
In fact I’ve been toying with a Schtick where the characters would have a ‘timer’ on their adventure and would automatically be transported back to ‘base’ at the end of the evening, regardless of how far they went with the adventure. I’m not sure I could pull it off in a cool enough way to maintain my player’s willful suspension of Disbelief but I’m still pondering.
Any ideas?
I’ve been doing the episodic thing for a while now. Its worked pretty well for the group. I think it lets the group feal like they have accomplished something that day. While still being part of a broader story arc. With the style of game I’ve been running along with its episodic nature. It has been easy for me to plug players in or out. So it really doesnt matter if all the PC’s show up or not we still can play and it doesnt effect the game or session. But I also award Experience at the beginning of the session. For the last session you played. So if your not there you do miss out on some experience. If people want to make up for it and are interested I will run side sessions. (on a different nigh or time) Which will be their character, and perhaphs some one shot charcters made by others in the group. Or people that usually cant play in my normal weekly game. My friend Kev only seem to be able to get out of the house once every month and a half. But if hes around he’ll join in as hes usually starved to play.
I was looking at the five room dungeon thing. I like that. I pretty much have been doing something similar to that with my episodic play anyways. I was looking at my last Star Frontiers game it pretty much had all the elements. (which the actual play from if posted on my blog, If you care to read about it more in depth.)
1. Puzzle, Roleplaying challenge (switched from its normal position of 2): PC’s prepare for and ambush prirate attackers.
2. Entrance and guardian (Switched from its normal posistion of 1.): The PC’s take the fight on to the pirates ship.
3. Trick, Set Back: PC’s encounter head man only to have to fight his robot instead.
4. Big Battle or Conflict: PC’s fight the pirate captain.
5. Reward, revelation, plot twist: PC’s have to escape the pirate ship before they are trapped.
Now with your game the whole transported back to the base deal. I’m not so sure about. But there should definitely be a stopping point. Or I guess conclusion for that section. Now if that was going back to base. Thats OK. But if it doesnt fit the situation. I think that would leave me a little cold so to speak.
I’m happy to see that the Episodic approach is appreciated by players.
I’ve been discussing the ‘return to base’ concept quite a lot with one of my friends today and I think I could pull off something like that in Planescape where at the end of a session, all players are pulled from the adventure site to be returned at a fixed spot. But that would remove control from the players as to when they return from a site and may, as you put it, leave them cold.
Maybe the return to base could be a player controlled thing, some sort of Rune of Recall and we’d agree as a group top trigger it at the end of the night unless everyone commits to show up at the next game… I’m pondering this…
When I stopped playing D&D many years ago, we were a DM and three or four players, and whenever somebody couldn’t make it, we felt our session was falling appart. And since the situation didn’t get better, we eventually stopped playing. Ten years later, I decided to restart my gaming. And I decided that I wanted to have up to six players per group, dates fixed via voting on a website (doodle.ch), with characters popping in and out at the beginning of the session, no questions asked (and no XP gained). It worked really well. In fact, it has worked so well that on some days I’ve had six or seven players at the table which led to a new set of problems. Since lower-level characters get more XP, the gap will close over time. As an additional houserule to make it easier for players who rarely find the time, I’ll auto-level any character who has missed at least two sessions in a row to the lowest level present in the rest of the party. This has happened exactly once in the last 11 months of gaming, so I think this is no problem at all.
I have an idea on the back to base thing. The party is approached by some an agent of a powerful (insert uber good aligned creature here) who has been imprisoned and is looking to complete his paladin (or other applicably epic quest) quest. However the prison has no way out except the special widget. to get the widget the party needs to go to its own plane, but the plane bounces you back to where you came from as a banishment as cast by a 20th level caster after X amount of time (where X= 1 session). So he asks the party to learn how to travel the planes with that time limit (read: at the end of every session you plane shift back to the prison).
Good approach Alex!
Zozeer: That’s a very cool idea! I might steal it (or at least some part of it) Thanks!
Hmm… you could make it interesting by stealing part of the gimmick of a show I’ve been watching lately.
It’s called Pushing Daisies. Essentially, the main character has the power to touch a corpse and bring it back to life, and then touch it again to kill it permanently.
The trick comes in that if he leaves the body alive for more than a minute, reality adjusts itself, and someone else nearby dies instead.
In other words, failing to return would carry some sort of consequence (that all the PCs know about). This could be enacted by having something automatically bring the PCs back before this consequence occurs (easiest, and if the players understand the consequences, likely to be accepted) or by leaving it in player hands. In such a case, you would give them the time left until the consequence happens (if it’s planescape, time until a temporary portal closes, leaving them stranded, perhaps. And they get to decide when to return.
Perhaps, one day, they will decide not to return before the set time. This could open up other possibilities, including making a new “rescue team” to go after the trapped characters next game (which would allow you to ignore what players are there, as well) or something else that could happen as a result of whatever the consequence is.
Just a thought.