Do You Cancel Games When Players are Missing? 

What do you do when players can’t make it to a game? How many players need to be missing before you change your plans for a session? Thanks so much to Dscryb for sponsoring this video! Visit dscryb.com/supergeek and use the code SUPERGEEK at checkout to get 10% off of your first subscription payment. dscryb.com/supergeek

In one of my campaigns, when someone can't make it, we do what we call a "Team Building session". Basically, we pick a place on the world map, or major threat in the setting, build it out a little, and then create a party and their backstories that fit into that place or would be fighting that threat. We collectively narrate out the trials and triumphs of their first major adventure, learn their relationships with each other, name the team, and end the session. The lore we build has ended up coming back into the sessions a few times, and makes the world feel more rich. It's gotten to the point where I usually look forward to those sessions more than normal sessions.

Something like this happened not long ago for me. One of our players wanted to have a bit of a break and we made the foolish decision to hold off until he was ready to come back. Some time passed before we finally chased him up, turned out he'd decided to quit entirely, and hadn't even bothered to tell any of us, so we COULD have continued without him, but by the time we learned this the impetus was completely gone.

We have this issue with a campaign I’m in where the DM will cancel if even one player can’t make it and it sucks cause we play bi-weekly and it’s ALWAYS THE SAME PERSON CANCELLING LAST MINUTE

The obvious solution for a situation like your home remodeling one is for one of the other players to start a campaign that they can play with just the other players. And then that player won't be ready to run that campaign some weeks, so then you have someone else start a third campaign for weeks when you're not there and the other player isn't prepped. Soon enough, no one has any idea what's going on, but they DO get together every week! So if that's the most important part...

I love the roleplay on discord thing, not only because it keeps the RP fun happening between sessions and allows me to be more thoughtful, but the fact it acts as an almost Archive I can look back on as an almost emotional touchstone.

5 Players, 1 DM. Age between 30-45. We play every tuesday, !no rescheduling!. As long as 3 out of 5 players are present, we play. Otherwise we cancel. We play roughly 45 Sessions a year. Though none of the players has kids.

Thanks for the shout out Mike, I was actually talking to you so I'm glad you found this one. I am in love with this Quantum Leap into important NPCs concept, great stuff!

There was a group from my local game store who only played 2 or 3 times a year because one player was from Australia and another was from Germany. They only played in person so it was a HUGE event and they would play for the whole weekend. The same campaign has been going for nearly a decade and honestly I'm jealous of how much fun that group has when they get to see each other.

I play as normal if we have half or more of the players - so in my current 5 player game we’ll play with 3 players. But given notice I’ll still run for 2. I just run something that’s either a prequel involving their characters, a prequel involving favoured NPCs where I’d like to flesh them out more or a little side action (you remember two sessions back you sent Arborio and Jade the NPCs to talk to the King - let’s see how that played out.) I really try to avoid cancelling the night of doing anything that’s not roleplaying)

I was part of a group where they did cancel a session. The reason? It's because the player character was the "captain" of a ship with a crew on it. And they won't cancel if another player can't make it. And we were playing the Ghosts of Saltmarsh.

My games are generally story-driven enough that unless there's a good reasonable excuse for that character to be apart from the party, I do NOT run sessions with a missing player after level 3-5. Any choices I make on behalf of the absentee player removes their agency in the broader narrative. In the cases where this has disrupted consistency of sessions, it has more often led to the removal of a flaky player than the death of a campaign, as very few situations have arisen where *consistent* absence was due to an actual reason.

In my group we never continued playing big campaigns whenever a player is missing, we either play one-shots or hang out playing tabletop games

When I needed it most, this video was here! Just yesterday, one of my players announced they need to take a 4-month hiatus from our campaign due to major work commitments, and I've been anxious about moving the game forward without them. In the past with this 2+ year campaign, we've skipped sessions when only one player was missing because we're a really roleplay-heavy group. Watching this affirmed for me it's not just okay to keep playing and not pause the campaign, but it's for the best! Especially since the remaining four players are keen to keep playing, and we all understand why our friend can't be in the game for awhile. Tl;dr: Thank you, Mike. This video is exactly what I needed to hear at this moment in my campaign!

I finally got into DnD, and I've set an honor into being on time at my laptop every week. We've only cancelled once so far in a month of play, but that was due to the DM himself being occupied. And while there have been people who couldn't make it, we've played other things on those nights. Which means I'm now on my third character in about as many weeks. My actual play group, however, had to take a break until the 18th of March, from a descision made on February 9th, because one player had stuff to do until then, and we can't have the room we play in on other weekdays.

Our Roll20 game has 7 players plus the DM. As long as we have more than half, the DM usually will go ahead and run the session, with the missing players "following aling in a fugue state" so they're with us if they can make the next session. We also have a second DM that runs an alternate campaign if the main DM, who is a vet, has to be on call or has an emergency. We DO try to get as many people there for big fights.

I run my games as one shots in a shared universe which takes a lot of pressure off of my players. It also allows them to have a stable of characters to try out. Players operate out of a massive plane hopping mechanical crab, in much the same way that the show Stargate Universe works. They go on away missions, and if you die or stay behind, that's it for that character. The big downside is that maintaining the overall narrative is difficult.

In my group, we started to have recurring scheduling issues that meant our weekly games were becoming closer to monthly, and I can attest to that loss of enthusiasm. Instead of just playing without everyone, however, we had a different idea that has so far worked really well for us. Basically, we created a setting for a new campaign that revolves around "World Shards," which are basically entire self-contained one-shot dungeons or encounters from across the multiverse. The flexibility allows me to run sessions that are wildly different from anything in our main campaign. For example, I just recently ran a whodunit style murder mystery which would never have fit into the main campaign, but was a ton of fun. This also has lets me explore different styles and themes while DMing, and because the system is so simple and flexible, some of my players have expressed interest in DMing their own Shard ideas as well, with one of them set to run theirs this Friday. I can't deny that it does still suck to have the primary campaign go a month or more without a session, but given that the party prefers to have everyone present for each session of that campaign (as do I), the World Shard setting allows us to still play while also exploring new settings, character ideas, builds, themes, etc. I'm really glad we started doing it.

My group and I cancel if any of us can't make it. I dm for 4 players do 1 person is a pretty considerable percent. UT mor than that, my players would just rather wait and play with everyone than have someone mis out. My sessions are few and far between because we're all so busy, so we end up playing for a while so if someone's gone they end up missing potentially 6 hours of stuff and that sucks. So I always make sure everyone can be their for my games

If it's a combat session? No, I can run their character and have it make sensible choices. Any other case (exploration or roleplay focused), I can't really play the game without one of the main characters

My first DM set a precedent I like to follow: 1-2 players being absent is fine, if we get more just cancel. And another thing: if the player who’s going to be absent is in a vital plot role, delay it!! Either the plot point or the session itself. A different DM I had didn’t follow this and we felt bad for the player who was out and had a major character moment. I might end up preparing a side story based on some other adventurers the party has encountered and are about the same level as the player characters for when a plot vital player is out.

I've done two things so far when we don't have everyone. The first is I ran a separate mission using pre-gen characters in a "choose an adventure from the guild board" scenario, which my players chose to deal with the "phantom of the opera". The second was grabbing the characters, whose players could make it, and whisking them away to the land of the dead, where the god of death needed their help with stopping demons from stealing souls from the area (and he also wanted to meet his "god daughter" [ Backstory stuff ;) ] ).

My group usually does a small one shot in a different part of the same world. Often a good opportunity to flesh out what your backup character has been doing. We also get to "hear rumors" about the main party's shenanigans through our backups, which is fun.

when we reached 5 players (and the DM) in our group, we decided to usually run one session per week even if one player couldn't make it. we still manage to get everyone together for almost every session, but sometimes times don't quite line up, so it's good to have the option and its happened a few times that we played with one fewer player. most recently, i missed a session because of private stuff, which i already knew the week prior, so the DM could plan the session without me in mind. and the session after that, we caught up and i was back in the game no problem.

One time, when I was in a campaign that was approaching the end of a story arc, a few too many players had to drop out for a week. Instead, those of us who remained found ourselves in a different place and time with no memory, likely through the meddling of some god that was involved. Because we had no memories, we were able to do an alternate take on our characters' personalities for that session. My Warforged got to use his significant intimidation score for once. By the next session we were back where we had left off, with a vague dream of what had happened, and with the loot we collected during the one-shot appearing in the next enemy camp we raided.

A litttle bit of a different scenario, but I had a DM who was going thorugh some personal stuff and kept cancelling sessions at the last minute (they were still interested in playing, but they just hadn't had time to prepare). We (the players) solved the frequent cancelations by coming up with alternate campaigns and one-shots that we were interested in running and then took turns to run something (with our DM joining as a player). We all got to hang out and get our DnD fix and no one felt like they were letting the rest of the group down.

In my group, we have this thing called portal sessions, for plot reasons magic is acting erratically and so when we don’t have enough players for a normal session, the remaining characters get teleported away to a pocket dimension. They might fight some monsters, or solve the puzzle, or learn a little bit about the history of the world. Enough to fill out a nice little session so that the players who are there get to play but we don’t do anything major plot wise. (Also for the most part, no time passes in the “real” world during these sessions) This is also lets characters disappear from a session when the player couldn’t make it at the last second, I found that this is a really good compromise because it means that although the character is not there, nobody feels like they have to derail whatever they were doing to go find them. They just got portaled. (Also, none of the characters can actually die during a portal session. They just get kicked out of the portal world and are out of the game until next time. This is mostly so that I can throw deadly encounters at them and see how they react without worrying about a TPK when most of the party’s missing. they’ll just wake up with a level of exhaustion as a consequence.)

I have back up campaigns that we play if everyone is not there. They are things like the Lost Mines of Phandelver. Things that are not terriblely story intense where we can have players drop in and out and gray blob them if they are absent.

I played in a big west marches style game over COVID and we role played through discord to cut time out of some exposition for certain quest and it was really fun. We had a large group of players and 2 different campaigns going in tandem. Some of the players had 2 PCs so people would decide what PC to play and if someone didn’t show up they rp’d that week before the session a reason and someone else in the party would join. Honestly some of the craziest and most fun I’ve had playing

Yes!! Agree with these solutions big time, and recognizing that constantly re-scheduling is a problem. I used to be one of the players who would always push for the whole group being present - but after seeing not one, not two but THREE campaigns slowly die out because we could never get together... well, I have changed. I tend to have some pretty intense FOMO, and always thought "well, I would hate to miss out, so we shouldn't keep someone else out of it either." But guess what? Having to be filled in on information through roleplay is *really* fun. Having an outsider POV on something that happened is super fun to play! I have a long, long campaign that I've been running for a year and a half now. The first year, we kept pushing things up whenever someone was absent. We got maybe 16 sessions in a year - because I also tend to run games bi-weekly, rather than weekly. After a 2-month period without a single session, the group and I concluded that we need to keep things moving - or else the game will die out, or we die before the game is ever finished 😂 For a party of 5 players, I previously had a rule that if more than two people were absent, we would re-schedule. But this video has given some great ideas for how to deal with very small parties! Thanks for the tips, and especially a big thanks for linking to others who have more to say on the matter 😁

I have a very small group (3 players) in a bottle area (an interdiemnsional circus) so it makes it hard to reduce to 2 players, if 1 is missing, especially because we have only had 1 session, so people don't know each other as well yet. This happened on our last session, so I agreed to push until our next scheduled date. I will discuss with them what they feel is good if this happens in future.

Hm. The Stargate thing is tempting. I’m running a Curse of Strahd campaign, but due to work commitments only two of my original players are still in the game, and all three of us are very keen to keep going, but I’m still in the process of recruiting new players. They’ve just found the Holy Icon of Ravenloft, and an out-of-body experience to get one of them to be able to use it could be very interesting.

Funnily enough, I've experienced both systems back-to-back, in two campaigns run by brothers. One ran a campaign where he wanted everyone to be present, but thankfully kept the scope pretty small, so even though it took a while, we made it all the way til the end. In our current one, the other brother told us straight up that he wanted to keep going even if only a few of us could make it. Most of the time that meant that if one of us couldn't make it, he just filled in the missing player later on (thanks to some diligent note-taking by yours truly, inspired by Ginny Di). But in one very extreme case, only two of us plus the DM made it. So we played a totally different system altogether, where we each got to play multiple characters on different sides of a galactic war. That actually might've been my favorite session ever! It was fascinating to have characters who had such different goals while trying to figure out how to achieve them all, sometimes at the cost of my own characters. I think the second approach has worked out much better for us, and in cases where a character-specific plot beat needs to happen but the player isn't present, our DM will sort of fast forward over it and then have a one-on-one session with the player at a later date and then fill the rest of us in on how it went, which I think is a fun middle ground. The only times we've actually cancelled are when the DM himself can't make it, which makes sense since we play online--we're all real-life friends who live apart.

I think maintaining the schedule is extremely important. Canceling can happen but it takes a lot to cancel a session. If one player is out, we press on with that player choosing either to be 'greyed out' or another player handling their sheet in combat. If half the players are unavailable (like yesterday) I run the remaining players through a one-shot with alternate characters elsewhere in the world. If I'm down to only one other player, I'm willing to run a one on one session or cancel. Keeping the schedule is important because it minimizes risk of the game dying out. If players get too comfortable w canceling sessions, it ceases to be a priority and the game is at more risk of stopping and never picking up again.

We rarely cancel - we meet once a month, so we are all rather excited to get to the game by the end of each month. If a person is sick, or there are family responsibilities, that player is run by me, with input from players. We also have those players play over Discord, should they have access to Wi-Fi. When we do cancel/postpone, that is usually around examinations, when some players are writing exams, and other players are setting ang marking exams (we have a 24-hr turnover on marking). So the lesson my players have learnt so far, is around the end of the year, there is some flexibility, but in all other circumstances we play.

Been dealing with this issue quite a bit in a Rise of Tiamat game I've been playing in for the last several months. One of the players has had several scheduling conflicts due to their work schedule and we just cancelled/rescheduled each time, which led to some bad feelings towards that player. The most recent time it happened, the DM and rest of the players came to an agreement to start a mini campaign within the same overall campaign that focused on other plot hooks that the party didn't follow from earlier in the game. Thankfully we haven't had to implement it yet.

Hallowed are the Ori! I do think games are highly vulnerable at the start. I've been in games that died due to just the one ghost. Where you have no game only canceled sessions.

I play in two campaigns online where the game span multiple time zones one globally, which is a heck of a thing and the other across the four major time zones in the US (depending on the time of the year got to love Arizona) with that being said, scheduling is obviously tough, but I very much appreciate both of my DM's takes on it and I generally do think it is best for helping the flow and pacing of the games.

I am lucky that I started GMing for Adventurer's League and random one shots. So I've never been bothered about running sessions with people missing. If there is a good story reason for them to be missing, that is brought up. Otherwise, play just moves on without their characters in the scenes. Sure it may not be super realistic that suddenly a PC is missing, but I usually have 6 players in a game, so 4 or 5 is still plenty to keep playing with. In my Dragonlance campaign last week we were down to 3 players in the middle of a dungeon and i knew the next room was going to be really tough even without being short players. So we did the sorcerer's Test of High Sorcery in a dream sequence. The other 2 players played characters that would push the sorcerer to good or evil choices, and in the end we had a Mage Battle! Everyone had a lot of fun and some of the decisions the sorcerer made will make the next room MUCH easier.

I don’t run sessions at home, an it’s part of my job, I have a set time weekly at the community centre, I have another youth worker running at the start of the week, so if one person has commitments they can take a different session, we have a group of 8-10 people and they need to give us 24 hours notice, the other thing we should mention is this is a paid community service so people generally try to reshuffle and reschedule their sessions. Our adventures are campaigns but at the end we try and complete a chapter and characters return back to the town area.

There are so many great suggestions already listed here! I'll add my two cents, but I genuinely love how our collaborative hobby naturally encourages shared ideas for problen solving: I grew up with Saturday morning cartoons, afternoon cartoons and "Must-See TV" shows. These stories were mostly self-contained arcs that would resolve themselves in 30 minutes (or sometimes an hour). There were often overarching themes or larger stories that were still consistently woven through, but it was all generally episodic. Occasionally characters would swap in and out, sometimes a story had a "To Be Continued...", but most of the time by the end of the show that specific story/adventure/whatever was resolved. This is how I run my games - people come or go (life happens), characters will join or miss a aession (or maybe only make a quick cameo), and the session focuses on those who are there. I long ago gave up on the idea of trying to make a sweeping LotR campaign, and instead have it all broken into smaller, bite-sized adventures that can be completed in a few hours by my players. It does take some work and everyone has to agree on it, but i found it makes game sessions happen more often, both because we play with whoever is there, and because FOMO seems to at least partly encourage people to show up. As I said, it's just my two cents - good luck!!!

I had been thinking about this for future games and something I was thinking about trying was players also making back up/support characters. They'd be out in the world experiencing things, knowing characters from the party and maybe even working other angles for the party. However, they wouldn't be in a party. That way if I wanted to hold off on a campaign moment for missing players we could switch to them in any combination exploring some other view of the adventure.

Wow a DCA reference I wasn't expecting that. Really takes me back that was the actual play that actually got me to finally start running D&D, the fact that they were running Curse of Strahd really affected how I DM leaning into horror aesthetics as a first instinct, constantly trying to make everything feel like a gritty struggle for survival.

At the beginning of the week (mondays usually) I ask my players if we a down to play dnd for Friday/Saturday night. And having the event function on Discord helps a lot with reminding them. I do believe it is up to the DM/GM to always be the one to ask if the players want to have a session or make it clear that there is no session in the following weeks. All the games I DM are 4-6 players . we made the ruling ahead of time that if we have 4 players minimum, we will play a proper campaign session unless they want to run a combat oneshot that we always have prepped ahead of times

I’m dm’ing a game right now with serious scheduling problems. The problem is we’ve never played on a regular basis (we just figure out when the next time that fits for everyone is, it’s really irregular). So I guess I’d have to figure out how to turn this into a regular thing before I can apply any of the advice I’ve seen around scheduling…

We are a group of six. We have the thumb rule, when one player is missing we play anyways, when two people can´t we reschedule. Of course there are exceptions, like we are standing in front of the gates of the hometown of player x and player x can`t be there.

In my campaign we’re in the middle of a time loop at a ball and were missing a player last session. We did a flash forward one shot. Very fun.

This happens in my group. 1 of the players is a dad and his son, on occasion, travels for martial arts tournaments. I am pretty much the kids "god father" and go with that family, there are 5 players, so the others were put in to a bind. They started playing a different group of characters on those times that we are gone.

My party is big enough that if one or a few people can't make it, we still typically play. We have seven regular players plus the DM, and an eighth player who's at college and comes basically whenever he can make it, which is pretty rare. We can still progress the story well with a person or two less. If it's something really crucial/big story-wise, maybe we would do a side quest or something instead, but we haven't had issues so far. We've really only canceled a couple of times total, and usually it's just for holidays or specific things.

Canceled games not being anyone's fault can be hard to swallow when you have an extreme scenario like mine...we used to have a problem player, whose main source of problems was that she never understood that her actions affected other people, in AND out of character. One of her main problems was attendance; she almost never showed up, and when she did show up, she almost never paid attention and even tended to completely wander off without so much as a 'brb.' This resulted in the story arc that had a focus on my character being extremely delayed for *months* because the DM didn't want to go too far ahead without her but she kept ditching last minute. I don't think she even read my summaries of the sessions to catch her up to speed when we did have to go on without her. I still feel a lot of resentment even years after her official dropping out of the game because it was a prime example of how little she was invested in the game, and how much it felt like she didn't even care that that was affecting things I was looking forward to. A different player in that game had some scheduling issues in the past few months that made them miss a few games, and that whole scenario with the problem player has made them feel EXTREMELY guilty about it even though in their case, none of us feel any ill will towards them. TL;DR: in most cases it is absolutely nobody's fault, but I do think that TTRPGs are a commitment and while things do happen, one should at least show respect for that commitment.

In one of my last campaigns, the players befriended a group of kids in their homebase village. When we are down some players, the rest can always play the children (for them I use Blades in the Dark-like rules) on adventures independent or releated to the main campaign (in this case they can find clues the main characters missed). The only fear I have that they enjoy playing the kids too much and don't want to return to their main characters ;).

Your video gave me an idea. My first GM, before we even started playing, did a Solo session with each of his players. It was to play out our backstories one by one. It made them more fleshed out cause we literally were there and it gave them more details and in general they were more memorable, also it gave us a chance to play our character for a session before we put them in a setting with more players where our mistakes would impact the whole party so we could see if our idea for a character worked, mechanically and roleplay wise. With the current group I'm GM'ing we won't be able to play a regular session this week due to one of the players not having time so I will try to play out their backstory with them to fill the gap between sessions. They have a connected backstory so it'll work for giving my 3 players a chance to play and build onto their relationships without having to move the plot forwards

My DM will generally run the session if only one person can't make it. Usually having the missing person run an errand or stay behind as a "lookout" for example. Two or more people usually ends with a one shot. We play online and sometimes we'll be tired or late from work or whatever and I have absolutely played in sessions where I was on the call but not making decisions for my character purely because I was so tired - just so I would know what was going on the next session. I've had three campaigns with the same group at this point and none of them have gone to completion because the DM loses the passion they have for a particular campaign. But scheduling issues have never been the cause

If just one player is missing, I usually continue with the main story, unless the missing player is very important to the current session. If it is essential for them to be there, or 2 or more players are missing, I usually prepare a side story to give them some background information on the story. Usually something that either is related to a known/backstory NPC, something about what one of my villainous factions are up to or something to foreshadow something that will be relevant later. This has kept my game fairly consistent for a few years now, tho you do have to be careful not to end up with several ongoing 'one-to-three-shot' side stories.

I used to run a group of three, and if we missed someone we wouldn't play because it would completely throw off the party composition. Sometimes, months would go by between sessions. But we did finish, luckily! It just took way longer than it should have. It took five years(!) to reach the conclusion. Now, I run a group of five. If we don't have three players, we don't play. Otherwise, we do! We've only missed a handful a sessions over the course of a bit over a year. I like this a lot more! I agree with you! All present for the final battle and epilogue, the rest can happen with players missing. Ideally, I'd like the introduction to have everyone as well, but you make it work with absentees.

This is where having a game that you can just pick up and run as a one-off can be great; obviously it depends on your group and how and why you play your games, but unless your group is literally only there for that specific campaign (which, granted, may be the case if you've got a group together on-line or something similar), then there's probably something else that will fit. My old game group ended up playing a lot of Savage Worlds for this reason - it was something that the players who _were_ present could pick up and play through an adventure of, without having to do much set-up, and was still about as fighty and corny as the larger games we usually played. That way, we all got to have our game session, and could share stories about the one-off we'd played with the rest of the group next time we saw them, without anyone feeling like they'd been left out of their game. That said, this was before people messaged each other online all the time, so you could probably just ask the absent players if they were cool with you playing a session without them these days.

This has to be one the best if not the best advice in your channel and I really appreciate it. I immediately shared it with all my groups.

Because there are moments that I timeskip things, I will doubleback to 'fill in' the timeskip. It's not perfect but can be a cool little experience and help fill out stories that may not have had a solid answer at the time.

In my monthly group with 7 players we play as long as there are at least 4 players. Sometimes we move a session within the month if too many players have a problem, but we haven’t cancelled in years. Also we have a regularly scheduled Saturday so that helps a lot

In my main group we are 5 DMs.. so when the current DM have to cancel, its a free for all for who gets to run the oneshot between games. I've run for as few as 2 people and it was so much fun.

My thought is that if 1/3 of your players can't make it, nothing should happen that impacts their characters, but some story can still happen. This would be time for lore dumps, a slower progression, shopping, and the like. If 1/2 of the players can't make it, then the story should pause, and you should drop a side quest for the present members that would, for some reason or another, not allow your missing members. For example, consider that the present members all wake up from a long rest to see their companions locked in an eternal, nightmarish sleep. The waking party would then need to find the source and defeat the Nightmare, and turns out it was infecting the nearby village, so they get a bit of a reward for doing so! To summarize, if you have a group of 6 players: 1 player missing: either write them out or sandbag them, continue and remember to fill them in on what they missed 2 players missing: slow down the story, make sure nothing plot relevant happens for their characters, consider having a lore dump or shopping session 3 players missing: pause the story, generate a sidequest for the present players, reward them slightly for being present 4 players missing: check with the last 2 if they really want to have a session if that many people are missing, consider doing a oneshot or playing a non-RPG game. 5 players missing: idk, go to a movie? 6 players mission: read a book, take a nap, work on next session?

I run really small groups so my rule is that the group as the be alerted at the very least the day before the game. If someone has to back out the day of then we do the session without them or switch to a different game (since I play with the same 4 ppl for all my games.) It’s been pretty effective in keeping my 4 games running/cycling through them-though it’s a bit chaotic if we run a different game I didn’t prep for lol.

I run a 6 person group, and I made it clear that if we had at least 4 people, we'll play. They essentially just don't exist until they show up. It's not super thematic or anything, but FOMO is an incredible motivator and we end up averaging 5 people a session

This is reminding me of the end of an adventure. It was the end of a new DM's first campaign, it was also the end of covid lockdowns for some players. So people were naturally making plans to get out of the house. The problem was that people who knew they'd made plans wouldn't let us know until 5min before session if we got notified at all. The new DM wanted all his players there for the climactic battle, but all that happened was everyone who was hyped for the end and who respected everyone else's time to show up, slowly came to hate the game. It took 6months to play the last 4 3hr sessions. Each week I would get hyped for the game only to have the game ripped away from me at the last second. It's terrible and I know that some other players at the table don't respect my time now. All that has been mostly fixed with changing what day we play on to one that is less in demand for socializing. I am now convinced that the DM should get everyone's input for time availability, then DM sets the time and place based on everyone's best availability, and then you play regardless of who shows up and maybe postpone it if there are too few players or retool the planned session for the fewer number of players. Any games I run will be for the people who show up, not for those that can't be bothered to call out.

I tried something very similar with the first adventure I ran. I tried to have everyone meet up and hang out at session date even if we had no session. Did not work quite as I had hoped but we did manage to pretty much end the adventure (even though the last session or two were just narrated since we agreed that we would not play in the hollyday-season and wanted to start the next campaign in the new year). For that second campaign, I took so much time and effort to build the characters tigether with the players and to get to know the characters and what the players wanted from them that I actually just played the PC when a single player could not make it. Unfortunately that group broke apart and half the players never played DnD with - I believe either of us ever again. With the three remaining players I started a new campaign from level 1 and plan to see it through to level 20. Good thing this video reminds me of this issue so I can get things back on track from the irregular sessions we are having lately.

I usually cancel if I'm down to 2 out of 4, but I recently started a "one shot series" They Came from the Cyclops' Cave game to fill in while I made some major system changes to our main game (Chronicles of Darkness to Storypath) that I'll also run when we're down to two players... when I just couldn't get something together for the main campaign... or when I need a break. I rarely worry about having Everyone at a session, but I have had some where I built a session around a particular player's backstory and had to cancel because they couldn't make it and I didn't have time to prep a new one (I used to do a lot of prep ..backstory, personality notes, bunches of history my players never discover... maps and art I can buy, and the stats are the "easy" part.)

One of my players has chronic illness that can flare up, so his character, a life oracle (pathfinder), will often feel "drained" from using his powers and stay at the inn to recover. Having a built-in, canon reason to excuse players is *very* helpful, something I learned from Matt in CR Campaign 2. We only cancel if I'm sick or two players of five are missing.

C2 of critical role also had a period in the campaign when Laura and Travis were on parental leave, which Matt planned ahead for, and had a plot arranged to explain 3 players absence. I won't do spoilers but I'm thinking I might need to do something similar later this year as one of my players will be getting married.

The majority of the time, we usually have 4-5 players. Our standard rule is that at least three players have to be there to be able to game. Basically more than half of the group. The missing player's characters are still present with the group, but only become relevant if a situation comes up that one of the missing player's characters have something unique they do that would solve a problem the party encounters. We started this rule once we cut back to only gaming every other week, so we didn't go too long without gaming when there were multiple conflicts. When we used to game every week, it was usually a vote among the players that were there if we ran the game with people missing.

I'm in two campaigns. One is weekly and was designed for drop-in D&D at a local game store. We're part of a mercenary group based in Sigil and run short (1-4 session) missions throughout the multiverse. So whenever one of the core players can't make it or whenever we have a random person drop in to play, the mercenary company just opened a portal and either sent us a new person to help, or needed the expertise of the missing member on another mission. Basically, we just suspend disbelief and go with it. The other group is bi-weekly and only three players. It's a bit more roleplay heavy than the first group, so if someone can't make it, we discuss whether we want to cancel or play without that person.

I ran a game for two years and we had a player that had to travel for work, I just explained it that his character walked off and then returned in the next game if he could be there. I then had a friend who could not play every game so I had them create a character and they just subbed in when the other one was out for travel. Was it strange sure, but did it allow for us to play without issues, yes and we all went with it. Unless we were short 2 players we played, when 2 were missing we re-scheduled.

This is something I brought up in our session 0 for my very fresh DND campaign. Generally, I hate cancelling just because someone can't make it. In my last game, we sometimes went 6 - 8 weeks without playing in an otherwise bi-weekly game, which completely killed all momentum we once had. And we always cancelled because one player couldn't make it. Totally made it unenjoyable for me, as it was mostly last minute cancellations. For my game we play when we're 2 - 3 (out oft 5 normally) players. I told my players it's totally cool if they miss a session once in a while because it's their grandmother's birthday but I also wouldn't put the campaign in pause mode for that. I started a campaign because I wanted to run a campaign after all, not because I wanted to run a bunch of filler oneshots. It's a policy I already used in my vtm campaigns and generally it's something that trained my players to show up - because they might miss cool stuff if they don't. Now of course I know there's sometimes stuff where missing a session is unavoidable. Totally fair. But I've had players miss more sessions than they attended, at which point they gotta ask themselves whether a biweekly game is really something they can commit to.

Hey Mike-- I think my first comment so I want to say I've really enjoyed your videos and vibe with your philosophy on d&d My first game, we had 5 total players and one was a constant absentee and the GM would cancel when it wasn't the player (I eventually led a table discussion about letting us play if we were down a player) I started GMing my own campaign because I loved dnd and I wanted to play and now I'm here running two games and having a blast. I find being a GM just as fun as being a player. I set the expectation with my players when I started GMing that I felt that 3 players was enough to run a game of D&D. Every campaign I have run since, when we do character creation, I start with talking about my style of running games and homebrew rules I like to use and I mention that I will run games without players. I want them all there; but there's no pressure. Missing the game will not take it away from everyone else at the table. I think setting that expectation at the front of every game has done more to solve problems than I have given it credit for. I have a set schedule; we play every other Sunday afternoon for 3 hours. These two things have let players know that I am making that time commitment and I schedule the rest of my life around that as much as possible. And they match that effort; not because I asked them to. But because they want to play. I've moved the starting time up or pushed it back at times to help a player be there for as much of a game as possible. In terms of... what I actually do differently when I'm down players. I ask that player if there's anything they want their character to do in that time (research, build, etc) and if I know the players are debating two paths, I ask them to give me their vote going forward. Other than that, I don't do anything different. I go to every game knowing where we're starting and no idea where we're going. In my current campaign, we've had 3 games where we were down 2 players. The first time, we lost the ladies. The remaining 3 players, establishing themselves that they were unsupervised, went to bully the artificer's rival and ruin his factory and his business. We called that the Bachelor's Party. The very next game, the guys were missing. So the ladies put the boys on the train to the location the main party wanted to go to and then they went on a minor dungeon crawl with an NPC to explore a rumor of undead there. That was the Bachelorette's Party. Third time was the "Wedding" where they went to talk to some beloved NPC's to investigate rumors and one player went to talk to his wife (one of the main antagonists. The party is desperately trying to get him to divorce her.) I think ultimately I would say... I trust my party to do whatever they want to and feel comfortable with. They don't go poke a boss battle when they're missing a player. They go do the minor stuff and explore niche things and have small character development moments. The example you gave where a character has just been brought back to life; it could be that they still had to rest for a day even though they were alive and that's also interesting for the other players to deal with. Trust players to roll with the punch. And as a GM, we never know what the players are going to do next anyway. X"D That was my 2 cents. Sorry it was long.

In one of my previous groups, we had a player who would often cancel last minute. She played a ranger, so my DM always made up something why her character was wandering off, usually it was a fox that encouraged her away to the forest and back to the group once she attended a session. At one point, we had a new player come into the group in a session where the ranger was absent again. So the DM improvised some strange magical event where the two characters swapped places. The new player played a bard, who was transported from a tavern into the middle of our battle, while the ranger was suddenly stuck on a stage with no idea how she got there. It made for some hilarious game time, where the ranger had to find herself out of an awkward situation and back to the group withou knowing where she was. Unfortunately the group broke apart before we couls finish that story (the why could be an rpg horror story honestly, but that's something for another time)

It's been over 10 years I don't play weekly anymore. Even when I'm a player. Most of the people I play with don't have every weekend available (including me), and due time zones, it is impossible to schedule games on weekdays. My groups always had well-kept diaries, and we keep the game discussions alive throughout discord. However, we settled on playing monthly. I know it's not for everyone, but it was the way I found to keep playing RPGs, and it worked for my groups.

Besides campaign finales (and maybe mini-finales, in something like a Pathfinder Adventure Path that spans multiple books), I think the obvious example of a session where you should have everyone is session zero. If we're laying out ground rules, agreeing on safety tools, etc., then I think it's vital that everyone who'll be in the game gets to contribute to that discussion. Even if it's an existing group that meets regularly but is having a new session zero for a new campaign, or a mid-campaign "session zero" to check in & make sure everything's still working as it should, I'd still want everyone involved and would push the session if we couldn't make that happen.

I've done both. Probably worth mentioning first that all the games I've played in are in-person. The current game I'm playing in doesn't play if anyone is missing, as we only have 4 players (plus the GM) and it's a very role-play heavy group (we have combats in less than half our sessions). Two of the characters have stuff written into their backstories where the GM could easily whisk them away, if the players are absent. With that group, we've done other things when people haven't been able to make it, whether that's just hanging out or doing fun activities with our characters. One-shots have also been proposed for that, though we've not actually had time to do that. I've also played in groups that are fine playing without everyone, though these tend to be larger tables and less intensive RP. I was GMing a pre-made dungeon crawl for a group back when I was pretty new to the game and we constantly had a player who didn't show up (and often didn't bother letting us know until after the session had started), so we handwaved a "dwarf fighter goes into his Pokeball when player isn't here". Honestly, with him not there, the party wasn't losing much of anything other than their meat shield, but no one wanted to kick him out of the group. There was another time that it happened more recently in Critical Role where one of the players (Liam) couldn't be there and Matt was like "Orym does pushups" and during the following episode, Liam was able to roleplay out Orym's reaction to stuff that happened with other characters.

My usual metric for "need everyone here to play" is important fights with powerful characters ESPECIALLY if I have homebrew it cause I'm not great at judging power levels and I have this, irrational(?), fear of killing someone's character while they're not there. I just don't want players to feel like it unfair to possibly lose a character without having the agency of being present.

I haven't really been part of any ongoing campaigns myself, nust a few one-shots, but our main DM friend has made it a point that every single campaign he runs - no matter the system - is eventually interconnected. The one shot he ran for me and my husband last Dec? Set in the same D&D world that he's been creating with another group of friends for years. Our actions during that one shot directly impacted events in a Kids on Bikes campaign that he's running. All this to say that, even though scheduling can be a bit of a nightmare, as long as we're okay running some new characters occasionally, he can run the occasional one-shot or even short campaign for a smaller group, and we all it will eventually, lunk up with what we or another group is doing in some way

I have run a side adventure (sort of a flashback) for a smaller group when we knew one player was going to be unavailable for a period of several weeks. This worked because we knew this well in advance so I could prepare for it. But I know I definitely can't just whip up a side quest or different adventure on a few days notice if someone cancels very close to the session. Prep time takes a lot of work, at least for me, and I also have other stuff to do in life. We've tried playing with an incomplete group, but we found that it caused a lot of issues with people having missed part of the story and not knowing what is going on. For us, we just play only with the whole group. And as a DM for my group, I'm very strict on things I accept as valid reasons for cancelling a session. If a player is too busy to be able to commit to this campaign, that is fine, but then this campaign is not for them and I will replace them with someone who can. I should note we mainly play in person.

Great topic and discussion, Mike. I have lots of different personalities and individual challenges within my players. I usually GM 5 players (with 6 being my max). The 5th is the 18yo son of two other players, and for psychological reasons, he is difficult to keep at table, focussed, and engaged with his character. I work around that with his capabilities when he's present, but we all ignore it when his character isn't around. Of the remaining four, all can step up to the plate and deliver great RP scenes, but they are distracted to a greater or lesser degree (phones, coloring books, etc.). My cancelation threshold is to have at least enough players to make group-level choices and interact in a meaningful way. One of my players can handle that alone, while another requires at least two others for anything to get done. If I get more than 2 cancelations from the core four on the same session, we reschedule, but that only happens every 6th to 8th session. Before inviting each player to the campaign, I talked seriously about attendance. If they can't commit to an overall attendance of 75% (sometimes better and sometimes worse) at campaign start, I don't want them playing at my table. Some players have a lot going on, plus drama, plus the kind of emergencies that every adult player will have. If they can't commit to regular attendance before unexpected emergencies... That's a nope for me. That policy helps a lot. They are reliable for the most part, and that reliability has gotten us through a 99-session campaign, and we are now on session 54 of the next one.

Our discord server has several Pathfinder games running, shuffling players and GMs. Most groups are GM+4 players, and if at least one player can't make it - the game is postponed. Even though we play a rules-heavy game, we're still very heavy on the RP, so we don't want to miss things. 3 or even 2 characters wouldn't be enough for us. We once had a very big hiatus of 9 months, mostly due to GM's personal reasons. But we managed to come back to the campaign and finish it, and to this day it's my first and only campaign I played through level 1-20. Ngl, we did lose a bit of momentum, and by the end of this 2-year campaign we were ready to move on, but I think it's only natural? Recently we had another hiatus of 3 months, but as soon as we remembered what had happened before, the game was on. And no one at our table would want to miss a game.

In one campaing the first session one of the players had to leave for baby issues so we had to make do on the flying. However, later I had to cancel that campaing because, althought I tried to be as available as possible and making it easier for my players, they never had time to meet for leveling up their characters (all of them are casual players and didn't have the book or knew how to use it), so before being really angry at them I chose to value their frienship over the game and stop everything.

We are 6 characters + GM, if one can’t play, assuming that the cleric’s player is always late, we still play. Two or more, we meet anyway and play some TTG. Our table is very regular, we play every monday since 2009, and never stopped except when two players had newborns at the same time.

We have a DM that sometimes has to cancel, and we have a player that's willing to step up and run one-shots/side adventures in the same world (coordinating with our regular DM), which works great! On the other hand, when a player has to miss a session, our characters are independent and busy in the world enough (already at level 7!) that it is usually not too hard to find a good reason for the character to be absent. If we leave off in the middle of combat or something, some one else will usually run the character. We also do use Discord in between sessions, but, IMO, it's been a bit of a mixed bag. It's nice to have the outlet for RP, to keep track of other PCs' doings, logistics, etc. -- but not everyone is always equally able to engage with Discord, and when people start using Discord for RP *instead* of doing it "onscreen" during the game session, I feel like the rest of us miss out. It's a difficult balance.

Me personally, I used to do one of two things if someone was missing for the week. Offer one-shots to give my players a chance to try different builds to mix things up, or ask if anyone of the players would like to run a one-shot so I could be a player. This set up was especially if their character was going through a personal arc at the time. But overtime, I've found it's sometimes just better to continue on and come up with a background reason why they arn't present. Most recent example: Party of my current game just hit level 3. Ranger couldn't make it. So we (myself and the ranger) decided that in world he was busy finding an animal companion (he went Beast Master), hence why his character was not there that day. Of course, personal arcs I still feel a filler until that player returns the next week is best. Gone longer than one? we're moving on. Nothing worse than time killing a campaign.

I used to always cancel if one person can't make it and now we're suspended because one person withdrew and it gave me the space to rethink if I was even enjoying running the game. It'd gotten stressful. I had seven players; i actually think getting to restart with only five players, at some point, might be better.

Depending on group size I will set the limits differently. In my smaller groups 4-6 I say when at least 2 people are missing we wont play. in my larger groups 7-9 I up that by 1 to 3 people need to be missing to postpone. To help with sceduling I always tell my players its always on the same day at the same time. When we are missing people for that normal date, we try to find another time during another day so we wont miss an entire session for the duration (weekly, bi-weekly, once a month etc.) I found out that helps a lot. Some people might think this is expecting too much of the players, but I communicated this with them and they are all fine with it. I mean we all want to play D&D a certain amount of Organization and time planning is necessary to do it consistently.

Yeah, this unfortunately happens alot. I'm a DM myself and just getting a game started has turned into a chore. So I've basically just decided to sit back. Do some studying, and see if my potential group can pull each other together to play a session.

Apologies for the long post! I've have 2 players who are routinely absent from sessions. Originally I did cancel sessions, because I felt it unfair to move on when life was getting hard for them. I got a very rude awakening when one of my players left (unquietly) because of this. Maybe 2-3 more sessions in, and I saw the quitting player's point; it wasn't fair to the people who did make it. Now, I run with 1/2 or more, and if it's lower than 4 I run a Slayer's Take contract. Thank you for the idea! I've created new leadership NPC's and done a tiny bit of remodeling due to the end of Season 1, and my players have 2-3 characters each to choose from. I throw high CR monsters at them, see if they make it lol

In my dragon age game I have a side game going of 1 shots/missions for the main organiation The Inqusition, if people will miss sessions and to get people to try out new classes.

my D&D group has 5 players and we will go ahead with sessions as long as we have 4 that can make it! we did have a spot there of only 3 being able to make it due to one player being overseas (we play over discord, but time differences are a pain) and 2 others constantly switching off availability, and we ended up going back to play death house with different characters than the ones we were currently running through strahd!

Just commenting to share a story. After college I got a job in Japan. I'm over half a day away timezone wise from my old friends, who still often hung out together playing games online and streaming movies together on discord, only remembering my existence when they realized they had somewhere to stay for free in Japan, and then only again when they found out that I had experience DMing DnD. Long story short, after months of dedication crafting their world, planned story arcs around their characters' backstories, multiple adventures prepped for this sandbox world depending on where they would go, 100 pages of content typed up in total, one day as I was sleeping, having prepped everything to continue the module we were running as I was finishing writing their next set of potential adventures, getting ready to wake up 6 am Japan time in order for them to play USA evening time, one player who couldn't make it cancelled the game on my behalf just because he couldn't make it. The week before he said there was a chance he wouldn't make it but we had said that we'll still be able to play, we'd done so before for other people, and even if other people can't come too, we'd still at least hang out online since it was going to be the day before my birthday. But the so-called leader of the friend group cancelled the game, and no one showed up, even to hang for my birthday when I asked in the chat where everyone was and waited several hours. And after all that happened and when I let them know later I was upset and if they can't come that's ok, but they have no right to cancel the game on my behalf and that as long as they can understand that and offer an apology, the game can continue. They refused, and that's how a friendship of 15 years ended. It's stupid and it sucks, but just, players, you can tell the DM you aren't coming, you can tell the DM you'd rather they not play without you, but it's not your job to cancel the game when other people are potentially coming to play.

Enough cannot be said for the FOMO aspect it gives players who miss out. Sounds mean to "enjoy" imposing this but it's just true. Those players might feel so bad about missing out on a cool session that they'll put more effort into planning out their schedules and actually make time for the game rather than fitting it in whenever it's perfectly convenient. OR a chronically missing player will eventually just drop out and tbh while I'd miss them I also value a regular game with present players so it's an opportunity to bring in someone else who will make time for it

Shout out to a recent campaign 3 episode of Critical Role where Liam's character was just quiet but doing burbees for 4 IRL hours. Also now trying to imagine a fictional plot for the Sick Day stream they did. I guess that would be an alternate universe where The Incident happened again. Weird that Chetney and FCG keep getting raptured together...

I have a pretty simple rule of thumb. First I look at what the session involves. If I would need all 5 of my players, I cancel. Now if it was something like last week,(the beginning of a dungeon crawl) if 1 person was missing, I would still run. Now if 2 of my five players are missing, I look even harder at what's happening in the campaign at the moment. If they're in a safe spot, like a tavern or camping while inbetween quests or side jobs. Or just on their way back to get rewarded, I'll ask the players if they feel up for doing a simple low stakes session. If they all say yes, I run just that. Some simple, low stakes, fun.

This hits close for me. I have a group that meets and plays a oneshot even if everyone cant be there, but it's still frustrating. It often feels like we have done more one shots than main campaign. Ive had to just stop getting excited to play when at least half the time its the disappointment of not. Heck, we dropped one whole campaign because a player had to drop out, and the current part of the story was a lot about him. I just want to k ow we'll play if im there, and if i have to miss it, im not ruining someone elses night

We have to have 2 players not show up for our next session. Since the players are all still relatively new, we're just doing a one-shot with the same characters in a totally different place. I told them that nothing that happens in this session will matter so to just go crazy and try abilities and skills they haven't yet. It's basically a practice session. I'm really excited for it and think it's a great way to keep the game going even when not everyone can be there.

I habe kudt been yellig at the screen for spending 1,5 months inviting people, planning 1,5 year campaign, 1 long session every month... making a set schedule. Now one player says i cant make it for 3-4 of the bevauee the only wotte one sunday in his calender and the other is first "i will be missing may.." then at session zero: "what we play for July and August? I can't either"

Actually just had a session cancelled a couple nights ago because one of the players had a last minute emergency come up. In most cases I think we probably would have continued on without him, but this next session was going to be his character confronting their main villain, so it definitely wouldn't have made sense to do it without him. We did end up doing a little battle royale one shot with the rest of the players but just wondering if theres any other solution to that.