Stand-In
So there I am, running the party through the uncharted depths of an underground jungle, when all of a sudden the module calls for pod people. These pod people are copies of a previous adventuring party that died in the jungle, and the PCs have to figure out whether these vegetable adventurers are friend or foe. Cool stuff so far. According to the module however, “Their goals, personalities, races, and classes can be any mixture that makes sense in the context of the campaign.” In other words, I had to invent their stat blocks. And since I’m an awful person and an irredeemably bad GM, I hadn’t prepared properly. I had to make up their stat blocks on the fly.
Happily, since this was happening in a game with a handy dandy SRD, I was able to pull close-enough stats from the internet. That saved my bacon, but it still left me trying to learn four mid-level characters on the fly. That’s taxing stuff, especially when you’re simultaneously trying to run a tense social encounter.
I bring it up for this reason. In that same session, a buddy’s girlfriend was sitting in as a guest player, piloting an NPC she’d only met half an hour earlier. She too was running a big block of stats that she’d never seen before, and doing her best to be a part of the party. Running a character without prep time is tough, but running somebody else’s character—one with an established personality and relationship to the party—is ridiculously hard. Brava! thought I, as she gamely made the attempt.
This sort of thing comes up most often when one of the players has to miss a session. I’ve often seen groups call on another player to control a PC in its owner’s absence. And when that happens, it’s a common solution to say, “He stands over there and does his default action.” Now as fun as it is to use Sir. Mannequin as cannon fodder, I’d much rather see the stand-in player make an attempt to get the character right. Yeah it’s a high degree of difficulty, what with running your own PC at the same time, but I think it’s a better solution than gaming with sock puppets.
How about you guys? How do you handle it when you have to run a stand-in PC? Do you just handwave that character’s actions, pretend they aren’t there, or try and do the character justice?
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Heh, I try to get the RP more or less correct (the barbarian is a meathead, the womanizing Bard womanizes, etc.) However, I may not play mechanically like the other player, as often i’m itching to try out some aspect of their character. For example, our Bard had taken Heat Metal but seemed to have forgotten about it. He was absent for a session when we fought an OP high-level Assassin with equally ridiculous weapons; I had the Bard continuously Heat Metal on his blades until he dropped them, then we stole them. From then on, the Bard used Heat Metal more regularly. =)
Interesting take. I hadn’t ever considered it, but you’re right. Putting new eyes on a character sheet could bring up some undervalued options. I’ve always wondered how to implement this sort of thing in a body-switching episode (“Oh no! Me in puny halfling bard body!”) but the mechanics never quite came together for me.
Yeah, I had the same though reading MSK’s post. Meta-game it’d be easy: Every passes their character sheet to the left or randomly switches with someone else and you have to use their abilities through the view of your own character. Not sure how you could make the in-game mechanic work, though; putting the mind of a barbarian inside the body of a sorcerer would mean it brings the INT and WIS, and probably CHA to an extent, over with it. Not to mention the years of study in arcane lore that the magic user has that the barbarian doesn’t.
Maybe it would be something like each character has control over another one? Like, they can’t tell their own body what to do, but they can command one of the others? “WIZARD, FIREBALL THAT GUY!” “BARBARIAN, RUSH THAT NEST OF ORCS!”
Exactly. Nothing slows down a game quite like, “Let’s everyone pause and recalculate our physical and mental stats.” Blech. It would take a GM prepping the characters ahead of time, and that doesn’t sound like any kind of fun.
You might be able to pull that off with a Polymorph-like spell. They change the target’s mental scores while retaining their personality. Of course, if you thought the Wizard’s turn took forever now, wait until someone who has never played one suddenly has, like, 30 different spells to need to know how to use.
You could also just get an amenable group to simply agree to a character swap session. =)
Well now I’ve started a Reddit thread on the concept. I hope you’re happy. 😛
I guess the only difference for me is that if the character is the face or shotcaller, he/she takes a back seat for that session. Wouldn’t be ok to make big, game-altering decisions if the player isn’t present.
That and there is the awkward part where you talk to yourself. It’s pretty much become a tradition for me. XD
Hey, if the GM has to talk to himself, it’s only fair to spread the pain!
In the case of the pod people, I know I’m looking forward to farming them off to the players to run in the next session. Turns out they were trustworthy after all. (Unless my players happen to read this comment. In which case I would still be nervous about ’em.)
Make sure they act suspicious and creepy, but be on the good side.
“You will not see the light of dawn… because you can relax and sleep in. We’ll take tonight’s watch.”
“And I’ll take the rear guard. We don’t want you getting flanked, now do we?”
I love playing as multiple characters and I have a tendency to get bored with my own character’s mechanics a lot faster than I’m going to get new mechanical features, so those kinds of situations are actually pretty fun for me when they do come up.
Though usually it still winds up as “we all pretend Dave isn’t here till his player comes back” as the group majority decision. Especially since it’s hard to know if it’s cool with the player for other players to play their character and nobody tends to think ahead to ask about that kind of thing.
Do you ever find yourself retiring characters midway through the campaign? If so, do you usually find that to be a good decision in retrospect?
Honestly I can only name two long lasting campaigns I’ve been part of. And one of them is the one I run that goes at a glacially slow pace. (I kid you not, we’re at the very start of quest #2. The game started over a year and a half ago.)
In the other one I did retire a character, but it was only because I’d gained divine rank 0 at mid level and it was breaking the game and was the last of the character’s goals so it made sense for the character to retire rather than happening because I was bored of them.
I doubt I would retire any long running characters either. Though it is possible I might beg the GM to give some in-game excuse to allow me to dramatically change my mechanical setup. But I’d want the character themselves to actually remain.
Oh wait. Totally forgot about the star wars games. Though I’m not sure if those count as each campaign really only lasted a few months and the number of sessions per each was probably less than 10. *shrug* If you count the trilogy of campaigns as one campaign I certainly retired characters (but that’s because the time between each game was long enough that the characters in the previous campaign had long since died of old age if not by other means).
Gotcha. I recently offered my players a “free rebuild” at level 10 for this reason. Even so, one of them is considering retiring her guy and bringing in a new PC. This is at level 11 or so and four years into the campaign.
….i think the real travesty here is Thief trying to 1v1 a Land Shark, knives akimbo, without so much as a summoned critter for a flanking partner. Fighter might want to get on that before Muppet has to put in overtime.
As for the missing player situation, the GM usually takes over for them or just whips up a story reason for them to be absent. Then again, my old group was a little low on the optimization spectrum so it didn’t hurt the group’s fighting capability all that much.
PFS has the pleasant side effect of eleminating this issue entirely.
Don’t worry about Thief. She’s just using her shadow-bro amulet to create a distraction. The real Thief is off-screen to the left, preparing to sneak attack with a ballista.
For a second there I was thinking in GM mode and went “There’s no way you can sneak attack with a ballista!”
Then my brain went back into player/rules lawyer mode and said “I quote: ‘The attack must use a finesse or a ranged weapon.’ It says nothing about size or weight.”
There’s precedent! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JulJxOIfPYo
I’d like to get a friend and his SO to play im my next adventure. Touble is the kid is too young to leave home alone. I‘ll suggest a schizophrenic curse and whoever is off duty plays his/her character. No matter when the break of the session occurs if the other player is on: sudden switch of gender and personality. Said character remembers only what they get reported in between sessions by the other player at home.
You’re a Pathfinder player, right? I happen to be reading through the Spiritualist class at the moment:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/occult-adventures/occult-classes/spiritualist/
You could easily do a “pet class” like this, but have the dominant personality switch depending on which player is present. Summoner / Eidolon and Bladebound Magus / Black Blade could also work well. You could set it up so that they both have a full character of the same class, but they literally transform into their counterpart’s role, becoming a phantom or a sword seemingly at random.
My two cents anyway. Good luck getting them into the game!
yeah PF, exclusively. Thnks for the link.
Our GM has used two distinct ways around this issue with two different editions; in a 4th Ed campaign, the absent player would be handed to someone who was already playing a similar class (fighter with paladin, wizard with cleric, etc) which cut down on the on-the-fly learning, what with all the at-will, encounter, and daily powers. This worked out relatively well, as the turns in 4E were fairly long to begin with (see previous point).
When we ported our characters to 5E, he came up with an NPC simulacrum of each party member’s role, so that if someone wasn’t able to make the session and had not given notice, we could without too much trouble spirit them off to deal with a “matter of grave importance that happens to take place of screen” which was handed out by the mimic du jour. Of course, if more than one person can’t make it, we just can the session and play other board games or something… So far, it is working surprisingly well!