btw, @BESW, Dragons of the Cuyahoga arrived in the mail today. (I'd forgotten I'd even ordered it! $1 used books, shipped media-rate, will do that to you!)
Hey @Magician, @BESW, thanks for the chat the other day about burnout. When I thought about it I realized things had progressed to the point where I wouldn't really enjoy even co-writing. But it turns out two of my players were keener than I expected to GM, so I grit my teeth (butbutbut spoilers!) and handed over my notes and they've been cheerfully plotting since.
So now I'm excited to see what they've cooked up. Not knowing what's going to happen next is a lot more fun when you're not the one who's supposed to know :P
disclaimer, I see nothing wrong with it if everyone involved with it is ok with it, but I don't personally like other people taking over my PC characters (NPC's are fine) and I don't feel particularly good about taking over theirs either
@Magician No, a while back one of my more interesting NPCs volunteered to go with them and has been gradually gaining abilities. I'll add a few more until she matches the rest of the party and play her as a PC.
We've already done this when one player wanted to run a session; we just switch which characters are PCs and which are NPCs.
@trogdor Agreed, after 2 years it wouldn't feel right, though I don't mind playing a PC as an NPC if we're down a player but need the party intact
I'd prefer not to use a temporarily playerless character as an NPC; try making them a plot hook instead
for example, being the target of a semi-successful assassination featuring an obscure poison both keeps them out of the game for a session, and leads to interesting questions like who is trying to assassinate you, why, and how do we get an antidote
I like the way @BESW has handled it a couple of times, he has had PC's randomly glitch to another dimension where things are foreshadowed to them until the player comes back
the first time, he even actually told us what we saw there
actually, I guess that has only happened the one campaign
@trogdor Ooh, that does sound fun. In a good-sized group my go to is "they're off getting drunk somewhere" (the more humorously implausible this is the better), but in a smaller group where basic functionality depends on having everyone there, sometimes it's necessary to include them (unless you're going to remove obstacles on the fly that could only have been bypassed by the absent PC.)
@SirTechSpec This is a major reason I like mechanics which give players more control over deciding what's happening, rather than just how they're responding to it.
but I will say that even as a pretty new GM,.. it is taking some getting used to
I am used to the GM being the person who is supposed to place wonderful surprises everywhere for the players,... that is not easy to do when the players suddenly know so much more about the world and contribute to it more (it isn't a bad thing, again, just getting used to it)
coincidentally one of my players is about to leave for a month so I too was having a problem what to do with his character in the meantime
the solution is going to be the character is going to be killed off and when the player comes back he starts with another one. Current character's death makes a lot of sense storywise player leaving or not, so I talked to the player and we decided on this solution
I found that if there was much pressure at all for regular attendance, my friends would choose to just not come at all.
So I invented convoluted justifications for a complex ongoing plot that didn't require everyone being there, and eventually figured out there were already games which had that built in.
Heck, in Fate one thing we've done is say "Yes, the PC is still here. They don't get turns, but you can spend Fate points on their aspects to have them do things or make trouble as normal."
@BESW actually I had forgotten about this, I suppose it is comforting to know people could still do something with Brooklyn during the sessions that I GM
@Sejanus There's some old examples of play recorded in the conversations tab of the Fate chat and game room, mostly from back when we were teaching ourselves Fate Accelerated from the beta docs.
@Polyducks I played a warforged paladin once which was nice, except I quit the game after a few months before I could actually do anything interesting with him.
@trogdor After seeing how some previous games went, with people saying "well I didn't come because so-and-so said they weren't coming" (then they did), I made that a feature, not a bug: "We're playing a game every Wed night, with whoever shows up. If we've got enough people it'll be GURPS, otherwise board games." It's worked extremely well so far in terms of variety and flexibility.
@SirTechSpec We had a campaign, a few years ago, designed to allow for drop-in, drop-out player involvement, as well as accommodating players who want different settings. Basically it was a multiverse/parallel-universe setting with a mysterious agency who drafts people a second before their death from various universes.
The other nice thing about board games is that they usually ask a lot less of us in terms of both effort and prep (like no prep) so we also do that on days we're all present but too tired to use our imaginations
