Hello fellow DMs i have got a question before starting my campaign:
So basically my group is six players (and me DMing) lets say Player 1, Player 2, Player 3 etc. for the sake of simplicity. We want to do a more spontaneous campaign setting where each of the players can join whenever they got time to play (we re playing with EXP leveling system): so for example lets say Player 1, 2, 3 and 4 are playing on sunday while the others (Player 5 and 6) got no time.
But the next weekend only Players 4, 5 and 6 got time to play. If the other players (including player 4 who is currently on an adventure with the others from last weekend) are away from the "homebase" what do i do to keep the flow of the adventure going ?? Maybe an amulet who can teleport them to one another? Or do i need to finish each individual adventure first and make them come back to the homebase before they can start another mission together? But that would ruin the whole idea of spontaneity in the campaign ..
I would be glad if some of you can help us with this one.. :)
Returning to homebase at the end of each adventure would be the easiest for you to incorporate the returning players into the next game session. But this might pose a problem for adventures that take multiple sessions. The amulet proposition might prove problematic if everyone has one, and they need to escape a dangerous situation, they can teleport back to the PC that stayed "home" this session.
Another method might be to allow the other present players to drive the PCs of those that aren't present, effectively making any PC without a player a sidekick for the rest of the party. Maybe PCs don't gain xp, or gain half xp, when they're not being run by their owner.
Lastly, you could just hand-wave the whole geographic proximity bit, and just start the present PCs off wherever the party is currently. Run every session like an episode of a TV show and start with a small recap, and go. This might require you to stop every episode outside of combat, and start each episode with a short recap. Effectively asking your players to ignore the party makeup changing mid adventure.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
maybe ignore it until it's brought up in game and then spring this on the players: it turns out there are two #4's ...and one of them has been replaced by a doppelganger is a clone!
did they pull the wrong lever during what they though was a simple bathroom break in the crazy wizard's tower? or was it the result of flipping a cursed "lucky" coin to decide which branch of a splitting path to take? or is some high fey toying with your group?
it could be pretty interesting (although derailing, sorry!) if you ever had 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 4, & 4 all in the same place at the same time. potentially, some wise sage or sketchy priest might propose a ritual to meld the two together combining their experiences. two become one! would they both agree? if yes (or perhaps by force) the results could be dramatically underwhelming. two become... one. in practice this wouldn't change their xp or character level, but maybe you could cause it to meld two of their weapons into a +1 weapon. additionally, they'd have a little extra gold just from having been on two adventures but maybe this process was expensive. ...which i mention because it sounds like this "splitting the party (members)" might happen again and you don't want them to decide to try forcing this to create magical items... or do you? what do we care as long as the players are having fun (and, hey, maybe the third time it leaves someone with three eyes and no weapon), right?
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In a game I'm currently playing in, there's another player who can't always make it, so his character has a cursed item (or maybe he's cursed, I forget exactly) and when the player isn't present, the character's soul is trapped in a magical amulet that another PC carries around until he's back. (That was all arranged in advance and the whole group agreed to it.) I'm not sure how well that would work with multiple affected characters, though.
Depending on the kind of campaign you had planned, and how you feel about multiverses... you could kind of lean into the continuity breaks by saying that either the party is cursed, or something is wrong with the world, causing their reality to shift between slightly-different versions of themselves. For now, the shifts are only enough to adjust who's present or where they are located, but "if it's not cured/fixed, it will keep getting worse, until it kills you/destroys the world," or some such dire warning. That might make an easier alternative than scrambling to explain each discrepancy as it comes up, but it may not fit with the kind of game you want to run.
In the groups I play with regularly, we're well aware that life and scheduling are inevitable, so we do a few things:
Players show up when they can make it, and don't when they can't. Attendance was a bigger issue back in the old days. Nowadays, in the Plague Times, people can usually make a Zoom session, but it's still fine if they can't.
You're not penalized if you can't make it. You still get to level up with everyone, and you still get loot.
Narrative handwaving is a thing. The characters are assumed to be around, doing things; it's just that the specific things they're doing somehow managed to be completely self-contained.
If you're fine with a very casual way of handling it, players can just be warped out of existence for a while or something. Magic is a thing in D&D, and it really does help sometimes to just say, "Eh, it's fine.... Man, magic is weird. I wonder why the multiverse's archmages haven't gotten around to fixing these reality warps." If the style of game you're going for isn't super serious 'n' stuff, just handwaving it will often be fine. If it breaks the players' immersion, have the reality warps become a known problem with the world.
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Paladin main who spends most of his D&D time worldbuilding or DMing, not Paladin-ing.
Hey guys thank you so much for your replies! I really do appreciate all of that knowledge and will try to set up my campaign in an according way :)
I think these are all great ideas and i especially like the ones keeping it simple and dont give "penalties" to the guys that couldnt make it. Everyone works, studies es or has to attend their classes nowadays so it should always be fun in the first place.
Im looking forward to the campaign already. Best of luck for your own adventures in the future.
The simplest solution is to treat it like the ones who can’t make it simply DCed like in an MMO and then joined back in whenever they’re available. There one instant and one the next and it’s no big deal. Kinda like when Kenny suddenly respawned in that early season two-part episode of South Park. Just *poof* there they are. You don’t even really need an in-universe explanation if everyone is simply okay with it. It breaks verisimilitude, but for a super casual game like it seems like you wanna play, that shouldn’t be a problem. It also makes sure that nobody gets “punished” for not being available some times.
The simplest solution is to treat it like the ones who can’t make it simply DCed like in an MMO and then joined back in whenever they’re available. There one instant and one the next and it’s no big deal. Kinda like when Kenny suddenly respawned in that early season two-part episode of South Park. Just *poof* there they are. You don’t even really need an in-universe explanation if everyone is simply okay with it. It breaks verisimilitude, but for a super casual game like it seems like you wanna play, that shouldn’t be a problem. It also makes sure that nobody gets “punished” for not being available some times.
This exactly. They were always there, maybe doing background stuff like feeding the horses or breaking down the campsite, or cleaning up the pots and pans from your last rest break. It’s really not complicated. You don’t need magical teleporting amulets or godlike intervention. In one game I played in, the dm had a purple worm show up and attack is, when we killed it the missing pc crawled out of its stomach. That was entertaining.
I agree with the no penalties thing. For fun and for your convenience too. Having a party with lots of different levels can be a pain in the butt to balance.
If you wanna go with the teleport thing, just build an anti-exploit mechanism of some sort. Takes 1hr to cast and give all of the amulets a shared cooldown so only single players can use it between long rests. That's the in-game explanation. Nobody knows why sometimes it can teleport a single person and sometimes more in one day. Magic works in mysterious ways.
And the actual mechanic is that a player who is away from the party/adventure can use it to join the others. If they try to use it the other way around, then you can just say not allowed. That way one player can Teleport to the party, but the rest of the party can't tp to a single player.
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Hello fellow DMs i have got a question before starting my campaign:
So basically my group is six players (and me DMing) lets say Player 1, Player 2, Player 3 etc. for the sake of simplicity.
We want to do a more spontaneous campaign setting where each of the players can join whenever they got time to play (we re playing with EXP leveling system):
so for example lets say Player 1, 2, 3 and 4 are playing on sunday while the others (Player 5 and 6) got no time.
But the next weekend only Players 4, 5 and 6 got time to play. If the other players (including player 4 who is currently on an adventure with the others from last weekend) are away from the "homebase" what do i do to keep the flow of the adventure going ?? Maybe an amulet who can teleport them to one another? Or do i need to finish each individual adventure first and make them come back to the homebase before they can start another mission together? But that would ruin the whole idea of spontaneity in the campaign ..
I would be glad if some of you can help us with this one.. :)
Returning to homebase at the end of each adventure would be the easiest for you to incorporate the returning players into the next game session. But this might pose a problem for adventures that take multiple sessions. The amulet proposition might prove problematic if everyone has one, and they need to escape a dangerous situation, they can teleport back to the PC that stayed "home" this session.
Another method might be to allow the other present players to drive the PCs of those that aren't present, effectively making any PC without a player a sidekick for the rest of the party. Maybe PCs don't gain xp, or gain half xp, when they're not being run by their owner.
Lastly, you could just hand-wave the whole geographic proximity bit, and just start the present PCs off wherever the party is currently. Run every session like an episode of a TV show and start with a small recap, and go. This might require you to stop every episode outside of combat, and start each episode with a short recap. Effectively asking your players to ignore the party makeup changing mid adventure.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
maybe ignore it until it's brought up in game and then spring this on the players: it turns out there are two #4's ...and one of them
has been replaced by a doppelgangeris a clone!did they pull the wrong lever during what they though was a simple bathroom break in the crazy wizard's tower? or was it the result of flipping a cursed "lucky" coin to decide which branch of a splitting path to take? or is some high fey toying with your group?
it could be pretty interesting (although derailing, sorry!) if you ever had 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 4, & 4 all in the same place at the same time. potentially, some wise sage or sketchy priest might propose a ritual to meld the two together combining their experiences. two become one! would they both agree? if yes (or perhaps by force) the results could be dramatically underwhelming. two become... one. in practice this wouldn't change their xp or character level, but maybe you could cause it to meld two of their weapons into a +1 weapon. additionally, they'd have a little extra gold just from having been on two adventures but maybe this process was expensive. ...which i mention because it sounds like this "splitting the party (members)" might happen again and you don't want them to decide to try forcing this to create magical items... or do you? what do we care as long as the players are having fun (and, hey, maybe the third time it leaves someone with three eyes and no weapon), right?
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
In a game I'm currently playing in, there's another player who can't always make it, so his character has a cursed item (or maybe he's cursed, I forget exactly) and when the player isn't present, the character's soul is trapped in a magical amulet that another PC carries around until he's back. (That was all arranged in advance and the whole group agreed to it.) I'm not sure how well that would work with multiple affected characters, though.
Depending on the kind of campaign you had planned, and how you feel about multiverses... you could kind of lean into the continuity breaks by saying that either the party is cursed, or something is wrong with the world, causing their reality to shift between slightly-different versions of themselves. For now, the shifts are only enough to adjust who's present or where they are located, but "if it's not cured/fixed, it will keep getting worse, until it kills you/destroys the world," or some such dire warning. That might make an easier alternative than scrambling to explain each discrepancy as it comes up, but it may not fit with the kind of game you want to run.
In the groups I play with regularly, we're well aware that life and scheduling are inevitable, so we do a few things:
If you're fine with a very casual way of handling it, players can just be warped out of existence for a while or something. Magic is a thing in D&D, and it really does help sometimes to just say, "Eh, it's fine.... Man, magic is weird. I wonder why the multiverse's archmages haven't gotten around to fixing these reality warps." If the style of game you're going for isn't super serious 'n' stuff, just handwaving it will often be fine. If it breaks the players' immersion, have the reality warps become a known problem with the world.
Paladin main who spends most of his D&D time worldbuilding or DMing, not Paladin-ing.
Hey guys thank you so much for your replies! I really do appreciate all of that knowledge and will try to set up my campaign in an according way :)
I think these are all great ideas and i especially like the ones keeping it simple and dont give "penalties" to the guys that couldnt make it. Everyone works, studies es or has to attend their classes nowadays so it should always be fun in the first place.
Im looking forward to the campaign already. Best of luck for your own adventures in the future.
The simplest solution is to treat it like the ones who can’t make it simply DCed like in an MMO and then joined back in whenever they’re available. There one instant and one the next and it’s no big deal. Kinda like when Kenny suddenly respawned in that early season two-part episode of South Park. Just *poof* there they are. You don’t even really need an in-universe explanation if everyone is simply okay with it. It breaks verisimilitude, but for a super casual game like it seems like you wanna play, that shouldn’t be a problem. It also makes sure that nobody gets “punished” for not being available some times.
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This exactly. They were always there, maybe doing background stuff like feeding the horses or breaking down the campsite, or cleaning up the pots and pans from your last rest break. It’s really not complicated. You don’t need magical teleporting amulets or godlike intervention. In one game I played in, the dm had a purple worm show up and attack is, when we killed it the missing pc crawled out of its stomach. That was entertaining.
I agree with the no penalties thing. For fun and for your convenience too. Having a party with lots of different levels can be a pain in the butt to balance.
If you wanna go with the teleport thing, just build an anti-exploit mechanism of some sort. Takes 1hr to cast and give all of the amulets a shared cooldown so only single players can use it between long rests. That's the in-game explanation. Nobody knows why sometimes it can teleport a single person and sometimes more in one day. Magic works in mysterious ways.
And the actual mechanic is that a player who is away from the party/adventure can use it to join the others. If they try to use it the other way around, then you can just say not allowed. That way one player can Teleport to the party, but the rest of the party can't tp to a single player.
Finland GMT/UTC +2