Not sure how to feel about this

The DnD group has been informed that characters may die in the game when the players are not present in that session, but that player may also have the chance to "rectify it" after the fact.

I have no idea what the guy is thinking, especially when nobody was told this could happen before - and this game has been going on for more than 2 years.
It sounds so different from what I am used to in tabletop games, that the players are always ultimately responsible for the fate and demise of their characters, and I am wondering if I am just out of touch with reality or if this is genuinly really weird.

Also, thread topic: strange shit that DM's introduced into the games that you didn't know how to feel about, justified at the time or no.

Picture might be very relevant.

That's kind of weird.

Personally I take the approach that if you're not here to run your character then someone else can run it in combat or I'll run it.

Then if the character is going to die, instead they fall unconscious, and maybe have some kind of lasting (not necessarily permanent) injury depending on the circumstance.

That is weird. I could maybe see it being possible if you were with the party in a dangerous location at the end of a sesssion and then didn't show up next session. A disclaimer about how your guy may not survive if there's a TPK or something sounds sort of reasonable.
But if your guy is just hanging out in town or something, the DM should keep his hands off.

In general I don't allow PCs to die if their player is not present, though.

Actually, that makes me think. I wonder if this is a response to some other player trying to game things by ending a session when the party is in trouble, and then not showing up next session? "Ha, my guy couldn't have been killed by the mob of trolls that had us surrounded, I wasn't there for this session, so obviously my guy got away!"

The formulation was that "When players are not in the game, characters revert to NPC's that may be in the control of the DM if the situation calls for it".

So yeah, it isn't just the player being on the backseat being player by another charatcer, it is the DM deciding how the player dies or gets hurt. For example if the town they are resting in gets attacked, known NPC's have died. So this paints a pretty ugly picture in my mind.

Maybe he's sick of people not showing up and is trying to passive aggressively "encourage" people to show up more regularly? How's your game's attendance been lately?

It was definitely not the respponse of one guy's particular action, it is part of the theme of the game he is running that players come and go and affect the world by their presence, but the characters never truly leave that world.

Whenever a player can't make it to a session, I either let that person fade into the background or, if there's no way to do that logically (say they're in the heat of combat) I have them fall ill with heat stroke.

At worst, in a group of 10+ people (we sometimes have two DM's in the same house taking different roles of the same adventure) at most one or two guys cannot attend for about a month or two in a game that runs every week, and one of them at least cannot attend because of school.

I've considered that same reason, but I honestly believe he thinks this "makes sense" from a narrative and thematic point of view. He even said that "after a few sessions of inactivity, the player will gain a kind of independence and go out doing their own thing".

You might be right, but it falls in place like a puzzle piece that players "walk in" to the game world and drop in as the characters and play them, as apart from the traditional "I make this charatcer, he is mine, the dice decide how I do in the game".

I guess you could say this is not your typical game.

Sorry "the character gains independence" not the player.

So he's kind of transitioning to a troupe game? Interesting choice.

Not sure, but it seems to have been a flavour choice that turned very real.
From the beginning, it was that players "walk into this strange world" and assume different characters, and the players themselves may leave the world, but the characters stay and do their own thing. So, apparentely, the less the players play, the more independent the characters become. And on top of that, characters may die in the absence of the players. Even with this albeit interesting inclusion of meta (even though he has made it clear we bring no items or knowledge from "our world" into this DnD game), it struck me as a very misguided idea to make characters able to die at the whim of the DM.

I guess my issue is that it surrenders a kind of control of the character at the same time as I feel like it doesn't add anything to the game. I'm from an old school of gaming of cruel but fair DM's, and character death isn't an issue for me. But if a character dies, I want it to be my fault.
Even leaving the window open for it to happen feels like a very strange choice on his part.

The first time we had a missing party member our then new DM simply didn't address it, leading to someone else in the party making the joke he had seen said member grab a sausage lying on the floor of the dungeon and disappear in a flash of light. It's since caught on as a fucking stupid meme but it keeps absent player's characters safe, if at the cost of putting everyone else on edge in missing a combatant should they have to fight. We also had a case where a member had to leave mid session, let another player control her character, who then went on to be eaten by yetis within the hour so I feel we've seen both sides of the spectrum and neither is very fun to go through.

Your case sounds like an interesting compromise that benefits the player that wasn't there without fucking with the party's dynamic, would be interested to see how it turns out.

That is also interesting to point out that I have not seen a session that ends mid-adventure. We almost always end up back in town, and this implies that characters could either die in town, or go on their own adventure without any warning from the DM - and the character could die.

From where I'm sitting it sounds poorly thought with a side of evasive. I'd arrange a "scheduling conflict" and sit this one out in the safety cupboard.

If a player misses a game I run then I simply don't have their character in the game that day

It's that easy, guys

Sounds like something a DM would make as a rule when their players are consistently missing sessions. You know, give them a bit more incentive not to be lazy.

I could be wrong though since I know nothing of your group, but has anyone in your group been missing a lot of scheduled sessions? Were their reasons missing justified like emergencies or sudden call-ins from work?

What do you do if that character is vital to whatever arc you're going through? Like if you're visiting your the paladin player's order for important business and the paladin player doesn't show up? How would you handle that without just doing some unrelated filler quest for that session and going back to the order thing when they're able to come back?

Player's that don't show up in my DM"s campaigns pass out immediately. Or when the other characters were sleeping the character decides to sleepwalk in random directions.

Real life is a bitch for me. School right now eats up so much of my freetime; I feel bad for the DM because I can't be consistant, even when I'm not procrastinating on my homework.

Oh I see. Since the PCs are part of the narrative, it's a waste for him to throw out a fleshed out character with backstory. If you don't play your character, it slowly becomes more of an NPC, and if you don't come back, it's an NPC that might die.

That actually makes a fair amount of sense.

Generally I'd be pretty dubious, but if he's running a rotating game with lots of people who drop in then never come back, it's 'waste not, want not'.

Then if it turns out you were just busy with school, you come back, get your character back, and they've just got a scar or whatever.

That mainly works only if the veil is as meta as implied.

As in, if this is just some undertale weird "your this guy but not this guy" bullshit fuck it.

But if its like a Deadman (the dc hero) deal where you (the player) are a force possesing various people to perform a task, its less disasterous if it dies offscreen because its not "I had my story end a shitty way and feel invalidated" it's "my favorite vessel died" its like a magic item breaking.

Yes, that GM is weird for handling things like this. You are on to something here, OP: I would suggest talking to the GM and seeing if he can be made to see reason again. Preferrably, go with the whole group and tell him that this idea is fairly stupid.

honestly running a 10+ game is gigantic challenge and it's to be expected for the DM to try stupid shit to make it more menageable, even at the cost of scaring a couple of players off.

at the same time making the characters whose players are not present not fight would make more sense even if it doesn't fit the narration.it should be very easy to balance encounters if instead of 9 players only 8 are present.

>"When players are not in the game, characters revert to NPC's that may be in the control of the DM if the situation calls for it".
This is almost exactly what I do.
But I also more or less promise that I won't fuck the character.
It's basically autopilot with minimal risk and minimal reward.

This.