XP/advancement and absent players

#1

Sometimes life gets in the way and you can’t make it to a session. And then by the next session all the other players have shiny new toys on their character sheets while you… don’t.

Does this encourage or discourage future attendance? I’ve seen good arguments for both.

Are there games that have explicit advice or rules on how to handle this situation?

How have you handled it in the past, as a GM or a player? How did people feel about it?

edit: not sure if this fits best in Game Design or RPG Chat

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#2

Love letters.

I love writing them; players love getting them. Sometimes I give XP on them, most often I don’t; however, everyone gives the player narrative control and at least a choice of a toy, while immediately getting them hooked in the events of the beginning of the current session.

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#3

Agreed-- whenever I spend the time to write those up, it usually pays off. But honestly I usually forget about them.

BTW the classic love letter is, IIRC, simply a rolled move asking about a choice or task the PC might have been doing during the session they’re gone. They’re given that at the start of session and it helps fill in the narrative. It’s a unique shiny toy without undercutting the other players’ work.

Here’s a terrible template for that: While the others were off adventuring your character spoke with Previous NPC, they asked you to look into X. Roll. On this result, this happened. On that result, you learned this, etc. I hope someone has a better, more specific example.

If I’m doing a game with less narrative and more need for combat balance, like D&D 5e or 13th Age, I usually give them a session or two of being behind the rest of the crew and then push them up to parity with the lowest of the PCs. I do this explicitly and check in with the table. Most folks won’t resent someone getting brought up, especially if it helps the group’s overall effectiveness.

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#4

I’m PBTA games love letters are the classic route here. That said I think you could just ask the table about advancing the character to match everyone else.

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#5

iirc Blades in the Dark’s solution to this is pretty simple: You’ve been in the clink and got out. While in the clink, of course you picked up useful contacts.

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#6

For me it depends on the game. Many games don’t have such a rapid pace of advancement that one session means you’re behind. Many games are set up so that advancement isn’t all that important to play, so it’s just as easy and enjoyable to play if you’re a bit behind on XP. For those games, I just don’t worry about it, at all. I’m more concerned about the character getting disconnected from the events of play, and that’s where love letters or hard scene framing or giving them a bit of extra spotlight time can really help.

But for some games this stuff is super-important. In these games, missing a session’s worth of XP puts you behind the power curve, and that matters. D&D can be a bit like that - substantial power jumps, especially at early levels, leave characters dramatically under-powered compared to their peers. In those cases, I tend to award XP to absent players as if they’d been there - or perhaps with a small reduction like 25% or something. It’s not their fault they couldn’t make the session, and I don’t see why out of game considerations should impact on in-game fun.

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#7

The biggest obstacle to gaming once you’re a fully-fledged adult is scheduling game-time. Job responsibilites, kids’ schedules, family obligations, and participation in other organization (e.g church, Elks Club, getting elected to the School Board) all make scheduling game-time difficult. Speaking only for myself: If my games only ran with 100% participation, I’d be lucky to play once a month!

We always determine what we do with absent players as a group during our Session Zero. My preferred solution: We determine a quorum, and if we meet it for a particular session, the game will run. PCs of absent players will either be absent themselves if it makes sense in the fiction, or will be run as NPCs by the GM. It’s easy to send a PC with an absent player off to run an errand when the party is in a big city, but less so in the middle of a multi-session dungeon crawl. When being run as an NPC, the players have to acknowledge that the GM may opt use that character’s limited-use resources, such as magic potions, and that the character could get killed when their player is not there.

When I run a class/level-based traditional RPG (e.g. D&D/Pathfinder/OSR), I pretty much dispense with XP altogether, and use milestone-based advancement for the whole party, regardless of the individual players’ attendance records. This keeps the entire party at the same power level, so we don’t have the problem of some PCs being over- or under-powered with respect to the rest of the party: Power imbalances between PCs is never fun for the under-powered player, who is more fragile and less able to contribute to the adventure. This made it possible to keep running a megadungeon adventure when one of my players was a single parent of young children, and was only able to attend the game about half the time.

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#8

In Blades this is never a problem, since character advancement does not really impact a character’s competency to the same degree as the Crew sheet does; a player might miss many sessions and never be less of a contribution to a job as the other players are.

And any toys the Crew had got are new toys they too get to enjoy.

Blades not only can handle it, Blades constantly use Heat and Vice rolls to remove purposefully characters from sessions. It thrives on it

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#9

I run a pbp, which allows people to post when possible. The only problem is permanent attrition due to lack of interest due to lag. I will npc characters of long gone players if they are all still in an adventure; they become active contacts to the other players after that.

#10

Inspectres is similar in that all advancement occurs in the Franchise not in the characters. It’s actually a fantastic game for drop in drop out because of that.

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#11

I ask the player. If it’s important to them that they “keep up”, they get to keep up. If it isn’t, it isn’t.

I don’t think character advancement is a real motivator for whether or not your friend shows up for game night, personally.

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#12

I love how many people referenced AW’s love letters. That’s what I use. D&D, other pbta, blades, burning wheel… it don’t matter. Giving people hard framed and limited responses returning is always my favorite.

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