Sling him in the longboat ’til he’s sober, of course. Oh, wait. That’s somebody else.

Like many other D&D gaming groups, my group occasionally encounters scheduling issues. By “occasionally,” I mean “just about every stinkin’ week.” My players and I mostly occupy the “married, with children” and “gainfully employed” demographics, which limits us to one session per month anyway. Add the unique issues present in every job and/or family, and more often than not, we have one or more absent players.

Midway through January, I posted about our use of “stunt doubles,” or players who can’t commit to on ongoing campaign but want to play once in a while. These players are invited to show up when they can. If we have an absent regular, the “stunt double” can take over that character. If all regular players are present, the “stunt double” can run monsters during combat.

We’ve tried other solutions, too, with greater or lesser success.

One of the reasons I wanted to set the current campaign aboard a sailing ship was so that we could plausibly explain the absence of a character whose player was absent. Inspired by Star Trek, I figured that an absent player’s character could be tied up with various duties on board the ship, or might be seasick, or might have some other reason for staying behind. We used this technique to good effect with Alanso Heslock when David couldn’t attend one of our sessions. I even worked with David outside the gaming sessions to create a side story about what Alanso did while the others were galavanting about the island killing goblin(oid)s. Of course, you can accomplish the same thing if your PCs have a “home base” anywhere; the ship just allows the “home base” to move around a lot. This technique breaks down, however, when you have long overland journeys. My PCs have been off their boat now for something like six sessions now, and leaving a character “offstage” for a weeklong trek through the desert doesn’t work when s/he suddenly shows up in an unexpected place.

In a recently-uploaded story arc on the Icosahedrophilia podcast, Steve was not present to play Dra’kith, but the PCs were in the middle of exploring a large underground city. I could think of no plausible way to get Dra’kith back to the ship alone, so I ran him as an NPC for that session (in which he died—bwahahahahahaha!—not because I’m mean, but to make way for Steve’s new character, a warforged barbarian). Recently, Matt K., who plays Jacques (a human paladin) in the campaign, could not attend, so Jay (who has played D&D with Matt for many years) ran Jacques; on the same night, I ran Kitaru (Jeff’s dragonborn sorcerer) as an NPC (and got him killed—again, not because I’m mean, but because Jeff is moving to another state).

Having one player run two characters and/or having the DM run a PC as an NPC allied with the party works reasonably well for a night, but it can really slow things down if the pinch-hitting player or DM does not have a thorough knowledge of the character’s powers, feats, skills, and combat role. Therefore, I’m considering a slight change to this strategy. Before our next session, I may try to write up stat blocks for each PC in NPC or “companion character” (Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, pp. 27–33) style. I would do this in consultation with the players so that each PC’s stat block reflected his or her “signature style,” but gave a pinch-hitting player—or me—fewer choices to sort through during a fight. If I implement this idea, we would have three options for how each player character is portrayed:

• The PC is portrayed by his/her/its regular controlling player
• The PC is portrayed fully by a “stunt double” sitting in for an absent regular player
• The PC is portrayed by another present player, or by the DM, using an abbreviated companion character/NPC stat block

What do you think about these strategies? Would you find them useful at your table? How do you handle absent players?

Update: See also Sarah Darkmagic’s perspective and suggestions on this topic.