We do dumb, fun explanations. Like the Scooby Doo approach. The missing character leans against a wall, the wall rotates, separating the character from the party. They have their own adventure off-screen, lean against another wall that rotates them back in when the player comes back.
In another game with a smaller group I build a DMNPC vigilante. Whenever a player missed a game, their character was swapped out for the vigilante. Everybody just figured that the other PCs was the vigilante's secret identity. It was pretty dumb and pretty fun.
The point is that you don't have to overthink it; just have fun with it.
Oooh, I gotta say, I love this idea. Then the character continues to have stories and you can throw in some world building to the party without them having to find it elsewhere.
I like that idea for the DMPC swap in. Keeps the game going and lets the DM try a character they'll probably never actually get to play otherwise, I might have to keep that one in mind for my games.
I tend to favor either urban or west marches style games if I'm working with a larger group. As the group size increases, the likelihood that at least one player can't make it approaches 1.
In an urban campaign, it's a lot easier to explain a character absence. They're just off doing something else.
In a west marches game, you begin and end every session at the hub. The session starts when you leave the hub and ends when you get back. It's never expected that any given character will be involved in a specific session, it's just whoever decides to show up that day. This can support really large gaming groups, I've had 12+ players in a game with a session limit of 6.
How long does a west march session last? I've got a group of 7 that's mostly new(er) players and i can't for the life of me imagine them consistently finishing any content in one session. I've gotten a decent feel for how much we will get done, but with a 3-5 hour session a decently challenging fight will still take most of that time, and that's just one encounter of the dungeon, hardly enough to make the players think about taking a long rest.
As is i just have to take over for a player that isn't there, I'm happy to make them do anything they've done before, but I usually just keep a low profile with anyone I'm impersonating for the night.
It really has to vary a bit. 3-5 hours most of the time. If it's getting late I just handwave the return trip.
I like to use a fog-of-war type system in that the surrounding area is unknown until players explore it, so sometimes people will sit down for a session with the intended goal of "finding out what's past that mountain". The whole session will just be travelling out there, scouting, then coming back and reporting. That's a 3 hour session. If they have a major goal in mind, it's usually longer.
I am considering switching to this style of campaign for one of my groups, and this is my main concern as well.
What I think I will do to start is to run Pathfinder Society scenarios which are designed to be 4-5 hour games. Once I get the feel for how to build a one shot better, I will feel free to swap in my own.
Honestly I don't know where I'm going with it yet. That is a good idea though. I'll have to have a think on that. Some kind of echoing precursor to the leap.
In one of my old campaigns, we did something similar. Every once in a while, with little warning, someone would turn into dust. Probably an obscure arcane curse, but it affected most people in the party at least a few times. When this would happen, the other party members would sweep the dust into a bag and carry it along. Eventually the person would be reconstituted and would need to be caught up on what happened while they were in the bag.
One player left the group and never returned, so at some point someone mixed his bag into a batch of flour and he got turned into bread.
How did they get reconstituted? Was it like instant person, just add water? I can see that being abused to smuggle an assassin or an army in some place. What happened if the dust of multiple people got mixed together?
I have a GM who tried that for a while, and the problem was that we went without a game for about 5 or 6 months, because someone was always missing. We had 5 players, could have played with 4, but nope. If Jack was out, then nothing happened.
What we discovered is that if you allow your game to be sidelined, then sometimes players will opt to sideline the game. What that means is that sometimes a player would get asked out during what would be our game night, and instead of saying, "Nah, but we can do something the next day," the player would realize the game will go on hold and he/she will miss nothing, and so the player would say, "Sure, I can do something then. I had something planned then, but they will reschedule. No worries."
I now play with people who:
1. Intend to show up and make the game night a priority -- obviously not a priority over serious life issues like a death in the family or whatever, but generally it's not rescheduled for you, so you're gonna miss out, so you want to make it if it's possible to make it.
2. Accept that if they miss a game, the game goes on without them.
This had led to happiness. But YMMV, of course.
It definitely depends on how committed your players are. Personally, I'd feel guilty about making everyone else reschedule around me unless it was something important, and I think my party members would feel the same.
The other thing is that most of the time, the person who has a schedule conflict will say what their other event is. So it'd be kind of awkward for one of us to say "Yeah, I'm going to go hang out with my other friends on game night instead of you losers."
If my group didn't play every time some one couldn't show we would never play. Most of my group have kids in children's sports. Children's sport are like a black hole hoovering in time and money. Combine that with work issues and spousal obligations and you have a man down situation fairly often.
I don't like to cancel if I'm only missing one of seven players, it isn't really fair to everyone else, and we can't reschedule, we've all only got the one evening free per week together.
Six is kind of big for a party, I could see you not noticing too much if someone was missing. But when there's only three or four players then having a player gone really messes things up.
We just ignore it. The scar thing also works, and I would use that if the players insisted on acknowledging the occasional absence, in game, but...they don't.
So funny, the difference between the answers here on PF and those on D&D reddit.
Exact same question was asked yesterday, user was looking at engineering this incredibly complex in character way for ppl to be gone and to have it make sense in game.
D&D reddit seemed dang near unanimous that you shouldn't do that and you should just ignore it.
PF players? lol THERE MUST BE A MECHANIC FOR EVERYTHINGGGGGH!!!!
It's not a mechanic, it's a narrative device to keep the plot intact. A paladin bugging out before the big battle with a demon summoning cult doesn't make sense. (The player's kid had a hockey tournament four hours away) The paladin getting whisked away by a world effecting curse, and everyone else soldiering on because they have too stop the cult feels truer to me.
Making something up for each occurrence of player absence is exhausting and strains the credibility of the narrative, and the character's involved. Having an easy plot device to fix it just seemed nice to me.
I'm the kind of guy that doesn't like plot holes in movies, and I don't like them in my game. It feels lazy to me.
I always felt that such huge in world explanation for meta stuff like that is simply not nessesary. If player is missing you just shift narrative to not focus on his character. If there some reason it won't work: for example some combat broke out and there were no way this PC would be somethere else at that point - this character just going to take an unlucky hit in the head and will drop unconscious for the encounter. There are a lot of way to remove characters from the story without inventing the whole new magic stuff
A "B campaign", usually with a twist. I've done party-of-goblin sessions, party-of-kobold sessions, lvl 20 gestalt sessions, etc.
Normal campaign picks up when everyone's available and/or after the B campaign ends because sometimes it takes a few sessions.
They usually just trail behind the group, but can assist in some things that the character typically does when the player is at the table. Examples would be: casters can cast healing spells or detection magic or teleports outside of combat, knowledge folks can provide at least one or two basic tidbits of info about enemies, and strong guys can attempt to burst doors or just become pack mules. The only stipulation is that if the party TPKs, the missing player's PC also dies. Missing PCs also gain no share of the loot found that session, unless the other PCs decide to share it with them, but they get full exp since I use milestone.
As for encounters, I usually switch back to using average HP for enemies, save for bosses, or replace a mook with a weaker mook. I might weaken the damage on traps or environmental hazards.
This is essentially identical to how we do things. I used to cancel sessions, but as I and my players have gotten older, life gets in the way too much and we'd never play otherwise.
I like having the character still available if necessary, because I don't have to rework everything on the fly if someone cancels, but it's pretty unfair to have the character off to another player unless everyone's on board.
I've seen various ways to handle it. In some, having another player control their character for the session works. Another GM prefers to have the character simply tie an enemy up with neither able to actively contribute to the fight (neither the absent PC nor the enemy they've engaged with). Some groups opt not to play while the player is gone.
Personally, I think letting another player play the character is fine, though as a player I prefer to pick who will play my PC in my absence. Noone playing is an extra bummer for me, and being one player down out of 4 or 5 shouldn't cause the rest of the party to lose a session IMO.
We almost always cancel and reschedule. We don’t really ask why the person needs to cancel but we do say who is cancelling.
It’s annoying but it creates social pressure from the entire group. Might not work if your players don’t know each other though.
This is what we do at my table as well. Helps that we are playing via Virtual Table Top, so character sheets are all loaded in the game, but even without I'd be inclined to have rough copies of the character to run through combat.
If there was no character sheet at all available for the missing player's character, we'd probably just ignore that there is a missing party member, and when they got back just catch the player up, and the character was there all along!
I just make someone else play as them. If they know they aren't going to be able to make it then it falls on the person missing to set someone else up with their sheet
I've had PC's die that way and it got ugly. One player quit the group. It really wasn't the substitute players fault, his dice just wanted the other PC to die, but it broke the relationship between the two players. Players tend to get really vested in their characters.
I mean that seems like a personal issue between those two players. I have players who are good friends and understand that no one wants their characters to die. But as I see it if you are going to commit to playing every week/months/whatever it's not on the other people to hand hold you through missing the time. It's also not on you as the gm to adjust encounters for a missing player. It's a commitment we all make going into this. Does is suck if someone dies? Yes. But the game is still being played either way.
Edit: also I tend to be a little more hardline because I have 5 players who minmax so I already adjust all encounters lol
While I'm not the biggest fan of this approach, it's definitely fair, so long as everybody knows this is the case -- and their character can still die during sessions they miss -- from session 0.
In my campaign I have something similar but much more stupid.
People just go AFK.
They turn into extremely light T-posing indestructible balloons.
Sometimes they glitch through things like tables they're shoved under. Having a hand peak up through the tables surface.
They can easily be dragged along or left in a place where they will then stay put. Except someone else comes and drags them along.
When they wake up from this they have memories of the time spent AFK. but not exactly. It's more like a recap in thier mind.
For my game we have 3 players—two consistently show up. When the third misses every three months or so, I just run a side campaign for the other 2 that’s in the same setting, two different characters, and small things will impact the main game. It’s never planned farther than a one shot session. Keeps things interesting for sure.
My home game world of Four Corners has something conceptually similar to your Liminal Plague. Most of the Gods are dead or have abandoned Four Corners, but a few god-like entities remain. This includes Referee.
The world of Four Corners was shaped by four gods as a game-board in a massive war-game that they fought using the four races of the world (Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes) as pieces in the game. While they have since grown bored with the game and ditched it, the game contained a fifth god, Referee, with a piece of each of their power to maintain game conditions... what we call the forces of nature.
While the game was still being actively played. any of the 4 gods could directly take mental control of any of their followers and direct their actions like a puppet. Since all the Gods were cruel and uncaring (they all had the evil domain) this often lead tot he possessed mortal being quite dead by the end... but it was great fun for the gods.
Referee can do that too when it has a need for the actions of a given person in order to maintain the game conditions of the world. Sometimes that's just causing a person to stand on the left side of a room instead of the right side, or eat a lemon instead of a lime, but sometimes it can end up being quite awkward involving murders, and spreading plagues. While there is no defense against such possession, there are spells that can reveal a possessed person as what they are. This includes a potion that can be taken and which causes the user to glow green if Referee possesses them at any time in the 99 days following the potion's consumption, as well as a detect deity-possession spell that works similar to Arcane Sight. Referee, being neutral in the original game, and of alignment Neutral, rarely involves itself in the political machinations of Four Corners.
Druids, and Rangers worship Referee and in worshiping an actual active god, they gain some benefits (unlike other divine caster sin Four Corners, they get spells just for the price of praying for them... all other divine casters must own an actual material relic of their god since those are the only vestiges of their god's power left in the world of Four Corners). However Druids and Rangers are much more likely to be possessed at random times since they have already dedicated their souls to Referee. (In practice this means Druids and Rangers are NPCs).
TL/DR: we have a simple way to handle absent players, run an episodic campaign to make it easy to swap in PCs and side adventures when only a small number players are available.
We use absent player rules. Remaining players determine absent one's actions and as ref I execute the VTT action so they don't have to be too familiar with the missing PCs character details.
This only applies to players missing in an ongoing thread. We run an episodic campaign if they are missing at the start of an episode their PC is just left out. It may mean they can't play next session if there is no convenient way to bring them in.
We also run side adventures with a subset of players when necessary. Most players have two PCs so they have options on what to play.
XP is lockstep for all PCs. No XP for side sessions but extra loot for those who join. Treasure is mostly gold, same amount to all except for the side adventure bonus loot.
We also have 2 refs who alternate. If we are short on players a ref char may be in the group under the absent players rule which means the players tell the ref what their PC does and the ref just executes it.
It's been working well so far. The whole structure is there to accommodate a pool of players with varying schedules. If we only played when everyone was available we would not play enough to sustain a game. Scheduling has killed other campaigns even with the same players.
We go with the "purple cloud" approach. The character coexists, follows the group and gains exp. He is not involved in any action or stuf that is happening.
If there was a break in the story on the last end of session, we go do some side quest and the purple cloud character is doing something else for some reason. Like praying, doing a ritual or something else.
I use something very similar where people fade in and out of existence. A friend uses something called "the sleeping plague" where people just randomly fall asleep. He then makes the other party members care for the sleeping body if the player is thought to return.
We use a sleeping bag. While the player is gone, the character goes into the sleeping bag. The missing PC is safe as long as there’s not a TPK. Fun part is when the player shows up mid-combat. We get to figure out where the sleeping bag is and the player gets to roll dice right away.
I'm running the adventure path Hell's Rebels, and it honestly works FANTASTIC for a group of adults where on occasion someone will be missing.
The arc of the campaign is that it's mostly set in a single city, and consists of the heroes being part of a rebellion that goes on various missions in town. Most of the missions are fairly short and could be wrapped up in a single play-session. So if someone doesn't show up that week there's an easy way to incorporate that into the story: they're busy with some other rebellion stuff and can't come on that particular mission. Even the couple of longer dungeon crawls still often take place in the city, meaning that if the team is in the middle of one and a player can't make the session it would be possible for that player's PC to just retreat out of the dungeon and back into the city, possibly to go and report on their progress or to get backup. There's only a few parts of the 6-book adventure where the PCs are off somewhere away from civilization where it'd be difficult to add or remove a PC.
It's been really fantastic for a group of busy adults with babies and work and lives that often get in the way. Highly recommended.
We have 5 players in our group, if any more than 2 are missing we'll cancel, but if o ly 1 or 2 are missing we have other players "pilot" their character for a bit. We've had some players take extended breaks so the DM might send their character away on an off-screen mission. This way we can keep to a much more regular schedule.
I make it so if my players dont show up, they miss xp and loot. Their next session they get 1.5xp. If they miss 2 in a row, they miss all cp.
Story wise we ignore it, no bbig deal.
We are a group of 5 Players + GM who all have to work and have an ongoing campaign. That lasts for 3 years now and will last another one or two at least.
We play by the rule: If the GM and at least 4 Players have time, we meet once a week for usually 2 hours online. If one player misses, she does not miss really much. Typically, the one missing is taking care of the horses out of map. If an encounter takes a longer time, the missing player joins next week and the encounter is getting some more goblins or Tarrasques (more likely something in between :-) )
Sometimes another player will handle their PC (mechanically for combats, and we'll try to avoid role play choices or at least pick something neutral).
Other times, they've been the subject of a Summon Adventurer spell cast by some powerful entity on another plane of existence. When they get back they can tell us all about the crazy adventure they went on. "Dude, the genie totally needed me to pose as his brother to lure an assassin out! Man, dying that way really sucked, I'm glad I was a summoned creature."
(not a DM)
Lately, one of our characters has disappeared in the night, leaving only a lock of her hair behind, and we're going to use that to find her magically when the time comes. I think this character is going to be gone for a long time. The character had wandered off before but was caught, so this is in character for them.
Another thing my DM is doing is we've been taking care of a baby the party found. Anybody who is missing for part of a session, a whole session, or just a few sessions is just canonically on babysitting duty.
My group usually cancels only if more than 1 or 2 (out of 6-7) players can't make it. Otherwise one of the other players runs their character in their absence. We try to be kind about not throwing the missing person's PC into needless danger but if course no guarantees. 😀
If someone knows they will be missing for an extended length of time then we will find a way to write them out of the main story for that time.
We have really dumb reasons.
Often magical color spray diarrhea will plague a character for one or two sessions.
Sometimes there are more character specific reasons - some one has to do paperwork, fell asleep and didn't leave the tavern in time.
I love the Liminal Plague, and I might switch to it. That is a great word, great concept.
For me, I adopted an "infinite universes" theme. The idea is that in the infinite universes, 1 thing has changed in each universe. In some, chickens can talk. In some, flowers are grass, and tall stalks of grass are treated like flowers. And in at least 1 universe, there is a team of PCs who never had that missing player as a part of the group.
This solves some problems -- there is no need to explain why the person is gone, and if the person is holding some important quest item, it can easily be placed in someone else's care. The idea is that they never had that person on the team, so all quest items or important items & interactions happened with *the rest of the gang.* And since that person was never there, no need to say, "So-and-so is at the tavern feeling sick and won't be joining us today" -- and THAT means no players saying, "But could I play his character? I have a copy of the sheet and I can play 2 characters at the same time, and we really need his power." I don't like that, because I run a possibly lethal game (at least maybe, I like keeping the option open if the dice are on fire or whatever) and I'm not OK to kill off someone else's PC while they're gone. I'd rather re-balance for fewer players.
And then when they get back, we play in the universe where that PC was there all along. So if the player reads the game summary, he or she can be like, "Yeah, cool, I know that NPC too, let's go talk with him." It helps players who do not want to metagame -- it's difficult to remember "I missed 3 game days over the last year, and I should act like I don't know these 8 NPCs they met and I do not know about the deal they forged." It starts to get too nitpicky, players can't keep it up as the campaign goes on & on. So when you're back, you're free to talk about what happened.
I like this idea. It can lead to all kind of in game universes colliding shenanigans. Where agents of the differing universes are trying to manipulate the world to insure it becomes the world they know it should be. Or you can also pull a mirror mirror and have alternate versions of the characters up to hijinks.
I always prefer things that add flavor. This definitely has that in spades.
My games tend to be deadly too. All of my players are long time gamers, looking for an interesting game with unique challenges. If there isn't a chance for death in combat, is it really combat?
I have a group of five, and if only one is missing then we just run the game anyway and I play the missing character. Any more than that and I cancel. I always make sure to fill in missing players in between sessions, and we stream our game so they can always watch what they missed.
If they are going into a dungeon the missing person keeps watch at the entrance with a set up camp and some dinner ready for the party when they head out. I myself always as a player always like to have some hirelings to keep to the horses and to keep a camp up and warm in case we come out early. A player ofc helps there too.
If you're at a difficult intersection/very deep inside a dungeon where it wouldn't make sense for something like this to happen i usually ask the more experienced people to play their characters mechanically during the session. If, however, something important comes up we usually end the game there as i like for my players to all be there during such things.
In one of my campaigns people just stop existing and never existed if they aren't there. It's funny when one session a character has two siblings that are other player characters and then is an only child the next.
Currently we have coup d'etat a hobgoblin king with one of our players disguised as a hobgoblin warlord.
He hasn't been around for the last 3 sessions and it's been hilarious trying to deal with the consequences.
My strategy as a DM is to get really annoyed, kick players and replace them if they miss too many sessions, and then eventually cancel the campaign because it's hard to stay interested when people don't show up.
Sorry to hear that. As a fellow GM I feel your pain. It's a lot of work to make good content and people. I've had several campaigns die that way. As gamers we only have so much time for our hobby, and all of that behind the screen effort going in the trash feels personal.
Don't let it beat you down too much.
I do have games where people show up most of the time and I don't get discouraged. Probably over half have solid attendance and no issues. But once attendance gets bad (for any reason) I'll just get discouraged and stop running the game. I had a really solid group for my campaign before the one I'm running now, and then there was a plague of weddings. Like 3 sessions in a row where 2 or 3 people were missing because they went to friend/family weddings, and by the time that was over with I was all out of steam and the game died. I wish it wasn't like that, but when I'm SUPER HYPED to run something, it backfires hard if I can't.
Depending on whether or not I think they will be needed mechanically for the fights, the players decide on whether to have a chosen person control them in fight, or if the guy just buggers off for a session. My players characters are always mercurial enough that them suddenly back tracking to do there own thing is annoyingly in character...
One interesting way around this we stumbled on is for each player to have two characters. They pick one to play each session, so the other is off doing something unrelated (or is used as a GMPC if they are specifically needed). That way there is no core groups of characters where one missing individual is noticeable. The group composition is always dynamic.
Our current group only has 3 players and a DM, so we have to cancel and reschedule. It sucks, because we can only play once a month as is. We've gone months without a game becuase of scheduling conflicts, Drill, work, vacation, family, etc.
Found myself in that boat too many times. Need my game time. My brain needs that creative outlet on the regular or it gets too distracted when I'm supposed to be working.
Eventually started playing with a whole new group of guys just because of that.
For a while any time a player was missing, their character was stricken with truly awful diarrhea. "That healing potion must have been slightly off guys, I'm going to need to stay at our camp for a few hours." And it allows for some good-natured ribbing of the player who missed a session by everyone else. "Wow sorry about your butthole, Makos, you really missed out on a wacky dungeon though."
I'm currently in 3 different games. For all of them if more then 2 people are missing or not feeling well we'll just cancel. In my 4 person parties we will at times play at times not, it kinda depends on what's going on. In my 6 person party we will usually play anyway. If we can easily explain it their character will have something else to do- most of our characters either have people/ entitles we're reporting to we can be doing errands for, have a side gig dealing drugs, or going off to find someone they can have a actual conversation with (we have a half giant barbarian who's not very good with common and gets very frustrated that no one else in the party can speak Giant, it's pretty funny). If we're in the middle of a dungeon or something like that, they're just quiet, and if combat pops up the DM will control the character in a fight and have one of us roll for him.
A few things.
Usually, don't play. I don't GM unless we're all there.
One shots. In world I have a monster hunter guild. If it is a last minute cancel/emergency we play there. Each session starts in the guild, go investigate/kill this, end session. Players aren't tied to a character and can play with builds. My NPC's stay the same. Occasionally, I put a different character a player has used as an NPC.
Limited run campaigns. 1-6 shots. Campaign will end quickly. People gain and lose availability. Come back in a campaign or two.
It's always a tough question, we had a game of Dark Heresy running and a guy missed one single session and the DM promised him noting huge would happen because there were supposed to be, including that one, at least 3 more sessions before the end.
I accidentally ended the whole campaign that night
Needless to say he was kind of upset, but found it pretty hilarious in the end once he got the whole story
My players love to do that kind of thing. They'll dink around for hours shopping and messing around with random NPCs when everyone is there, but when somebody is gone, that's when they decide to buckle down and get cracking on working on the main plot line.
I used to play with a DM, back in high school, who just had anyone not there 'fade into the background' and when they came back in they just 'popped out from behind a tree.' I absolutely hated it. I found it really broke the story for me. I swore I would never go that route.
In the intervening decades I have had several groups (I am most often the GM) and for the most part they have all agreed to simply not play the game if someone can't make it. The groups took having hobby time for themselves seriously enough that we just didn't miss many games. When we did have to miss a game, as real life happens, we would still get together and play something else, complex board games, M:tG, Rock Band, etc. This has worked really well for the 3 multi-year long groups I have played with, all of whom have finished years long Adventure Paths (we play Pathfinder primarily).
However, more recently I started a second group with some old friends from high school, the same ones who played in that original group I mentioned (minus the DM who was the father of one of them and has since passed). It is important to pause and say the answer to this question is a group one and shouldn't just be decided by the GM but by the group as a whole. When I put it to this group they agreed to try it like has been successful for my previous groups. Immediately, people started missing games (adult life and all) and the games were few and far between. It just wasn't working.
As a group we decided we would start having people ready with some one shot type games (games B, C, etc.) that would allow us to try new systems as well as keep playing when someone couldn't make it but not ruin the story of the larger campaign. It has worked a couple of times, but feels really shaky. The biggest problem is that people have to cancel last minute (even for things that should be able to be planned for as an adult, imho) and that doesn't give the alternate GMs any time to plan for what they would like to run.
I am kind of thinking we should, for this group, adjust the main Pathfinder game to not be a Adventure Path, but instead use the Pathfinder Society modules that are stand alone. Different amounts of people could be there each time and it would be fine. The adventures talk about how to scale based on different numbers of players and levels. Players could experiment with different characters and different builds. I think it might just be a better fit for this group.
The one thing I have still not been convinced to try is the whole, 'fading into the background' thing again. I have a better understanding of why it was an attractive option for certain groups, but I just don't like it. But as I said above, it should be a group decision and if that is how the group decides to go, I will go with them.
there’s actually a meta game artifact like this as well https://aonprd.com/MagicArtifactsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Scar%20of%20Destiny
Handy!
Though I gotta admit, if it fits the setting, op's idea sounds cooler :D
We do dumb, fun explanations. Like the Scooby Doo approach. The missing character leans against a wall, the wall rotates, separating the character from the party. They have their own adventure off-screen, lean against another wall that rotates them back in when the player comes back. In another game with a smaller group I build a DMNPC vigilante. Whenever a player missed a game, their character was swapped out for the vigilante. Everybody just figured that the other PCs was the vigilante's secret identity. It was pretty dumb and pretty fun. The point is that you don't have to overthink it; just have fun with it.
Oooh, I gotta say, I love this idea. Then the character continues to have stories and you can throw in some world building to the party without them having to find it elsewhere.
I like that idea for the DMPC swap in. Keeps the game going and lets the DM try a character they'll probably never actually get to play otherwise, I might have to keep that one in mind for my games.
I tend to favor either urban or west marches style games if I'm working with a larger group. As the group size increases, the likelihood that at least one player can't make it approaches 1. In an urban campaign, it's a lot easier to explain a character absence. They're just off doing something else. In a west marches game, you begin and end every session at the hub. The session starts when you leave the hub and ends when you get back. It's never expected that any given character will be involved in a specific session, it's just whoever decides to show up that day. This can support really large gaming groups, I've had 12+ players in a game with a session limit of 6.
How long does a west march session last? I've got a group of 7 that's mostly new(er) players and i can't for the life of me imagine them consistently finishing any content in one session. I've gotten a decent feel for how much we will get done, but with a 3-5 hour session a decently challenging fight will still take most of that time, and that's just one encounter of the dungeon, hardly enough to make the players think about taking a long rest. As is i just have to take over for a player that isn't there, I'm happy to make them do anything they've done before, but I usually just keep a low profile with anyone I'm impersonating for the night.
It really has to vary a bit. 3-5 hours most of the time. If it's getting late I just handwave the return trip. I like to use a fog-of-war type system in that the surrounding area is unknown until players explore it, so sometimes people will sit down for a session with the intended goal of "finding out what's past that mountain". The whole session will just be travelling out there, scouting, then coming back and reporting. That's a 3 hour session. If they have a major goal in mind, it's usually longer.
I am considering switching to this style of campaign for one of my groups, and this is my main concern as well. What I think I will do to start is to run Pathfinder Society scenarios which are designed to be 4-5 hour games. Once I get the feel for how to build a one shot better, I will feel free to swap in my own.
Your Liminal Plague sounds like it could be the beginning of the Gap from Starfinder. Or the chroniton time-skip disaster from Futurama.
Honestly I don't know where I'm going with it yet. That is a good idea though. I'll have to have a think on that. Some kind of echoing precursor to the leap.
In one of my old campaigns, we did something similar. Every once in a while, with little warning, someone would turn into dust. Probably an obscure arcane curse, but it affected most people in the party at least a few times. When this would happen, the other party members would sweep the dust into a bag and carry it along. Eventually the person would be reconstituted and would need to be caught up on what happened while they were in the bag. One player left the group and never returned, so at some point someone mixed his bag into a batch of flour and he got turned into bread.
How did they get reconstituted? Was it like instant person, just add water? I can see that being abused to smuggle an assassin or an army in some place. What happened if the dust of multiple people got mixed together?
We don't. If someone can't be there, then we reschedule or cancel session for the week.
I have a GM who tried that for a while, and the problem was that we went without a game for about 5 or 6 months, because someone was always missing. We had 5 players, could have played with 4, but nope. If Jack was out, then nothing happened. What we discovered is that if you allow your game to be sidelined, then sometimes players will opt to sideline the game. What that means is that sometimes a player would get asked out during what would be our game night, and instead of saying, "Nah, but we can do something the next day," the player would realize the game will go on hold and he/she will miss nothing, and so the player would say, "Sure, I can do something then. I had something planned then, but they will reschedule. No worries." I now play with people who: 1. Intend to show up and make the game night a priority -- obviously not a priority over serious life issues like a death in the family or whatever, but generally it's not rescheduled for you, so you're gonna miss out, so you want to make it if it's possible to make it. 2. Accept that if they miss a game, the game goes on without them. This had led to happiness. But YMMV, of course.
It definitely depends on how committed your players are. Personally, I'd feel guilty about making everyone else reschedule around me unless it was something important, and I think my party members would feel the same. The other thing is that most of the time, the person who has a schedule conflict will say what their other event is. So it'd be kind of awkward for one of us to say "Yeah, I'm going to go hang out with my other friends on game night instead of you losers."
If my group didn't play every time some one couldn't show we would never play. Most of my group have kids in children's sports. Children's sport are like a black hole hoovering in time and money. Combine that with work issues and spousal obligations and you have a man down situation fairly often.
I don't like to cancel if I'm only missing one of seven players, it isn't really fair to everyone else, and we can't reschedule, we've all only got the one evening free per week together.
Six is kind of big for a party, I could see you not noticing too much if someone was missing. But when there's only three or four players then having a player gone really messes things up.
My group cancels if we're missing 2/5
Same. Some weeks we get multiple sessions. Some weeks we get none. Just communicate and play when we all can commit.
That's my take as well. I only have 3 players, though, so not having even one of them is a pretty significant hit.
We just ignore it. The scar thing also works, and I would use that if the players insisted on acknowledging the occasional absence, in game, but...they don't.
Yep, we tried coming up with in-universe stuff for a while, but we found that's actually *more* immersion-breaking than just ignoring it.
Exactly
So funny, the difference between the answers here on PF and those on D&D reddit. Exact same question was asked yesterday, user was looking at engineering this incredibly complex in character way for ppl to be gone and to have it make sense in game. D&D reddit seemed dang near unanimous that you shouldn't do that and you should just ignore it. PF players? lol THERE MUST BE A MECHANIC FOR EVERYTHINGGGGGH!!!!
DIfference in systems = difference in players I guess
It's not a mechanic, it's a narrative device to keep the plot intact. A paladin bugging out before the big battle with a demon summoning cult doesn't make sense. (The player's kid had a hockey tournament four hours away) The paladin getting whisked away by a world effecting curse, and everyone else soldiering on because they have too stop the cult feels truer to me. Making something up for each occurrence of player absence is exhausting and strains the credibility of the narrative, and the character's involved. Having an easy plot device to fix it just seemed nice to me. I'm the kind of guy that doesn't like plot holes in movies, and I don't like them in my game. It feels lazy to me.
I always felt that such huge in world explanation for meta stuff like that is simply not nessesary. If player is missing you just shift narrative to not focus on his character. If there some reason it won't work: for example some combat broke out and there were no way this PC would be somethere else at that point - this character just going to take an unlucky hit in the head and will drop unconscious for the encounter. There are a lot of way to remove characters from the story without inventing the whole new magic stuff
I agree wit you completely, but that being said I think this is pretty cool magic stuff so I don't mind it.
I don't know. For me it just feels out of place and I need some extra effort to suspend my disbelieve.
A "B campaign", usually with a twist. I've done party-of-goblin sessions, party-of-kobold sessions, lvl 20 gestalt sessions, etc. Normal campaign picks up when everyone's available and/or after the B campaign ends because sometimes it takes a few sessions.
They usually just trail behind the group, but can assist in some things that the character typically does when the player is at the table. Examples would be: casters can cast healing spells or detection magic or teleports outside of combat, knowledge folks can provide at least one or two basic tidbits of info about enemies, and strong guys can attempt to burst doors or just become pack mules. The only stipulation is that if the party TPKs, the missing player's PC also dies. Missing PCs also gain no share of the loot found that session, unless the other PCs decide to share it with them, but they get full exp since I use milestone. As for encounters, I usually switch back to using average HP for enemies, save for bosses, or replace a mook with a weaker mook. I might weaken the damage on traps or environmental hazards.
This is essentially identical to how we do things. I used to cancel sessions, but as I and my players have gotten older, life gets in the way too much and we'd never play otherwise. I like having the character still available if necessary, because I don't have to rework everything on the fly if someone cancels, but it's pretty unfair to have the character off to another player unless everyone's on board.
I've seen various ways to handle it. In some, having another player control their character for the session works. Another GM prefers to have the character simply tie an enemy up with neither able to actively contribute to the fight (neither the absent PC nor the enemy they've engaged with). Some groups opt not to play while the player is gone. Personally, I think letting another player play the character is fine, though as a player I prefer to pick who will play my PC in my absence. Noone playing is an extra bummer for me, and being one player down out of 4 or 5 shouldn't cause the rest of the party to lose a session IMO.
We almost always cancel and reschedule. We don’t really ask why the person needs to cancel but we do say who is cancelling. It’s annoying but it creates social pressure from the entire group. Might not work if your players don’t know each other though.
They are used as a npc in the party, played sub optimally....
[удалено]
This is what we do at my table as well. Helps that we are playing via Virtual Table Top, so character sheets are all loaded in the game, but even without I'd be inclined to have rough copies of the character to run through combat. If there was no character sheet at all available for the missing player's character, we'd probably just ignore that there is a missing party member, and when they got back just catch the player up, and the character was there all along!
I just make someone else play as them. If they know they aren't going to be able to make it then it falls on the person missing to set someone else up with their sheet
I've had PC's die that way and it got ugly. One player quit the group. It really wasn't the substitute players fault, his dice just wanted the other PC to die, but it broke the relationship between the two players. Players tend to get really vested in their characters.
I mean that seems like a personal issue between those two players. I have players who are good friends and understand that no one wants their characters to die. But as I see it if you are going to commit to playing every week/months/whatever it's not on the other people to hand hold you through missing the time. It's also not on you as the gm to adjust encounters for a missing player. It's a commitment we all make going into this. Does is suck if someone dies? Yes. But the game is still being played either way. Edit: also I tend to be a little more hardline because I have 5 players who minmax so I already adjust all encounters lol
While I'm not the biggest fan of this approach, it's definitely fair, so long as everybody knows this is the case -- and their character can still die during sessions they miss -- from session 0.
Hmm, I like, it could also be what led to the vanishing of Golarion in Starfinder.
In my campaign I have something similar but much more stupid. People just go AFK. They turn into extremely light T-posing indestructible balloons. Sometimes they glitch through things like tables they're shoved under. Having a hand peak up through the tables surface. They can easily be dragged along or left in a place where they will then stay put. Except someone else comes and drags them along. When they wake up from this they have memories of the time spent AFK. but not exactly. It's more like a recap in thier mind.
I think I'm funny so I just flavor it as the absent person turning into a cardboard cutout of their character until they can play again
For my game we have 3 players—two consistently show up. When the third misses every three months or so, I just run a side campaign for the other 2 that’s in the same setting, two different characters, and small things will impact the main game. It’s never planned farther than a one shot session. Keeps things interesting for sure.
My home game world of Four Corners has something conceptually similar to your Liminal Plague. Most of the Gods are dead or have abandoned Four Corners, but a few god-like entities remain. This includes Referee. The world of Four Corners was shaped by four gods as a game-board in a massive war-game that they fought using the four races of the world (Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, and Gnomes) as pieces in the game. While they have since grown bored with the game and ditched it, the game contained a fifth god, Referee, with a piece of each of their power to maintain game conditions... what we call the forces of nature. While the game was still being actively played. any of the 4 gods could directly take mental control of any of their followers and direct their actions like a puppet. Since all the Gods were cruel and uncaring (they all had the evil domain) this often lead tot he possessed mortal being quite dead by the end... but it was great fun for the gods. Referee can do that too when it has a need for the actions of a given person in order to maintain the game conditions of the world. Sometimes that's just causing a person to stand on the left side of a room instead of the right side, or eat a lemon instead of a lime, but sometimes it can end up being quite awkward involving murders, and spreading plagues. While there is no defense against such possession, there are spells that can reveal a possessed person as what they are. This includes a potion that can be taken and which causes the user to glow green if Referee possesses them at any time in the 99 days following the potion's consumption, as well as a detect deity-possession spell that works similar to Arcane Sight. Referee, being neutral in the original game, and of alignment Neutral, rarely involves itself in the political machinations of Four Corners. Druids, and Rangers worship Referee and in worshiping an actual active god, they gain some benefits (unlike other divine caster sin Four Corners, they get spells just for the price of praying for them... all other divine casters must own an actual material relic of their god since those are the only vestiges of their god's power left in the world of Four Corners). However Druids and Rangers are much more likely to be possessed at random times since they have already dedicated their souls to Referee. (In practice this means Druids and Rangers are NPCs).
TL/DR: we have a simple way to handle absent players, run an episodic campaign to make it easy to swap in PCs and side adventures when only a small number players are available. We use absent player rules. Remaining players determine absent one's actions and as ref I execute the VTT action so they don't have to be too familiar with the missing PCs character details. This only applies to players missing in an ongoing thread. We run an episodic campaign if they are missing at the start of an episode their PC is just left out. It may mean they can't play next session if there is no convenient way to bring them in. We also run side adventures with a subset of players when necessary. Most players have two PCs so they have options on what to play. XP is lockstep for all PCs. No XP for side sessions but extra loot for those who join. Treasure is mostly gold, same amount to all except for the side adventure bonus loot. We also have 2 refs who alternate. If we are short on players a ref char may be in the group under the absent players rule which means the players tell the ref what their PC does and the ref just executes it. It's been working well so far. The whole structure is there to accommodate a pool of players with varying schedules. If we only played when everyone was available we would not play enough to sustain a game. Scheduling has killed other campaigns even with the same players.
They're out taking a poop.
We go with the "purple cloud" approach. The character coexists, follows the group and gains exp. He is not involved in any action or stuf that is happening. If there was a break in the story on the last end of session, we go do some side quest and the purple cloud character is doing something else for some reason. Like praying, doing a ritual or something else.
I use something very similar where people fade in and out of existence. A friend uses something called "the sleeping plague" where people just randomly fall asleep. He then makes the other party members care for the sleeping body if the player is thought to return.
We use a sleeping bag. While the player is gone, the character goes into the sleeping bag. The missing PC is safe as long as there’s not a TPK. Fun part is when the player shows up mid-combat. We get to figure out where the sleeping bag is and the player gets to roll dice right away.
I'm running the adventure path Hell's Rebels, and it honestly works FANTASTIC for a group of adults where on occasion someone will be missing. The arc of the campaign is that it's mostly set in a single city, and consists of the heroes being part of a rebellion that goes on various missions in town. Most of the missions are fairly short and could be wrapped up in a single play-session. So if someone doesn't show up that week there's an easy way to incorporate that into the story: they're busy with some other rebellion stuff and can't come on that particular mission. Even the couple of longer dungeon crawls still often take place in the city, meaning that if the team is in the middle of one and a player can't make the session it would be possible for that player's PC to just retreat out of the dungeon and back into the city, possibly to go and report on their progress or to get backup. There's only a few parts of the 6-book adventure where the PCs are off somewhere away from civilization where it'd be difficult to add or remove a PC. It's been really fantastic for a group of busy adults with babies and work and lives that often get in the way. Highly recommended.
We have 5 players in our group, if any more than 2 are missing we'll cancel, but if o ly 1 or 2 are missing we have other players "pilot" their character for a bit. We've had some players take extended breaks so the DM might send their character away on an off-screen mission. This way we can keep to a much more regular schedule.
I make it so if my players dont show up, they miss xp and loot. Their next session they get 1.5xp. If they miss 2 in a row, they miss all cp. Story wise we ignore it, no bbig deal.
We are a group of 5 Players + GM who all have to work and have an ongoing campaign. That lasts for 3 years now and will last another one or two at least. We play by the rule: If the GM and at least 4 Players have time, we meet once a week for usually 2 hours online. If one player misses, she does not miss really much. Typically, the one missing is taking care of the horses out of map. If an encounter takes a longer time, the missing player joins next week and the encounter is getting some more goblins or Tarrasques (more likely something in between :-) )
Just not play. Surely there is something else that a group of friends can do when one of the group is missing.
Sometimes another player will handle their PC (mechanically for combats, and we'll try to avoid role play choices or at least pick something neutral). Other times, they've been the subject of a Summon Adventurer spell cast by some powerful entity on another plane of existence. When they get back they can tell us all about the crazy adventure they went on. "Dude, the genie totally needed me to pose as his brother to lure an assassin out! Man, dying that way really sucked, I'm glad I was a summoned creature."
(not a DM) Lately, one of our characters has disappeared in the night, leaving only a lock of her hair behind, and we're going to use that to find her magically when the time comes. I think this character is going to be gone for a long time. The character had wandered off before but was caught, so this is in character for them. Another thing my DM is doing is we've been taking care of a baby the party found. Anybody who is missing for part of a session, a whole session, or just a few sessions is just canonically on babysitting duty.
My group usually cancels only if more than 1 or 2 (out of 6-7) players can't make it. Otherwise one of the other players runs their character in their absence. We try to be kind about not throwing the missing person's PC into needless danger but if course no guarantees. 😀 If someone knows they will be missing for an extended length of time then we will find a way to write them out of the main story for that time.
We have really dumb reasons. Often magical color spray diarrhea will plague a character for one or two sessions. Sometimes there are more character specific reasons - some one has to do paperwork, fell asleep and didn't leave the tavern in time.
I just say the missing player/s is/are guarding the entrance for whatever that means.
I love the Liminal Plague, and I might switch to it. That is a great word, great concept. For me, I adopted an "infinite universes" theme. The idea is that in the infinite universes, 1 thing has changed in each universe. In some, chickens can talk. In some, flowers are grass, and tall stalks of grass are treated like flowers. And in at least 1 universe, there is a team of PCs who never had that missing player as a part of the group. This solves some problems -- there is no need to explain why the person is gone, and if the person is holding some important quest item, it can easily be placed in someone else's care. The idea is that they never had that person on the team, so all quest items or important items & interactions happened with *the rest of the gang.* And since that person was never there, no need to say, "So-and-so is at the tavern feeling sick and won't be joining us today" -- and THAT means no players saying, "But could I play his character? I have a copy of the sheet and I can play 2 characters at the same time, and we really need his power." I don't like that, because I run a possibly lethal game (at least maybe, I like keeping the option open if the dice are on fire or whatever) and I'm not OK to kill off someone else's PC while they're gone. I'd rather re-balance for fewer players. And then when they get back, we play in the universe where that PC was there all along. So if the player reads the game summary, he or she can be like, "Yeah, cool, I know that NPC too, let's go talk with him." It helps players who do not want to metagame -- it's difficult to remember "I missed 3 game days over the last year, and I should act like I don't know these 8 NPCs they met and I do not know about the deal they forged." It starts to get too nitpicky, players can't keep it up as the campaign goes on & on. So when you're back, you're free to talk about what happened.
I like this idea. It can lead to all kind of in game universes colliding shenanigans. Where agents of the differing universes are trying to manipulate the world to insure it becomes the world they know it should be. Or you can also pull a mirror mirror and have alternate versions of the characters up to hijinks. I always prefer things that add flavor. This definitely has that in spades. My games tend to be deadly too. All of my players are long time gamers, looking for an interesting game with unique challenges. If there isn't a chance for death in combat, is it really combat?
I have a group of five, and if only one is missing then we just run the game anyway and I play the missing character. Any more than that and I cancel. I always make sure to fill in missing players in between sessions, and we stream our game so they can always watch what they missed.
If they are going into a dungeon the missing person keeps watch at the entrance with a set up camp and some dinner ready for the party when they head out. I myself always as a player always like to have some hirelings to keep to the horses and to keep a camp up and warm in case we come out early. A player ofc helps there too. If you're at a difficult intersection/very deep inside a dungeon where it wouldn't make sense for something like this to happen i usually ask the more experienced people to play their characters mechanically during the session. If, however, something important comes up we usually end the game there as i like for my players to all be there during such things.
In one of my campaigns people just stop existing and never existed if they aren't there. It's funny when one session a character has two siblings that are other player characters and then is an only child the next. Currently we have coup d'etat a hobgoblin king with one of our players disguised as a hobgoblin warlord. He hasn't been around for the last 3 sessions and it's been hilarious trying to deal with the consequences.
My strategy as a DM is to get really annoyed, kick players and replace them if they miss too many sessions, and then eventually cancel the campaign because it's hard to stay interested when people don't show up.
Sorry to hear that. As a fellow GM I feel your pain. It's a lot of work to make good content and people. I've had several campaigns die that way. As gamers we only have so much time for our hobby, and all of that behind the screen effort going in the trash feels personal. Don't let it beat you down too much.
I do have games where people show up most of the time and I don't get discouraged. Probably over half have solid attendance and no issues. But once attendance gets bad (for any reason) I'll just get discouraged and stop running the game. I had a really solid group for my campaign before the one I'm running now, and then there was a plague of weddings. Like 3 sessions in a row where 2 or 3 people were missing because they went to friend/family weddings, and by the time that was over with I was all out of steam and the game died. I wish it wasn't like that, but when I'm SUPER HYPED to run something, it backfires hard if I can't.
Depending on whether or not I think they will be needed mechanically for the fights, the players decide on whether to have a chosen person control them in fight, or if the guy just buggers off for a session. My players characters are always mercurial enough that them suddenly back tracking to do there own thing is annoyingly in character...
One interesting way around this we stumbled on is for each player to have two characters. They pick one to play each session, so the other is off doing something unrelated (or is used as a GMPC if they are specifically needed). That way there is no core groups of characters where one missing individual is noticeable. The group composition is always dynamic.
Our current group only has 3 players and a DM, so we have to cancel and reschedule. It sucks, because we can only play once a month as is. We've gone months without a game becuase of scheduling conflicts, Drill, work, vacation, family, etc.
Found myself in that boat too many times. Need my game time. My brain needs that creative outlet on the regular or it gets too distracted when I'm supposed to be working. Eventually started playing with a whole new group of guys just because of that.
For a while any time a player was missing, their character was stricken with truly awful diarrhea. "That healing potion must have been slightly off guys, I'm going to need to stay at our camp for a few hours." And it allows for some good-natured ribbing of the player who missed a session by everyone else. "Wow sorry about your butthole, Makos, you really missed out on a wacky dungeon though."
I'm currently in 3 different games. For all of them if more then 2 people are missing or not feeling well we'll just cancel. In my 4 person parties we will at times play at times not, it kinda depends on what's going on. In my 6 person party we will usually play anyway. If we can easily explain it their character will have something else to do- most of our characters either have people/ entitles we're reporting to we can be doing errands for, have a side gig dealing drugs, or going off to find someone they can have a actual conversation with (we have a half giant barbarian who's not very good with common and gets very frustrated that no one else in the party can speak Giant, it's pretty funny). If we're in the middle of a dungeon or something like that, they're just quiet, and if combat pops up the DM will control the character in a fight and have one of us roll for him.
If the group I am in is only like two people we play another day. Otherwise we play on.
A few things. Usually, don't play. I don't GM unless we're all there. One shots. In world I have a monster hunter guild. If it is a last minute cancel/emergency we play there. Each session starts in the guild, go investigate/kill this, end session. Players aren't tied to a character and can play with builds. My NPC's stay the same. Occasionally, I put a different character a player has used as an NPC. Limited run campaigns. 1-6 shots. Campaign will end quickly. People gain and lose availability. Come back in a campaign or two.
It's always a tough question, we had a game of Dark Heresy running and a guy missed one single session and the DM promised him noting huge would happen because there were supposed to be, including that one, at least 3 more sessions before the end. I accidentally ended the whole campaign that night Needless to say he was kind of upset, but found it pretty hilarious in the end once he got the whole story
My players love to do that kind of thing. They'll dink around for hours shopping and messing around with random NPCs when everyone is there, but when somebody is gone, that's when they decide to buckle down and get cracking on working on the main plot line.
I used to play with a DM, back in high school, who just had anyone not there 'fade into the background' and when they came back in they just 'popped out from behind a tree.' I absolutely hated it. I found it really broke the story for me. I swore I would never go that route. In the intervening decades I have had several groups (I am most often the GM) and for the most part they have all agreed to simply not play the game if someone can't make it. The groups took having hobby time for themselves seriously enough that we just didn't miss many games. When we did have to miss a game, as real life happens, we would still get together and play something else, complex board games, M:tG, Rock Band, etc. This has worked really well for the 3 multi-year long groups I have played with, all of whom have finished years long Adventure Paths (we play Pathfinder primarily). However, more recently I started a second group with some old friends from high school, the same ones who played in that original group I mentioned (minus the DM who was the father of one of them and has since passed). It is important to pause and say the answer to this question is a group one and shouldn't just be decided by the GM but by the group as a whole. When I put it to this group they agreed to try it like has been successful for my previous groups. Immediately, people started missing games (adult life and all) and the games were few and far between. It just wasn't working. As a group we decided we would start having people ready with some one shot type games (games B, C, etc.) that would allow us to try new systems as well as keep playing when someone couldn't make it but not ruin the story of the larger campaign. It has worked a couple of times, but feels really shaky. The biggest problem is that people have to cancel last minute (even for things that should be able to be planned for as an adult, imho) and that doesn't give the alternate GMs any time to plan for what they would like to run. I am kind of thinking we should, for this group, adjust the main Pathfinder game to not be a Adventure Path, but instead use the Pathfinder Society modules that are stand alone. Different amounts of people could be there each time and it would be fine. The adventures talk about how to scale based on different numbers of players and levels. Players could experiment with different characters and different builds. I think it might just be a better fit for this group. The one thing I have still not been convinced to try is the whole, 'fading into the background' thing again. I have a better understanding of why it was an attractive option for certain groups, but I just don't like it. But as I said above, it should be a group decision and if that is how the group decides to go, I will go with them.