The Listlessness
I’m going to go ahead and call Mark the Red patient zero for the listlessness. Poor bastard. I just feel bad that I, as a player with a turbulent schedule, am partially responsible for the spread of this awful illness.
We’ve touched on player absence a couple of times already. There may be ways to get around it for the gamers at the table, but it’s a lot harder to find solutions for the characters down in the dungeon. I mean, if you’re trying to construct one of those internally consistent fantasy worlds that all the cool kids are talking about, it is straight up silly to imagine a PC standing around zombie-like on account of player absence. You have to come up with some kind of in-game explanation to justify the weirdness.
Some groups just handwave it away with, “They went back to town for the session,” but that feels unsatisfying (especially when town is hundreds of miles away on the far edge of the map). Other groups make a joke of the absence, claiming that disappeared PCs came down with “sudden onset diarrhea.” Of course they’ll be indisposed for a few hours! The Paizo guys have the only official metagame explanation I know of in their scar of destiny, but even that strikes me as a bit arbitrary.
I dunno guys… I’m honestly considering turning “the listlessness” into a full on metagame campaign hook. The PCs quest for the source of this strange malady, and so come to realize that they are fictional constructs in an artificial world. If they’re monks they’ll gain enlightenment. Everyone else can just switch over to Toon.
What about the rest of you guys? Do you ever wonder what it’s like for your characters to deal with metagame weirdness? For example, do they know what their alignments are? Do they ever wonder why the NPCs all sound vaguely like the same person? Do they ever go in search of that weird ding noise when they level up? Share your idle musings and bizarre in-game shower thoughts down in the comments!
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With the game I’m running right now the solution for player absence is explained as the character is ‘in the bag.’ This solution came about because there really were a lot of players, but on multiple occasions I’ve seen characters try to dig through the bag for another character or at least something they have.
Bag of holding? But there’s only enough air in there for 10 minutes! Unless…
http://www.archivesofnethys.com/EquipmentMiscDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Snorkel%20(masterwork)
In my group we usually just say something that the character might be doing, even if not too believable, like a extended tea break for the high elf wizard, drinking for the fighter or barbarian, or for my bard when he was absent at a high level, giving a graduation speech to his old college.
The listlessness! It’s spreading! I can just imagine the bard’s speech.
“So as you new graduates go out into the world, you should always remember: I have rolled a 27 on my Diplomacy check to inspire you.”
“HUZZAH!”
My DM prefers to control “Plot relevant” player characters himself if they are absent. It helps to get the ball rolling when we’ll otherwise have to wait on a player for next week. In my brother’s absence, he usually gives me instructions on what he wants his ratfolk to do, which is usually scouting by flying around, carried by his wasp.
I see you have discovered the reason why the listlessness alters a victim’s voice. It’s hard to do a dead-on impression of your brother!
It’s good, but what if the die roll bad and that character dies? That would be awkward. “hey, dude, your character was killed while you was absent, make a new one for the next session”
But if I ever got in such situation, assuming I was the GM, I would rule that the one killed was an evil changeling that was trying to infiltrate the party and earn their trust. And the party would find the real one in the next room of the current dungeon.
Unfortunately, that can only be done once, or it’s going to become a meta-joke.
My groups solution is that people who can’t make it are watching our excess stuff, as we’re not lugging canoes and kegs of Dwarven ale into combat.
Last time a buddy of mine missed a session we declared that he was “gravely wounded” by the last combat.
“Can’t we just heal him?”
“He needs bed rest.”
“But I’ve got my wand of cure light wounds right here.”
“GRAVELY.”
“This doesn’t make sense! I should be able to–”
“WOUNDED.”
*realize GM is threatening me with grievous bodily harm*
“Oh yeah. He should get some rest back on the ship. Let’s move on.”
I once had a situation like that. We had two people out, so we sent on of their PCs to escort the other, wounded one back to seek medical attention. It helped that the wounded one had, the previous session run at an enemy and been on the receiving end of a critical hit from a Large scythe (4x crit modifier), bringing him from full health to negatives in a single hit. So the idea that he’d need a breather even after getting some healing magic was not too far-fetched.
That incident was later dramatized by me, in the following, expertly-drawn comic:
https://i.imgur.com/NJSxJEs.png
Flesh golem with a scythe you say? This wouldn’t happen to be an adventure that involved Rising? And Runes? And also the Lords of said Runes?
I believe it was “Downfall of the Runic Masters” or something like that. The PC in question was the Dwarf-Grappler-Monk-Luchador-Who-Thinks-He-Is-An-Eagle that I have mentioned before.
I actually had the incredible foresight of noting specifically that the two absent PCs had gone outside before we began to ascend that tower – which was good, since otherwise they would have ended up trapped under a giant bell. Which would have been hilarious, but inconvenient to get them out.
That scythe golem is exactly the critter that gave Laurel her first ever PC death. Very tragic. Much reincarnation.
Also, that bell trap was boss as hell. I always love it when there’s a good excuse for a flavorful trap.
I remember in high school, our rogue missed a session, and the GM said that he went into a catatonic state, his body stiff with rigor mortis while his soul was missing. We used him as a lever to move a boulder, and as a bridge at one point that session.
When he came back, he was told that he felt sore and stiff, and had bruises he couldn’t explain. But he had picked up some info about the BBEG while his soul was off gallivanting the astral. Good times.
An extremely advanced case of the listlessness. I hope the dude consulted with his GM immediately.
I actually bought a reception „ding“ bell for when my players level up :o)
Nice! The next step is to prep your sound cues, install the disco ball, and set the confetti cannons to maximum ‘fetti.
I have the pokemon level up music pre-cued, and since I use group xp and keep track of it the players learn they leveled up when they hear the sound. Pavlov’s PCs.
Embarrassingly enough, I’m not familiar with the pokemon level up music? Handy link to music?
Da-da-da-da!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uetxqmMJtLw
That one’s the level-up music from the original 1st-gen games. The jingle stays roughly the same throughout the series, so whatever version of it Bill uses, it’ll sound something like that.
main topic: Brawler got parked in the pub, Cleric (dwarf) got sick and stayed on the waggon where he stayed (motion) sick (player didn‘t want the dwarf to go on a boat so we took the wobbly waggon route) and Gunslinger got ghosted.
What do you mean by “ghosted?”
he was played by the player whose char got killed 30min into the evening.
See mondays comic for another detail ;-). It was a short playing day, gunslingers player didn‘t miss much.
Ersatz! I remember now. 😛
Usually, we just treat missing PCs as if they were there and fighting alongside us. Sometimes, though, we get a little more creative. One time our Ninja missed a few sessions and a level-up (during which he got a level of Swashbuckler), so we concluded that he had spent that time taking an internship on a pirate crew. Later, we had this incident, excerpted from the short story I wrote of the session:
“I really wish Baldrick was here” Ignus muttered as they creeped up the sawmill stairs.
“Well he’s not” snapped Anya, trying her best to move without her chain mail jingling. It wasn’t working.
“Where did he and Xiulan end up?” Bellona asked.
“I assume that nothing short of vital ninja business would keep him from meeting us at the agreed time” said Señor Bastonne from the front.
* * *
“Are you sure we have time for this?” Xiulan asked as she and Baldrick entered the shop.
“What? Yeah, we totally do” said Baldrick, checking his watch. “We’re not supposed to meet up by the sawmill until 9:00. That’s in forty minutes.”
Xiulan frowned. “You said ‘forty minutes’ two stores ago.”
Baldrick paused, bit his lip in thought for a few seconds and then stared at his watch for several seconds.
“What do you know?” he said. “My watch has stopped.”
“Excuse me, ma’am” said Xiulan, turning to the nearest store clerk. “Do you know what time it is?”
“9:15” said the clerk.
Xiulan and Baldrick looked at each other in panic before dashing out the door as fast as their legs could carry them.
…The best part is, that level of time management competency sums up players pretty well, too.
Goddamn I love game fiction. I just started a novel based off of my last campaign: musketeers and dragon riders. Fingers crossed that it’ll be worth a damn in book form!
There are active gods in most of my campaigns, which is highly useful. There’s a game my brother worked up the rules for which the gods play, called “Atheistball”. When a devout character’s player is missing, they are called away by their god and have a short text solo-quest/vision sent to them, and rejoin the group when they can. When a non-devout character’s player is missing, the character ends up a pawn in Atheistball. Sometimes that goes well for them, sometimes it doesn’t. I roll on a table to see. The devout characters all usually end up with a pretty neutral result, the non devout ones are always impacted one way or another. It’s amazing what it’s done for the roleplaying of religious stuff, over the years. It’s trite, but far too convenient a device to give up.
Any chance we could see a copy + paste of the charts? I’m curious what kind of hooks you’ve got for this device. It’s super-creative, and definitely not one I’ve encountered before!
I’ve never considered what my characters think when I’m not playing them. I mean mostly that’s because I don’t think I’ve ever been part of a game where I ever missed any sessions and these days I mostly play in a play by post fashion so it’s pretty hard to go “missing” without dropping out of the game entirely.
Still I would tend to imagine their perspective would be what it should be for an internally consistent world and ignoring all the meta stuff. shrug I’d probably lose my sense for characters if my mental image of their thoughts was that they thought about the meta.
I’m thinking about transitioning my Curse of the Crimson Throne game to play-by-post. Any tips or resources for moving over to that style? I’ve never tried it before….
I just had a startling revelation.
The Scar of Destiny isn’t a metagame excuse to have a player leave now and then. It’s proof that someone on another plane has created a “Summon Humanoid” spell line and inter planar time warping just makes those 5 roundsof combat feel like 5 hours in the ‘real’ world.
this is genius 🙂
Heh. They’ve been summoned into a Changeling game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changeling:_The_Lost
In one of the mega-dungeons we started, we used “Temporal Wild Magics” that would zap a character out of one place and time and back into another.
That way even if it was in the middle of combat that someone had to leave, there was a way to displace them.
I appreciate the elegance of a good catch-all plot device. Did the GM ever pay off that contrivance in the story? I mean like… Did you guys defeat the BBEG by throwing him into a Time Rift and ending the curse or something?
We never completed the campaign but it was just played out as a side effect of the dungeon being some crazy powerful maze.
Sort of a dragon effect? Proximity to powerful magic creatures makes the environment weirdly magical? I can dig it.
The plot described in paragraph 4 is basically the premise of the novel Mogworld (except that in Mogworld it’s a videogame rather than a pen and paper RPG)
Also I’m glad that somebody other than me has actually heard of Toon
Damn you Ecclesiastes 1:9! Every time!
I’ve got a buddy with a large collection of core rulebooks. I’ve only ever glanced through his copy of Toon, and never had an opportunity to try it. I badly need to get to more cons so I can get more systems under my belt.
“Yeah sorry, i can’t come this Weekend, but you can drag my Character around if you want to, because hes the Tank. Just don’t kill him.”
Buddy of mine: “Err you see. Did you ever had that Situation when you lend someone a CD and you get it back alls Scrachted?”
Me: “What did you do?”
Buddy: “Well, your Fighter has contracted Mummy Rot, oh and his Intelligence has been drain, so he is now barely Intelligent enough to speak at all. Nothing serious right? :P”
Me: “…..”
In the End, we manged and the Stat decrease cured itself with Time, but i had to play the Brain Dead Fighter for a few Ingame Days. I wasn’t really angry but,…. yeah i wasn’t expecting that.
The risk to character is the unspoken issue with absentee gaming. It makes more in-game sense than anything for the GM or another player to pilot the absent player’s dude. However, if we’re trying to make in-game sense, then it’s also possible for that character to be damaged or even killed while its player is absent. I think that, because that feels freaking terrible to lose a character when you aren’t there, we wind up inventing all these other options to explain away the character’s absence. In my mind, it’s one of the major simulation vs. narrative tensions in the hobby.
Hm, yes that is certainly a Concern. Luckly i have seen no Characters perish while the Player wasn’t there. If all else Fails, there is always the Power of Retcon, should a dire need to be. I don’t think there really is a solution,
I love coming up with in game reasons to explain absences – usually background appropriate.
Our Wizard has Fire induced PTSD causing Catatonia.
Our Wildmage Sorcerer is an accidental planeswalker that will sometimes blink to other planes. Which will be fun as they go to other planes and the sorcerer will have extra information.
Our Bard is a guard/lover for a celestial being that can forcibly call her back at any time – who has become the parties current patron/quest giver.
Our Paladin was a raging alcoholics and would sometimes get completely wasted while others aren’t looking – but has since found some herbal remedies to help(much better about coming to all sessions now)
Our Gnome Beastmaster Ranger has very poor control over her mastiff – and he will sometimes run off chasing a squirrel(or an Owlbear scent) and she has to go chasing after him – often into small spaces the rest of the party can’t follow.
Yes… Yes… ALL THE PLOT HOOKS!
I’ve had to take care of this a few different way in the past year in my Exalted game.
My favorite is probably of when the resident cuddly Slayer named Akki pushed a hekatonkhire through a portal in Lookshy into the Labyrinth when the player was going to travel for 2 weeks (as the player and I had planned). The next two sessions was the other players going down there trying and find him. Terrible times all round for the PCs. 😀
You reminded me of the time I had to have a pterodactyl fly away with Laurel’s paladin at the end of a session. I knew she would have to miss the next session, so I needed to invent an excuse to split the party.
“Oh no! That monster is flying away with our paladin! Quick everyone! Shoot it down.”
“Ummm… You can’t. It’s too far away.”
“But my fireball has a huge range!”
“It’s a super fast pterodactyl guys.”
“Bullshit!”
“Work with me here people. It’s a plot device.”
The DM or another player borrows the character. No explanation needed.
What happens if the PC dies in its player’s absence? Methinks that might require some explanation on the GM’s part.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN BALTHAZAR IS DEAD? WHAT DID YOU FREAKING DO!?”
Ah yes, that time we had to tell our party Paladin that he’d become a full-on folk hero in his absence that one session. Also, he’d totally Boromir’d, and his leaky pincushion of a body was now lying in state.
My previous group was joking that the character “was polymorphed into green sheep.” There was no explanation beyond that.
I personally try to avoid gathering party if some of them can’t make it, unless they decide to bail from the campaign completely. Usually I can invite some substitutes and we can start a new campaign. I currently have 4 campaigns running with different people.
In my Super Robots campaign, however, I came up with explanation for people absents: All characters are in the military, and have to follow orders. If the order came to move into the other town, to reinforce the battle position with their robot, there’s nothing they can do.
Neat idea. Speaking for myself though, I’d worry about none of these campaigns progressing. I’m running three games on a three-week rotation at the moment, and it can still feel a bit slow.
I was playing in a campaign where one player could only make alternating weeks, the GM handled this by saying that their psi powers sometimes at random gave them crippling headaches, such that they could follow the party but not fight.
“But how does he avoid taking AoE damage if he’s just ‘standing over there’?”
“Erm… uh… Subconscious psychic defenses! They only kick in when the headache is up.”
“So can we use him as an impenetrable shield? Maybe gain cover from him?”
“No. And furthermore, the subconscious psychic defenses deal 13 damage to you for suggesting it.”