How do I handle missing different players on each session?

Question

I'm trying to get my group together, but not everyone can join on a given day. What should I do to best run the game?

Do I (as the DM) take over their character, throw in a temporary NPC, cancel the session, or something else?

Answer 1

Try to get group consensus as much as possible

We cannot answer this question for you. You can’t even answer this question yourself. This is not a situation for unilateral DM decision-making; this is a situation that calls for group consensus. Discuss what to do—this time, and/or in general.

Typical approaches are to skip a session, or to run without them, just kinda assuming their character is in the background and letting the rest of the group play. Less typical—but not terribly unusual—approaches include giving them some specific in-character reason for the character to be temporarily absent, or for the DM or one of the other players to pilot the character. I’m sure there are other ideas, but these are the main ones I’ve experienced.

But in all cases, this should be done in consultation with the whole group. The player themselves may not want the DM or another player to pilot their character; in my experience that only works well in near-purely combat sessions. Other players may not be comfortable carrying on without them, either because they feel the character is too important to go without, or just because they feel like the absence will be weird and immersion-breaking. You may feel that it’s too much work to adjust your plans. There just might not be any good way to justify the character’s absence. A pivotal scene may simply require everyone’s presence—or a specific scene may require this character’s presence. All of these should be discussed.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer here. There likely will not even be a single answer that works for your group every time someone can’t make it. My groups have tons of real-life issues that make these problems commonplace for us; we have these discussions a few times a month. It doesn’t have to be perfect, everyone just has to be comfortable with the outcome.

As an example, once we were missing a player for a session that was to start with an NPC answering a major question from her character’s backstory, so of course that scene couldn’t be done without her. That time, we decided to skip the scene, carry on without her that session, and then go back to that scene the next week as a kind of “flashback.” The need for the character to process the revelation after the scene provided an excellent explanation for her being quiet in the subsequent scenes she missed. That time, that approach worked very nicely. It wouldn’t in another situation; it was a one-time thing.

Other times, characters have been piloted through by other players; still other times, they were just “quiet” for a while and it was fine, and the DM adjusted encounters for us being down a person. Still other times, we just couldn’t play. You do the best you can to accommodate everyone, and if all else fails, you make sure no one is decidedly uncomfortable with the outcome. You should all be friends, or at least friendly, and happy to hear each other out and try to find a “good enough” solution. Just have respect for everyone and you should be fine.

Answer 2

These Are All Viable Approaches

Ultimately, no one is going to be able to give you a hard-and-fast answer to this question, because practices vary from group to group (and sometimes by circumstances within group.)

But I can tell you that I have personally done or seen all of the following approaches, and that they've all worked to various degrees:

• Run the character as a GM (one of your suggestions). Generally I will put a degree of script immunity in, so that the character does not get killed, do anything wildly out of character, or make major plot-moving decisions without the player there.
• Delegate the character to another player to run mechanically (in mechanics-heavy systems, like D&D or Pathfinder) while I enforce the same conditions as above. This is my preferred approach-- it works well with my style, and with the groups I play with.
• Character mysteriously vanishes this session and re-appears next session (not my preferred approach, but in some groups absences are so common there's almost not much else you can do. This was very much an approach I took in college. I try not to do this now, as it does not mesh will with my style.)
• Cancel the session (another one of your suggestions), especially if too many people can't make it, or if the absent PC was going to be the spotlight of the next session, or face major in-character choices.

What I do in any given situation depends on both the group I'm playing with, and the circumstance at hand. But (contra another existing answer) as long as I am keeping the character from suffering undue harm (in the sense of getting killed, burning hard to replace resources, or in the plot sense of not getting to make major decisions) I actually do not feel the need to discuss this with my group before hand-- I have enough stress running and scheduling the game, I do not need no-shows enforcing additional conditions on me, and I am secure enough in my sense of fairness to make a decision and go with it.

One note is that if the game has just barely begun, I do tend toward canceling the session; if it's the first session or the "session zero" I will absolutely cancel the session-- the individual players and characters need a chance to gel into a group before this feels appropriate to me.

Your other suggestion (add in an NPC) is not something I have done or seen done. I suspect it could work in some groups, but it would not work well with my personal style.