Any tips for when a player doesn't show up last minute...

Any tips for when a player doesn't show up last minute? Running 5e Curse of Strahd and douche player canceled 15 minutes before we were supposed to start.

Ended up doing an impromptu one shot instead.

The "you get knocked out/fallen ill" excuse is lame and feels like such a cop-out.

What does Veeky Forums do when douche players cancel at the very last minute?

Abducted by crazy nasty halfling sex cult

If I still have enough players to continue the campaign for that session, then I just say the missing PC fell into a plot hole.

fucking kek

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immersion can go fuck itself

i just say the character ate a poisonous bug and now hallucinates himself through a forest.

if it is something stupid like players telling me they wont come 15min before the session, then i deal with the characters in a stupid way, and pass important items to the other guy or another voluntary.

the current party ate like 15 poisonous bugs in total so far, and reuniting the party in case they managed to join the session again was always pretty fun.

>party ate like 15 bugs
Is your party made of Salarians?

They're not physically present but also assumed to never have left the party, like they're an item in an inventory system. Maybe they got lost in one, who knows?

I'm totally aware that I'm a dogshit GM but I'll stand by my 'who cares' mechanics decisions.

-missing player's character stumbles on a mushroom and is blinded

-missing player's character vanishes in the night, taken by fey/spirits/local constable for questioning.

-missing player's character has an allergic reaction to moldy rations and can't speak, other player bots.

-missing player's character forgot an important item at last camp, designates a rendezvous point for later.

I try to end most sessions on a note where I can write out a PC if they can't make it the next week. If there's somewhere where the plot allows it, I'll have an NPC rush up and say they need the missing PC for some urgent side mission. Or maybe the PCs ended last session passing through some kind of portal, and when they get to the other side, the absent PC got sent somewhere else.

Or maybe your gf doesn't make it one week, and so you write her out for that session, so then she decides to quit altogether so the session after that her PC dies in a fiery tower explosion.

I don't do anything. I just either run it like normal, tweaking encounters as needed, or if there's not enough players I don't run it.

It's only a game, if more important stuff crops up like family stuff or work so be it. Not worth punishing a player over.

Showcasing how deadly something or somebody can be.

"You go through the door and this douchenozzle falls through the floor onto a bed of spikes and dies. Always check for traps, kiddos."

>douche players
>cancel 15 minutes before the game
I facepalm for not kicking them out sooner. If it's not someone I'm already close to, and he doesn't have a rock-solid excuse for why he *had* to miss today specifically (i.e. one-time business thing, boss made him work today, serious illness, hospitalized relatives, etc), I'd consider telling him he's not invited to the next game. If the player has already established himself as a douche, I'd take it as an excuse to kick him out because I just don't like him.

Otherwise, I'd find some way to put him "on a bus", so to speak. If I'm feeling vindictive, maybe I'd have his PC remember an urgent appointment and cancel his participation in the current adventure. Then if the player doesn't come back, the PC doesn't either. And it gives the other players a chance to tongue-lash him vicariously through his character.

this, and periodically send texts describing his torture at the hands of frodo the nine fingers in the same hole.

Talk to them like a human fucking being.

What if someone cancels many hours beforehand? Would you run the session or suggest something else?

Because in my group there's always one person, and its' never the same person, who doesn't show up

At this point we've only played board games instead of getting along with our latest campaign.

Fuck, man, I should just play Path of Exile with those guys. ;_;

I built my setting around making sure players had an excuse for not being present.

I made an entire cosmology and world about flying cities and airships, simply so that I could say if anyone was missing from a session, they had fallen off the boat.

This was adhered to, even when the players were fighting through a dungeon deep in the ground. The paladin fell into a pit.

Plan your adventures so they only require [players - 1] people to complete. Make sure that no specific member of the party is critical to the story/adventure, just the party as a whole. Make sure your players know you will be running the adventure whether or not one person is missing. Then run the damn game.

When I have players missing, if its not a situation where I can just say "Adventurer X is busy right now" then they tag along on the adventure, but its assumed they're always busy or incapable of assisting the rest of the party (I do this with NPCs too). Is the party fighting orcs? Ok, then so is he, it just so happens that this is all occurring to the side of the action that the rest of the party is taking part of so he and the orcs he's fighting don't even show up on the battle map. He'll just so happen to finish up at the exact moment the rest of the party finishes dealing with theirs and not a moment sooner.

Make it clear that the missing PC is there but not there, and unless your players are all spazzes incapable of understanding simple concepts, they'll understand and move on without trying to force the missing PC into scenes.

They caught a case of the planeshift flu and will be swapping dimensions every time they sneeze until further notice.

I play with 5-6, so there's a decent chance one of them is out, or late, or something. I just have them follow along the party, mostly as a mute, rolling skill checks in situations I know for a fact they'd roll for. In combat, I'll keep their actions simple, burning up decent amounts of resources, but nothing super crazy. I feel it'd be super shitty to have them get killed or specifically fucked over while they're out, so I tend to play them more safe than others.

When they get back the next time, I usually go through a quick 5-10 minute rundown of what happened last time, asking them at certain plot points if they'd have asked any particular questions, or done anything specific, so long as it hasn't changed the outcome of the events that already transpired. Mostly just stuff like, "Oh I would've asked the wizard for any alchemical recipes he knows" or "Did anyone take any of those mushrooms as samples? I would've wanted to". Shit like that.

The only consequences of not being there is just not having any influences on major plot points. I'm not going to penalize their EXP or something.

Their character is now an NPC. I run the character as best I can in line with how I think the player would have run them. However, I run them with far less initiative - basically they become more of a follower than a doer for that session.

If the player wants he can give me some instructions on his characters behavior, if he has any specific points. I'd also allow another player to run the character if the original player wanted that instead.

Don't want someone else handling your character? Make it to the session.

By some miraculous twist of fate my players always manage to have to miss the session where their character would matter to the narrative most, forcing me to delay things. Nobody can go missing during the week we're fighting goblins or investigating some random werewolf attacks, it's always "oh shit I know that you said my missing sister was in the dungeon but I can't make it next week" or "oh fuck I know that we're supposed to be returning to the hometown that I was banished from when I was an adolescent but I gotta do something else"

and then it's just like, what the fuck am I supposed to do OTHER than put the game off at that point?

That would really suck. I haven't run in to this exactly just yet. But that is mostly because I plan 2-3 adventures per session - allowing the players to have a sheet of 'hook information' that their player has and then working out as a group what they are going to do. Some exceptions of course do happen.

So in your case, I'd just meta them that 'uh, ignore that one hook thingy'.

I have had this sort of thing going on now for two sessions, but the net effect is that they players haven't gone on a Fey adventure that will revolve around one player. They don't even know it exists as an option because I just delete the hook information and haven't mentioned it in other roleplay activities during game.

But I can see how that would happen, and that would really suck. Maybe a one shot 'on the way there' pop up adventure?

I agree with the, "show must go on" mentality if you can arrange it. A lot of GMs have success keeping interest when there's the threat of missing out on a session rather than knowing the game will wait for them.

I also like the, "One shots or alt serial campaign" idea. So your group agrees that if people can't show up/the game can't move on without a missing person, you try out new systems and/or someone else GMs for the night if you want to stay with the same system. I've seen GMs recommend that as their preferred method of handling things because it kept them fresh.

The "West Marches" format is also pretty good, I'd think. Particularly good if you have a large group of busy people. You run with whoever shows up, RSVPs taking priority if there are more people than room at your table. It's a serial game rather than properly a one-shot or campaign series. Everyone who's not at the table is assumed to be doing mundane other things or, by arrangement with the GM, doing something related to personal plots.

Not many tolerant or adult suggestions in this thread are there?

I've worked excusing players from the table into campaign ideas regularly for quite some time, now. One campaign has the PC's as time travelers, but not able to control it except under certain circumstances. They miss a day ingame, and the character sees it pass in the blink of an eye. Another was them playing as the descendants of the characters of the other campaign, disappearing and reappearing as timelines changed, Marty McFly style. A third had the PC's dimensionally displaced, and thus able to perform the acts of unusual caliber common to PC's while leaving them prone to falling into cracks in spacetime.
Works well as party glue, because who better to understand your condition than people who share it, and it allows whoever shows up to show up without there being the looming question of how you'll handle the inevitable missing players.
Noteworthy auras making PC's prone to clandestine fey abductions when nobody is looking, avatars projected into the adventuring space by unreliable tech/magitek malfunctioning, PC's being pieces placed by gods on a game board, Clash of the Titans style, I could go on and on.

if it's before an adventure? Then I give them an excuse for why they won't be able to go immediately but will catch up with the party.

If it's during an adventure? Then I usually make them a passive character that helps out the party but doesn't do much, the fact that the character is still there is usually enough not to shatter immersion

jesus op your memes aren't even dank

You didn't just make it about flying cities and airships because cities and airships are cool?

And you didn't think to just make food poisoning a possibility in your setting or something?

>"As you awaken for today's adventures you notice that "missing player's character" seems sort of dazed and confused, almost in a trance as if someone else is controlling them like a puppet. For some reason you don't see this as strange and just continue on as normal."

I then proceed to NPC the player whenever necessary, but they don't say anything or do anything important.

>"oh shit I know that you said my missing sister was in the dungeon but I can't make it next week"
The PC of the missing player takes the sister by side and talks with her for a long time: he tells the party to go ahead without him, he's got some catching-up to do.

>"oh fuck I know that we're supposed to be returning to the hometown that I was banished from when I was an adolescent but I gotta do something else"
The PC of the missing player starts having second thoughts and stays a bit a-ways from the town in question. The show must go on.