The question arises (fairly frequently in my case) of what to do when your players fail to show up for a game. Last night was supposed to be the beginning of our “Where Heroes Fear to Tread” WW2 Super Villains game, but two of my 4 players didn’t show, and I had no way to get a hold of them.
In the end, we played a game of Scrabble, in which Dave whupped me and Bridget soundly, while declaring “beginner’s luck”. Never trust a Cryptologist, I always say.
We had also considered playing “Order of the Stick”, “Munchkin” or “Illuminati”, but those fell through in favor of Scrabble.
But what do you do? We didn’t want to just cancel everything, but a game with just two players would screw up my plans completely.
I’ve considered perhaps creating a two-person setting that would work well if no one else can show, but I’m not sure.
Any suggestions?
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June 18, 2009 at 9:48 am
Jakob
I have an backup campaign where I play when players fail to show up. The thing is that the only thing I do is prepare the goal of the adventure. When the adventure begins I just start to improvise. The best thing about this is that I also have a character (which I usually don’t) and I try and make the other players take their turn at telling the outcome of rolls and interactions with NPCs so that I may also play a little role playing and make it easier on me.
June 18, 2009 at 10:09 am
Alex Schröder
I just added more players to my games. Once I had six players, we always had enough people to play. I think I had two players two or three times only. And I just kept running the same campaign as always. Unfortunately I find it tricky to find cool three player boardgames. So I’d probably suggest eating dinner, or sitting at the console for an all-out Soul Calibur contest!
June 18, 2009 at 10:27 am
Stuart
Boardgames are definitely the way to go. You might want to consider something like Arkham Horror or Descent which might give you more of that RPG feeling.
June 18, 2009 at 10:57 am
j_king
Many of our players also play the minis game, so we do that instead. There are rules for playing scenarios and random dungeon crawls if all-out skirmishes aren’t really called for.
Otherwise it’s usually a board game. Catan, Zombies!!!, and Risk are favorites.
June 18, 2009 at 11:04 am
dysonlogos
If one particular gamer is there, we immediately “force” him to pull out his copy of “Lacuna Part 1″. Character creation takes five minutes for those players who haven’t been part of the game to date, and game play is fast, intuitive to a point, and surreal.
Otherwise we pull out our previous stand-by : The Mega Dungeon of Random Players. A B/X game that I keep all the character sheets for and occasionally roll up new characters of roughly the current PC levels for other players to join in.
June 18, 2009 at 11:14 am
Zzarchov
Im a fan of Fluxx myself for some laughs, if you want to do something constructive for the campaign one thing I’ve done is “back story”.
June 18, 2009 at 11:16 am
Zzarchov
And then hit enter accidentally too soon. In “backstory” I’ll play through a past event in a characters life they want to go through in more detail, or sometimes past events in a villain they are chasing’s life (especially if the group had previously done research on said villain).
June 18, 2009 at 11:22 am
Siskoid
That’s why I structure all my campaigns so they withstand a missing player or two. Either it’s set in a locale (not a travelling show) and the character can miss roll call, or there’s an in-game way to “ghost” a character (not easy).
The only “continuing” stories I do are with players who will never miss a game once the date is set.
June 18, 2009 at 12:15 pm
wrathofzombie
I’m rather lucky to have really reliable players. When something comes up I usually know a couple days in advance, and I can always depend on 3-4 out of my 7 players to be there. If someone can’t play, they fade into the background, and everyone is comfortable with that.
What I’ve done in the past with the situation you are in is have games set up for one-shotters. Shadowrun, Star Wars: Saga edition, Vampire, and All Flesh Must be Eaten are great games for a one shot or two, and characters can be rolled up easily.
Another couple of ideas is to watch a movie together and see if it sparks ideas for you or your players for the campaign, or just for enjoyment. Also you could talk with the players that are there about the campaign, how they like it so far, and ask if there are any goals they have for their characters they would like to see happen.
June 20, 2009 at 9:32 am
M Harnish
We’re big Fantasy Flight fans (Descent, Arkham Horror, or Fury of Dracula) when we end up short on players, though that doesn’t happen often with our current Burning Wheel game since it’s episodically-structured and much more character driven so a few missing players doesn’t present a problem.
July 13, 2009 at 12:27 pm
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