It’s game day. Time to sit down for session twenty-two of your long-running campaign. Everyone knows their characters inside and out, people are really falling into the groove of role-playing and using their abilities well, and the campaign is moving along well. The heroes have made their way from being a rag-tag band of misfit strangers into a well-oiled team, and they’re progressing towards facing the Big Bad.
And then someone has an emergency and can’t make the session.
What do you? I mean, you can certainly cancel the game entirely. That’s always an option, but probably not the best one. After all, everyone was psyched to play, there’s creative energy to be harness, and in non-COVID times, it’s likely that some people have even travelled some distance to get to the game. Also, if you’re playing the game for a streaming network or a podcast, well, you have an audience to satisfy.
You can play the game without them. Most people will understand and say “Sure, someone can NPC Johunk the Barbarian, just don’t get me killed,” when they can’t make a session. And most GMs have learned to essentially make the person an invisible companion during those times. But that’s also unsatisfying, especially if there are major plot points that are going to be dealt with that session, or something very specific to the character. Having Johunk the Barbarian’s ex-boyfriend show up with a grudge during a session when Johunk is an NPC is far from ideal.
The third option is “Let’s do something different for a session.” This is when you can pull out a board game, or another RPG, or another campaign from within the same RPG, that doesn’t require the missing player.
We recently ran into that on Something… Something… Dragons. We were going to be missing a player for two-to-three weeks, so we decided to divert from the Carrion Crown Adventure Path for Pathfinder, 1st Edition and instead we did a couple of sessions playing Mutants & Masterminds, 3e. One thing that worked out well in this case is that superheroes are, by their nature, usually able to have people come and go between “missions” in a way that works for Pathfinder Society play, but doesn’t usually fit into an AP. I can’t just have Elyris go missing for three weeks, but no one wonders if Lightray isn’t able to join the team for one mission with superheroes.
For this reason, I highly encourage people to have back-ups to play. It can be another RPG, it can be a board or card game, whatever. But having something else to do on Game Night when a player suddenly can’t make it will definitely help keep the fun and excitement in the group and keep anyone from feeling like they wasted their night.
Plus, the side-quest can do a lot to make sure that everyone is all the more excited to get back to the main story.
