What to Do When a Player Misses a Session

Welcome back to How to Be a Better DM, the Official Podcast of Monsters.Rent, the only rental subscription service for D&D minis.

I’m your host today, Justin Lewis, and today, you and I will talk about a topic that affects every gaming group at least once in their campaign. To be honest, it’s somewhat a thorn in my side as I personally hate when this happens. It can interupt the flow of the game and cause some confusion as far as the story goes as well. It’s a plague, and today we will find the cure…

But before we get to that, I just want to let you know that we want to hear from you, literally. We want to start featuring some listener questions or tips on the show, so go to Instagram, then go to @monsters.rent and send us a message, either audio, video or text, of a question you want answered, or a tip you have found helpful in your DMing experience. We’ll mention it on the show and also give you a quick shoutout.  We realized that you have a wealth of experience that should be shared as well. So why not share it. Again, go to @monsters.rent on Instagram and send us a message and we’ll get it up on show.

So, the plague that I was talking about earlier? It’s when a player misses a session or can’t make a particular session.

Let’s take a scenario. This is a text thread between you and your group.

DM: D&D tonight at 6. Does that work for everyone?

Alex: Yup, I can’t wait.

Sean: Of course bruh, I’ll bring the soda.

Maddy: I’ll bring snacks. Does everyone like Japanese Algae candy.

Alex: No way, that stuff’s gross.

Maddy: Alex, I saw you eat like 10 handfuls of the stuff last week.

Jerry: I’m really sorry guys, I can’t make it tonight…

The rest of the thread: stunned silence for the next 3 hours.

This is a very common situation. The reason why there is stunned silence in the text thread for the next 3 hours is because every wants to play D&D that night. Jerry is the only one not able to make it. Everyone else is wondering, “What do we do?”

That is, in part what I want to talk about today. What do you do?

First off, let’s talk about what you can do and then let’s talk about why and when you should or shouldn’t do any particular thing.

I also want to make it very clear. Don’t feel guilty for wanting to play D&D without one of your players there. It happens. Also, don’t feel guilty for rescheduling for a later time. I’ve said this before, but D&D is a hobby and other things take precedence sometimes. That said, let’s talk about your options.

Here are, as I see them your only options:

1. Reschedule the Session for a Different Time
2. Play Anyway
3. Kidnap the delinquent player, duck-tape them to a chair, wax their eyebrows off for the impertenence of missing a session, and play anyways

That’s everything you can do. That last one might be somewhat…. Hmmm I think the word is illegal… but you get what I mean.

So now that we know what can be done, let’s talk about what should be done….

Reschedule the Session

Probably the least the desirable option is to reschedule the session. This is likely the least desirable because it’s assumed that everyone in the group wants to play D&D. This is essentially making everyone suffer. I’m not bitter, I’m just stating the facts.

Sometimes though, it is the right choice.

The most common reason for a rescheduling is that multiple people in the group can’t make it. You’ll have to come up with your own hard and fast rules, but in my group, if 3 people can’t make it, then for sure we are rescheduling. If 2 people can’t make it, then it’s like 85% sure that we are rescheduling. If 1 person can’t make it, it’s 60% sure that we are rescheduling.

I would say that rescheduling, regardless of the right choice, is likely the easiest option for the DM. Everything else is somewhat more involved. 

Now, I will say, just because you reschedule DND doesn’t mean that you have to reschedule games. You could still meet up with the members of the group who can make it and play a different game or even play a one-shot. There’s nothing wrong with that. For that reason alone, rescheduling is a very powerful option when it comes to a player missing a session.

It’s also a good option because you don’t really have to make any other considerations.

So with that, let’s transition away from this option that is really the simplest and easier, and let’s make things a bit m ore complicated.

Present but Non-Participating

So, for the next few options, we are assuming that only one player is absent and that the DM and the rest of the group have decided to proceed forward regardless of their absence.

Now, you have to make a choice as the DM as to what happens to the character who, for the time being, is without a puppet-master.

The next obvious and next easiest method here is to simply have that character present, but not doing anything. Whenever roleplaying situations happen, that character doesn’t interact and just is a walking potato. 

This method might work, but more often than not, it will be comical to the other players who will ask, “What does Gregarious do in this situation” to which you’ll have to respond as the DM, “Gregarious seems zoned out and doesn’t really respond to the rest of you.”

While funny, this method sort of breaks the 4th wall, remind you and your players that this a game and decreasing the overall immersion. 

If your players are wonderful and considerate players, they may not mess around with the C (it’s just a character since the P or Player is missing).

I don’t prefer this method because it’s far too easy to just transition to one of the other methods anyways. I feel like doing it this way with the Character being present but Not-participating is just a non-decision, as if the DM couldn’t decide what to do.

Besides we all know that as soon as combat happens, it will be as if the character isn’t there or someone will take control over the, so let’s talk about the other methods because those are much more likely.

Present and Subbed

One method you can employ is the Present-And-Subbed method. In this method, you let someone else at the table take control of the character. For all intents and purposes the missing player is being “subbed” or substituted by another player at the table.

If you do go with this method, I would put a couple of stipulations on the gameplay.

First of all, I would recommend that the subbing player does not do any roleplaying for missing player. I recommend this because no one wants words put in their mouths so if you have someone playing for you there is a chance that things would be said that the original player would never say or things would not be said that the original player would say. It just gets really confusing really fast. I would just avoid it.

Next, and this actually has to apply whether you or another are controlling the missing PC, but can they die. In my games, if you are not present, your character can’t die. That’s just because I don’t trust myself or my rolls enough to keep characters alive, so if you were going to die and bleed out, you don’t because you are “on loan” and that’s just not fair. In your games, are characters whose players are gone able to die?

If they can, make sure the missing player knows that. In fact, that should be a table rule set up at the beginning of the campaign before any players are ever missing.

You also need to decide if the missing player has the right to Retcon anything when they return. In my opinion, I would opt against this except for various roleplaying aspects. When it comes to the major choices, the player shouldn’t get to choose what happens when they are gone. That said, the players controlling them shouldn’t be able to make any big decisions with them either. When a character is being subbed they should really almost just be an NPC that gets to help the party in combat. Simple.

Present and Under Control of the DM

That last option that allows the character to still remain present is controlling them yourself as the DM. In my opinion, this can be pretty simple to do, but it can also get annoying. For example, if your players use digital character sheets that you the DM can see then it gets a little easier to play the character. If they don’t then you’ll have to keep track of a sheaf of papers.

Also, the more obvious consideration is that as the DM you are controlling scores of baddies. Do you really want to be in charge of another character during combat? My general opinion is to give a player control over the character during combat at the very least depending on how many adversaries there are. If there is just one, then I’m find doing it

So if keeping a character around is so energy and focus consuming, why would anyone choose to keep the character present instead of just having them leave?

There are a few reasons. 

The first reason is that, depending on your party and table rules, the character has to be present to gain XP. That’s how it works in video games, but that may or may not be how it works at your table, for example, I prefer to just have everyone in my party level up at the same time based on story points. That’s because I don’t like math. Also, I don’t have players who leave for extended periods of time.

The second reason a DM might choose to have a character stick around while their player is not present is because they are integral to the current story at hand. This might be the same reason that you choose to reschedule the session if a player is not around, because they need to be present to make certain decisions. Having the character participate without the player is not an ideal situation but it does allow the story to move on and it makes it so the entire party isn’t just waiting on the one person.

The third reason is that it doesn’t make sense for the character to just disappear. There are different ways to make the character disappear which we’ll talk about next, but if you are in the middle of a dungeon or stuck on a speeding train, having the character just say, “Gotta go” doesn’t make sense and breaks the immersion.

Not Present

So now that we’ve talk about keeping the character present, let’s talk about having the character be absent in addition to their player.

There are in my opinion 3 ways to make this happen.

You can have the character stay behind.

You can have the character actively choose to leave.

Or you can have something else pull the character away.

When you have the character stay behind, this is simply that the party decides to go somewhere and the character decides to remain where they are waiting for the rest of the party to return. I saw a great example of this in High Rollers, the group from the UK when one of the players was not there they had her character, Nova, just stay at the inn. Obviously this worked because the party was staying at an inn in a city. If there were in the middle of a desert without food or water, having the character stay behind would be nonsense.

When you have your character leave, the character decides that another path is more important than traveling with the party, even for a short time. In the 2nd campaign of Critical Role, Yasha did this multiple times because the player had other commitments.

When you choose this method, you have to have the player or yourself come up with a logical reason as to why the character left. If the reason is, “Because I wanted to find mushrooms in the forest,” that either fits with your campaign or your character or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, the other players will not find that a rewarding answer. 

More than anything, when a character leave the party and comes back, that should be an excellent opportunity to develop the story arc of that character, providing great roleplaying for the party when the character returns. So don’t waste it. Use it as an opportunity to have something cool happen.

How to explain why they come back?

Speaking of the character coming back, when a character leaves, you will have to decide if they will come back or not. If the character was just a temporary thing, or the player wants to have a new character then having them leave is not a bad thing. 

In most cases though, the character will come back, and that means that you and the player who was missing need to figure out a plausible reason not only for why the character leave but more importantly, why they came back and how they came back.

In some instances, it’s easy.

Nicholas Tracagious left to go commune with his deity in the forest. He came back because he was done. The only reason that specific scenario could work is because in this case, the party remained in the same city, able to move freely. If the party had been embroiled in a dungeon, then having Nick Tracagious show up would be somewhat weird, unless, his deity in the forest had shown him a specific place in the dungeons where he could special psychedelic mushrooms and the place where those mushrooms are found just so happen to coincide with where the party is. Honestly, even that scenario would seem a little too coincidental.

A quick sidenote though.

D&D is your story. That means that even though some things might seem coincidental, it isn’t because you are the weaver, tying all the threads together, weaving a great and beautiful tapestry. Was it a coincidence that Han Solo and Chewbaca were in the Mos Eisley cantina when Ben Kenobi went looking for a way off planet? Or was it the force? Was it just coincidence that Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli were all present at the Council of Rivendel or were they destined to be there. It doesn’t matter, because they were there. Sometimes I analyze things too much and fall into the trap of thinking, “What a funny coincidence that those two characters are there,” and then decide not to make that part of the story happen. In movies and stories, “coincidences” happen all the time, and honestly that might be why the stories or the movies even have a plot, because of the “coincidences”. So, I know I say that you have to make things “make sense”, and I know that I’ve been using a “lot of air quotes”, but just as long as your story is gripping and entertaining, don’t worry to much about it.

Side note over.

So, thinking about reasons why a character would return, there are a few possiblities, but obviously, if you can think it up, then it will probably work.

The simplest reason is that, like what I’ve already mentioned, the character that left finished the thing they went to do, so they came back. Simple, easy, doesn’t need much more explanation than that. 

Another simple reason is that the thing they went to do lead them back to the party anyways. This method is great if you want to tie in the reason they come back with what the party has going on right now. An example of this would be DewStar the Druid left because she had a strange vision about her communing with nature in a white glade. She leaves, finds the white glade, and while there has another vision about finding a black glade and her party. She starts her search. She finds the black glade, right as a Death Night begins attacking her party in the very black glade she saw in her vision. After the party dispatches the black glade,  DewStar discovers that at the center of the glade there is the grave of an ancient druid who’s spirit is at unrest for some reason. See, the character left and returned, both seemingly for plot points.

Another simple reason is that the missing character had their own agenda and then whatever the party was doing leads the party to the missing character. It’s somewhat similar to the previous reason, but there are slight differences. In this case, the missing character doesn’t really have any intention of returning to the party, or they intend to return much later. The party then, does the returning, surprising everyone involved.

When it comes down to it, you don’t need to make it make sense, unless you want to dwell on the fact. If you just want to gloss over that so-and-so returned from skinny dipping in a mountain lake, that’s fine. Gloss over and move on. The rest of your party will move on too, no problem. If you do want to spend time on, make sure that it’s a satisfying and fulfilling answer to the question of, “Why did you come back here and now.”

Table Rules for Communication

While we are on the subject of players missing sessions and things like that, I think it would be apropos to talk about how communication around missing sessions happen.

Here’s the truth of it: it will change on a case by case basis.

Here’s the ideal that we all strive for: Every missing player alerts the group at least a couple days in advance.

I know things don’t always pan out that way, but it’s best to alert the group as soon as you know you will be missing so the group can make decisions and plan what they will do.

For example. This previous week, I was sick. I was hoping I would feel better by the time the day of our session came around, but I wasn’t. So I texted the group that I couldn’t do it that day. On other occasions, members of our group have had conflicts and they’ve alerted us that they would be out of town a week in advance.

This allows the rest of us to decide if we will continue playing anyways or if we will hold off and wait until they get back. So really the only rule for communication is communicate early, clearly and often.

What if the Missing Player is Integral to the Story

What do you do if the missing player is integral to the story?

Here’s where I put on my Tough Love hat.

The simple fact of the matter is that you will have to decide yourself. But let me tell you that no decision is wrong. If you decide to move along with the story, that’s totally fine. In fact, maybe the player being gone will help you write a more creative story. Either way, you are the DM, you are ultimately the person with the most control over the session and whether it happens. Yes, your players may all decide to skip a week, but you get to decide if the week is skipped any time you want. Don’t forget that. Also, lord that over your players in a really jerky way. Just know that if a player is missing, and their character happens to be a big decision maker right in the center of what’s going on in the story right now, you can play without them. They may not like that, but if that’s what it takes to keep your group playing and having fun, then do it.

From sickness, to work trips, to family conflicts, our players will have lots of reasons why they may or may not be able to make the session happen. That’s probably especially true in this next month and a half as we move towards Christmas and the New Year. When your player turns up missing, don’t feel...