Image courtesy FreeImages.com/Andreea Scutariu

The Context

Saxon, one of my players and a fellow GM who has contributed guidance through ATGMs on a number of occasions was telling an anecdote the other week about what transpired in the D&D 5e campaign that he plays in.

It seems that one of the players was unable to attend. That happens in every group from time to time, and every group has a different way of handling it. The group in question used to have another player handle the PC belonging to the absent player – I’m not sure whether the GM did the allocating, the absent player nominated someone, or someone simply put their hand up. After a couple of bad experiences where players felt their characters were abused or disrespected (Irish Mine-detector Syndrome), the policy had been established that the present players ran the absent-player PC as a group, making collective decisions about what the character was doing, and that has apparently worked out satisfactorily for them.

On this particular occasion, the group decided that the absent-player PC – a Rogue – would climb the walls and hide out on the roof of the church where bad things were going on, avoiding committing herself to any particular course of action while things remained unclear. One of the group then rolled for the Rogue to climb the wall – and got a critical failure. The character fell to the ground with a great clatter and promptly became the center of attention for the bad guys, and was lucky to escape with her life.

After hearing this anecdote a second time – Saxon had also mentioned it the week before – I began to wonder whether or not an absent-player PC should be permitted to suffer critical failures or successes, regardless of what was rolled on the dice. This was not a question that had ever arisen for any of those present in the past, and no-one had a ready answer. The consensus was, however, that it was a very interesting question, and so that’s the subject of today’s discussion.

Actually, it turns out that there was rather more to the story. But that doesn’t invalidate the principle that was raised, even though it is less directly applicable than I thought. More on that at the end of the article.

Critical Failures – An Unwarranted Risk?

Do critical failures represent an unwarranted risk to a character whose owner is “loaning” it to the group?

That they pose a risk is incontrovertible, and so is the fact the player who owns the character is not there to choose whether or not to expose the character to the risk in question. So the key question is whether or not this rises to the level of “unwarranted”?

The dictionary definition of “unwarranted” is “not justified or authorized”. Justification obviously relates to the circumstances, and that’s what the group judgment is there to assess, so the risks can’t be considered unwarranted on that front. But unauthorized? That’s the rub.

It’s not like the player in question is handing the group power of attorney, with complete control over the character, and complete willingness to accept whatever may happen; the entire point of handing control to the group instead of another individual is to limit the degree of authority held over the character.

Which means that unless the player specifically foresaw the circumstances even in general terms and explicitly authorized the taking of risks of this magnitude, the dangers can indeed be considered unwarranted.

A Failure Of Trust?

If a PC dies because of a critical failure, either directly or indirectly, is that a failure of the trust placed in whoever was looking after the character in the absence of its owner?

To answer this question, I need to pose another: What was it that the player who owns the character was entrusting the player who looked after the character to do? What should be the priority?

Are they being entrusted to use the character to assist the team in achieving their goals? Or is priority number one to look after the character’s interests, even at the expense of compromising that success?

Neither of these are black-and-white yes-and-no decisions. There are degrees of risk, and degrees of consequence being risked, and degrees of benefit to those team goals that results from a success. Clearly, substantial risk for a minor gain is unwarranted – yes, there’s that word again – but things grow murkier when the potential rewards from the team perspective outweigh the degree of risk. What we have here is a three-dimensional moral space in which risks may be justified – but which has very fuzzy edges, not sharp boundaries.

In other words, the answer to the first question is that “it depends on what the expectations were of the player caring for the character in the first place”.

Now, in the incident that sparked this discussion, there is no question of any failure of trust; the players caring for the character were trying to do the right thing and get the character out of harm’s way; it’s just that this attempt went horribly wrong. And that’s an important principle to note: risk can be minimized but never eliminated whilst a character is in the field.

It’s that principle that makes this particular question so important – and so interesting.

Balanced Contributions: No Critical Successes

If you take away the risk of critical failures, balance demands that you also take away the chance of a critical success. The character can still succeed or fail, and may still get killed, but the dangers are significantly reduced.

The converse of this statement is that if the character under absentee ownership is deemed capable of achieving extraordinary results – i.e. critical successes – then she must also face the commensurate risk of failure.

Interpretational Confinement

Outside of combat, when predetermined game rules define a critical success and there is no such thing as a critical failure, it might be possible to cut this Gordian knot, because under these circumstances, it is the referee’s job to interpret the results. Simply by showing some restraint in that interpretation as a matter of policy, the GM can mitigate against the criticality of the question.

Take the case in question: the GM was the one who decided that the critical failure would result in a fall. Having so decided, it is entirely reasonable for the noise to attract enemy attention, but the GM could easily have taken the intention of the players and the metagame circumstances into account and found some other interpretation of the critical failure.

I’ll come back to this point, shortly – because it’s not all honey and sunshine.

An NPC’S Share Of The Spotlight?

A side benefit of taking critical successes (and failures) off the menu is that a “lucky shot” by what is effectively an NPC (for the session) poses less danger of stealing the thunder from those characters whose players are present.

It’s the players who are present who should get spotlight share, not players who are absent. Because the absent player has a PC, it would be impossible to completely deny them a small share of the spotlight – usually in passing – unless you completely cut the character out of the adventure with no in-game explanation.

Perhaps it’s more realistic to expect that the absent player’s PC would receive an NPC’s share of the spotlight – i.e. none of their own accord, but whatever is appropriate when they are interacting with another PC. And no more, which is the point that I’m making here.

You don’t play a game for the people who aren’t there; you play it for those who are. However, when someone who is usually there is absent, their future participation has to be protected, and their past participation has to be respected. And the best way of doing that is to have their character step back from the spotlight while they are away.

Potential Abuse

That’s all good in theory, but as a policy it can be abused. If a player knows that there is a fight coming up next session that they aren’t sure their character will survive, and don’t particularly want to have, what’s to stop that player from making some excuse not to turn up so that his character is protected? What if you had a big fight an nobody came?

In effect, this would mean that the player was willing to raise the danger level to all the other PCs in order to protect his own character. I’m quite sure that this would not apply to any of the players that I deal with in my current games, but have definitely known one or two in the past who were overprotective of their characters to this extreme.

Be Less Than You Can Be? – A Counterpoint

Which, in fact, brings up a counterpoint that needs to be acknowledged and considered: Should the absence of a player be permitted to diminish the opportunities for success for the entire group?

You can’t remove the potential for critical successes from one segment of the group and not have it affect the aggregbate capabilities of the group. A vigorous argument can therefore be made that the diminished likelihood of group success establishes that it is in the group’s best interests for critical successes to remain an option.

Balanced Contributions: You Took The Risk

But if you permit whatever chance of critical success normally applies to remain in force, even when the character’s owner is absent, then balanced contributions demands that the risk to the absent-player’s PC also apply. Any alternative to this policy gives the players an advantage that they shouldn’t have. Suddenly, the whole question doesn’t seem so cut-and-dried.

The Willing Acceptance Of Danger

You can also argue that the absent player knew the risks of ceding control to someone else and accepted them when he decided not to attend. This too, is not an entirely invalid point, especially if the character’s intentions and priorities, as determined in advance by the absent player, are respected. The willing acceptance of danger has always been a mitigating factor in lawsuits, especially civil liability cases; a great deal of court proceedings in such cases relate to the degree of contribution to whatever occurred by the nominal victim. If you choose to play on the train-tracks, you can’t really sue your public transport authority when you get hit by a train – or simply trip over and break your arm or leg, for that matter. The “reasonable person” standard generally applies, to wit: were the consequences of the act reasonably foreseeable by a reasonable person?

There are many parallels between such civil liability cases and the question under consideration. One of the limitations on the “reasonable person” mitigation is the principle of a Duty Of Care. A Duty of care is essentially a legal responsibility for the wellbeing of an individual under defined conditions that cannot be abrogated even if the other party is willing to do so. This often comes up in cases where an employee has been injured and is claiming negligence on the part of his employer, for example.

A “Duty of Care” also has limitations; it’s unreasonable for the employer to be responsible for ‘acts of god’, for example. Enter, once again, “the reasonable person” and what they can “reasonably foresee”.

There is a perception in some quarters that when lawyers talk about “the reasonable person”, they are really asking the jury to put themselves in the place of that hypothetical individual, but that’s not the case – a juror can be more or less intelligent, have received better or worse education, may have a greater or lesser degree of relevant experience, and none of that matters; it’s not a question of what any individual juror can or can’t foresee, does or doesn’t consider reasonable. Nor is it a question of the average person’s abilities and perspectives; what has to be determined is what it was reasonable for an individual responsible for the decision, given the expertise and qualifications that they can be assumed to posses, to foresee, and it’s exactly the same when a Judge making the decision.

So, the questions can also be phrased: “What, if any, Duty Of Care is owed to the absent player’s property, i.e. his character, and by whom?”, and “How far does that duty of care extend?”, and “Were the dangers to which that property was exposed foreseeable by a reasonable person?” – because, if they were, it’s reasonable to assume that the owning player gave his permission – and the argument then shifts grounds to a debate over whether or not that permission has, or should have, any enforceable authority.

Rebuttal: Not All Absence Can Be Controlled

What if someone can’t attend because they have to work unexpectedly, or have been hospitalized, or has to care for a sick relative? They had no choice in their absence, and hence can’t be considered to have weighed the pros and cons and risks; they simply accepted them as something beyond their control, or the price of honoring a more important commitment (it might seem like I’m arguing in circles, but that happens when you look at an important subjective question from all sides. This isn’t something that can be resolved by findings of fact, it’s one of those far messier (and often, more important) questions).

Real life happens, and only the most obsessed would argue that it should not take priority over a source of entertainment. The issue has to be kept in perspective.

GMs normally take a player’s word for it when they claim such extenuating circumstances, and it’s only reasonable for players to have an expectation of such credibility. But this puts “the willing acceptance of risk” into an entirely different perspective; every argument that falls into that category presupposes that the absence was voluntary. What if it was not, or has to be deemed to be involuntary because a reasonable assessment of the social value of gaming places a higher relative value on other events?

If the absence stems from circumstances beyond the player’s reasonable control, then the degree to which the other participants are bound by a duty of care obviously rises. They are the ones choosing to proceed with the game in the absence of one of the participants. after all, so they are the ones choosing to expose the character to risk.

Now, it’s not normally reasonable for everyone’s fun to be ruined because one player can’t be present, which is what cancellation would represent. So that puts the obligation and onus squarely back on the shoulders of those players and GM who were present, demanding that the character receive an extraordinary level of protection – and that, in turn, means taking both critical failures and successes off the table.

The Willing Acceptance Of Danger, Part 2

A good lawyer, treating this as a compensation case, would no doubt point out that “The Willing Acceptance Of Danger” also undermines all arguments about the party members whose players are present being exposed to greater risk because of the absence of the player, either directly (character is removed from the danger) or indirectly (reducing the group firepower).

They were the ones who chose to go ahead with the game, after all, when it would be completely obvious to them that the group’s effectiveness might be compromised by the absence. They accepted the risks, and so have no grounds for complaint about the absent character being “sheltered” by table policy.

A Halfway House: The Torg Inspiration

Perhaps circumstances can be divided by the GM into two categories – Dramatic and Normal. Dramatic situations entitle the absent-player PC to both risks and rewards from criticals; ordinary situations do not. The GM should make the decision as to which category any given situation falls into, depending on the consequences to the overall game. That would mean that the chance of an extraordinary success – counterbalanced by the risk of a critical failure – is only invoked when the situation is at its most dire, and the outcome of an individual check would have consequences for the entire party.

Returning to the anecdote which spurred this discussion, it seems clear to me that the game did not, or should not, hinge on whether or not the absent-player’s character made her climbing roll or not when the objective was to remove her from a position in which she might have such an impact on the game. She was effectively an NPC and should not be placed in a spotlight position like that. Therefore, this would not qualify as a Dramatic situation, and both critical success and failure should be off the table.

On the other hand, if another PC were climbing alongside the absent-player’s character, and suffered a critical failure, falling to the ground and alerting their enemies, until another PC reached a position to participate in the battle, a PC’s life would hang in the balance, and that’s a dramatic enough circumstance that both critical hits and failures should be in force. As soon as another PC can join the melee, however, principle responsibility for rescuing the fallen character shifts to them, and the combat stops being “dramatic” from the point-of-view of the absent-player’s character.

As a compromise solution, this has a lot to commend it.

Vox Populi: An Alternative Solution

Or perhaps one of the choices available to the controlling group is whether or not the risk is merited according to the circumstance. They could make this decision for the entire session, or on a roll-by-roll basis – and this would be part of the responsibility that they took on by running the character. The implication would be that part of the control conceded by the absent player is the right to determine whether or not the PC should take the risk.

Avoiding The Issue?

You might think that you’re avoiding the whole problem by choosing one of the many alternative solutions to the problem of what to do with a character whose player is absent – giving control of the character to the GM, having the character mysteriously vanish from the playing field (only to reappear when their character does), but that’s really substituting one headache for a completely different set.

I looked at a range of such solutions in Missing In Action: Maintaining a campaign in the face of player absence in response to a question sent to Roleplaying Tips and which appeared in issue 522. A whole bunch of solutions from other readers also appeared in Issue 523, which have never been posted online in their archives, which jump from Issue 513 to Issue 619. Johnn is slowly getting the gap filled in but progress has been slow and sporadic. (If they aren’t available to readers, they might as well not exist, Johnn! I think it’s time for another push on this front…)

Questions get raised by the alternatives such as “Is it right for characters to earn experience for events they were not present for?”; “Is it right for the difficulty level of an adventure to effectively increase perhaps beyond the point of possible satisfactory resolution because player absence reduces the resources available to the PCs?” and “Is it fair for a player’s absence to impose additional workload on the GM?” – questions that are beyond the scope of this article, but which are no more susceptible to easy answers than the problems raised here.

So here’s another (somewhat rhetorical) one: “Have you really dodged the bullet when you (or your campaign) gets wounded by another (metaphoric) projectile instead?” For my money, the answer is no.

Clouding The Issue: Sauce for the gander

If you accept the principle that any character should only be exposed to the risks of a critical failure and the benefits of a critical success under certain circumstances (such as their player being present, or having explicitly authorized such risks), a further headache looms on the horizon. Should PCs whose players are present also have the authority to determine whether or not to risk a critical failure in the pursuit of a critical success?

This puts a whole new spin on the concept of an “optional rule”, and is technically beyond the direct scope of this article, but it’s definitely a question that merits debate!

My Usual Solution

My usual solution to the problem of absent players doesn’t really help shed a lot of light on the issue. I first determine the level of criticality to the expected course of play of the absent player’s character.

• If they are central to the adventure, then I cancel game sessions rather than adopt any other solution.
• If they aren’t, but do have one or more crucial decisions to make in the course of the adventure, then I run the character as a semi-protected NPC to whom nothing permanently bad will be inflicted, after soliciting specific guidance from the player in question on the decision to be made. If necessary, I will even reveal details of the planned plotline to the player who is going to be absent.
• If they are simply making up the numbers through the course of play, then they will be run by me as sheltered NPCs who fade into the background unless they have some specific knowledge or ability to contribute.
• And no, the character doesn’t get XP if the player is not present, unless I regard the absence as reasonable and the player has made all reasonable efforts to provide reasonable notice of their absence. Reasons of health, unexpected family commitments, work demands – those are all on my list of reasonable grounds for absence, and the question of adequate notice depends on how much notice the player in question had. On at least one occasion (following the death of the player) I specifically got in a guest player to look after the PC so that the character could be given an appropriate honorable retirement from the campaign.

So my answer is a blend of the Interpretational solution and the avoidance of both critical successes and failures. I simply hadn’t thought to frame the question in quite this way before; it wasn’t an official policy, just an instinctive one on my part. Needless to say, it will be such a policy going forward.

A Question Of Policy

This isn’t about how your group handles absent players, but whether or not a character whose player is absent should be increased in mediocrity for the protection of both that character and the game overall. That’s a fairly deep and profound question, at the end of the day, with deep roots in the gaming philosophy of the GM and group. It should be clear from the above discussion that this is one of those occasions in which there is no one perfect answer. Perhaps this is another question to which each group must define its own answer?

Any decision will work provided that it is known to everyone in advance. All the complicated questions about acceptance of risk go away when a reasonably-accurate determination of that risk can be made in advance – when players know what they are letting their characters in for in the event of their absence.

Communication is the key – at least, that’s my conclusion.

Addenda

I forwarded the draft of this article to Saxon for him to pass on to the other members of his playing group and to offer an opportunity for any correction needed. Here’s his reply (slightly edited, and with subheadings added to break it up a little):

Hi Mike,

Just three points of clarification, plus some quick thoughts that I came up with overnight.

• The rogue character in question was female – so, minor nitpick on pronoun [fixed].
• Another nitpick is that this was the first time that any GM deliberately assigned the group-of-players-who-were-present-on-the-night to run the non-present PC (as well as the collective actions of the NPCs inside the temple of Chauntae in planning the defense against a siege).

  I’m not sure if that was an idea that the GM in question (TeacherDave, in this case) used because it was simply something that was useful at the time, or whether it was a considered response to the Irish Mine Detector phenomenon. I can asked TeacherDave if you want.

  The “IMD” phenomenon has been an issue within that group for a very long time, and one of the players and sometime-GMs (Peter) has been very vocal about avoiding it, both in his own game and warning against its dangers when it comes up in other games. For his part, when Peter runs his Space1889/Call of Cthulhu campaign, if a player is not present, their character simply comes down with a bout of ‘Martian Lurgi’ and is medically incapacitated for the session(s). (At one point I made a similar ruling for my own Dr Who game, and had the characters be temporarily retconned out of existence by fallout from the Time War, with a vague intention that this may become a future plot point).

• A final nitpick, and arguably the most important, is that the Rogue who tried to climb the roof fell because of the bad roll, but that failed action was not what attracted the attention of the enemy kobolds. A few rounds later, when the besiegers started killing off a number of townsfolk NPCs inside the temple, was when it was decided that she would start using her back-stab attack to reduce the number of attackers, and that was when she successfully made one kill but failed on the second, attracting attention to herself and forcing her to flee.

A Question Of Intentions

Thinking about it, that last paragraph raises an interesting point that may be relevant: at the time in-game, when the other players were feeling stressed because the group of allied NPCs in the temple were being killed, was it appropriate for the players-who-were-present to assume that the rogue character would be moved by the slaughter inside the temple to try and help them with some surreptitious backstabbing?

Or was that simply a rationalization by the players to try and get as many favorable factors engaged on their side of the battle?

I looked at her character sheet and can confirm that she was of Good alignment and had the character trait summarizable as ‘I don’t make long term plans and tend to act on the spur of the moment’ – so there was nothing there that argued against her actions; but the character’s backstory plot hook that was given out by the GM was that she was in this town (called Greenest) as part of an attempt to infiltrate the cult that was planning to attack the town.

So on the one hand she had no particular commitment to the cult’s stated plans of killing everybody and looting the town, but on the other hand, would she have necessarily broken cover if her player had been there to make decisions for her? Doing what’s right in the short term versus following a plan for a long term good? And as always, there’s the question of whether a character will follow even strongly held beliefs if it’s done at the risk of their life.

The Psychology Of Spotlights

There’s also an interesting thought that occurred to me about all players getting to feature, getting “a share of the spotlight”, as you put it.

Usually it’s the case that GMs need to make sure that all players get to do something in the course of the game, simply to stave off boredom. With that in mind, some overview of this game: It’s the first adventure that we’ve played under 5e D&D, and the characters are all new rather than imports from TeacherDave’s 4e campaign. The GM is playing a ‘getting the band together for the first time’ angle, but rather than everyone meeting in the proverbial tavern the characters had been traveling singly to Greenest for their own reasons. In the first session, some (but not all) of the characters had been introduced to each other. The Druid (PC of DrDave) and the Bard (PC of Johno) had been traveling together to Greenest for work; had encountered the overturned carriage of the Warlock (PC of Peter) and then fought off some kobolds that were working with the cult. They then continued to Greenest to discover it under large scale attack, and got into a fight to defend a family (who were related to the PC of Ray – another player who was not present for the first two sessions). During session 1 neither my Wizard, nor Urban’s Rogue, got any gameplay – although we did get some summarized backstory developed by the GM about our motivations for being in Greenest, in order to keep us at least vaguely interested.

In the second session, we cut to another part of Greenest, for the siege of the temple of Chauntae. My Wizard was inside, helping the townsfolk NPCs to defend themselves. Urban’s Rogue was on the outside.

In the third session all the players were present, and as a result of our various fights the characters all shepherded scared and wounded townsfolk NPCs to the safety of the town’s keep, where the characters were recruited to go and gather other townsfolk still trapped outside.

Now, Urban had known weeks in advance that he would not be available for the second session, since he would be at his mother’s farm hundreds of kilometers away. He had expressed surprise and mild irritation that he would not be there to play the first actions of his character in the game.

Is it possible that, subconsciously, the players wanted to make sure that Urban got to do *something*, even if only by proxy? Frankly I’m unsure, and think it more likely that the aforementioned theory of needing to have all hands on deck to defend the townsfolk played a more direct role in the decision-making – but it’s an interesting idea.

An Option of Hand-waving

Finally, a weird thought on handling the situation: most of your article has dealt with the aspects of fairness and responsibility and dealing with consequences. However, there is precedent for hand-waving the whole thing away.

I have a vague recollection from one of the 2e Dragonlance products given GM advice that if the main villain of the plot gets killed and he’s needed later in the storyline, simply declare that the dead villain was an underling who had been sent in the main villains place, and because of the masks that the commanders of the Dragon Armies wear that player (and their PCs) would never know the difference).

In the same vein, I came across a random spoiler for Horde of the Dragon Queen in the form of an observation/complaint that that plot line was set up to have specific villains later in the story, and if those villains get killed then the GM should arrange for it to have happened to substitutes.

But even if my memory is inaccurate, if it’s fair play for GM’s to hand-wave events to suit plots, then that begs the question of whether or not (and if so, when) it is fair to do so for characters.

Obviously this would need to be handled carefully, but in this instance: not only was the player genuinely away and acting in good faith (I’m honestly not even sure whether the GM had consulted with the player about using the Rogue character in this way), but also the actions that took place were away from the sight of the other characters. Those events could have very easily been retconned away.

This is exactly what I was proposing when I wrote about “interpreting the critical” in some other way, though Saxon’s proposal goes further – Mike

Now, in the end, the way things turned out were good, since Urban’s character developed a reason to flee the cultists and join the other player characters inside the keep as a result. In practical terms, the party got together, and his character wasn’t sidelined any further. But in other circumstances this may have led to rather more annoying results.

So the general premise holds, even if the inspirational circumstances weren’t quite as I understood them to be.

A Projection Of Intentions?

But this raised a further possibility in my mind: that the group, aware of the desire to “get the band together” had made choices that were more likely to bring about that result rather than preserving the initial independence of the Rogue character, or that the GM had steered events on such a course. Saxon also replied to this possibility, when I raised it:

I don’t think that the GM engineered things that way. I also don’t recall any discussion among the players towards that end, even off-the-cuff joke suggestions. I think it was a combination of bad rolls and decisions made on the spur of moment.

Due to a battery failure, we were not able to get a podcast recording for the benefit of the two players who were not present, and I did a writeup the following day while my memory was still fresh. Consulting it now, I see that there were at least two really bad rolls (5 week old memory suggests that there were 2 critical failures, but the second back-stab on the kobold may have been a mere very low roll). Not that that makes a lot of difference.

First-hand absence of the experience

I was also particularly interested in the take of the player who was most directly involved, Urban, who I have never met. He is the player who was absent and had conceded control of his character for its first in-game appearance as a result. I’ve never met him (as far as I know) but Saxon agreed to forward the draft article for his consideration.

Here are Urban’s thoughts:

It’s a very interesting article but I think our group doesn’t really fit into these structures. I think all our GMs all seem to have their own rules (Peter’s Martian lurgy for example) but basically [we]`make it up as we go along. I think you guys must take play very seriously that you send apologies and give adequate reasons not to come to a session as well as setting up what seems almost like a constitution. We seem to play it more by ear.

I don’t really have a problem with my character being played by others because I feel the chance of my buggering up a roll is the same as anyone else and I have put my own characters in crazy situations. My frustration was produced from the context in which the buggering up happened. This has more to do with the GMs organization and our lack of structure, something you guys seem to be more on the ball about.

Thanks for sending the article Saxon, it’s very thought provoking.

I can certainly appreciate that point of view; it’s one that I suspect many readers will share. I’ve taken the question seriously because it bears thinking about, even if you reach the same conclusion that he has, and because many groups will consider the question more seriously.

The Last Word?

However, it seems that even the group with which he plays is not always quite as devil-may-care about the issue, as Saxon acknowledges in some additional remarks included when forwarding Urban’s reply:

For all that they are very general, I think they are spot on in that the overall style of the Wednesday group is far more casual in style. A looser and often more silly game, where simply socializing over a shared hobby is often just as important as any in-game continuity, can afford to do that.

That said, I will offer one last observation that occurs to me as I read and forward Urban’s comments. There is the phenomenon of players identifying with their characters to the point where they have trouble separating the fantasy from the reality on an emotional level even when they can easily differentiate it on an intellectual level.

I know this feeling because it happened to me about a decade ago, and in the five minutes of quick recollection that I’m doing now I think that it was simply the case of one of the Wednesday-group GMs doing a quick shuffle of what the character was doing in order to quickly fill a plot hole in an adventure.

Because I was aware of the phenomenon and try to be an analytic person, my eventual reaction – starting from the day after, when I’d had time to sleep on it – was to go “Huh. So that’s what it feels like. Interesting.”

But I distinctly recall that at the time and for the hour or so of the trip home that evening, I was feeling resentful. And this proprietorial feeling was simply from having the GM decide on something that the character would do to fit a plot point – nowhere near as serious (or permanent) as having the character seriously injured or even killed through carelessness, malice, or simple circumstance when control was taken away from me as a player. Just a random thought that may be useful.

It’s certainly a relevant point, and one that ties the whole subject line back together. I’ve certainly both been in Saxon’s shoes in terms of the type of incident that he describes – and I’ve also been on the other side of the (metaphoric) GM’s screen when it’s happened, and (on at least two occasions that I can recall) when I was falsely accused of same.

Every GMing decision that does not immediately and fully yield gratification to the player concerned risks treading on toes, however lightly. If those toes are sore from past abuse, or simply more sensitive than most, or if the GM has used spiked boots instead of the lightest of dancing shoes when tap-dancing on the toes in question, there can be bruised egos and even wounded friendships.

That is an issue that deserves to be taken seriously, no matter how casual and easygoing the group may be. And, depending on the circumstances, that is exactly the type of damage that can result from a critical – when the owning player is absent. If a critical failure, it’s the absent player who suffers, whether they can shrug it off or not; if a critical success, it’s another player at the table who suffers, losing the chance at his moment of glory because what is effectively a glorified NPC has made off with their share of the spotlight.

The price of not at least thinking about the questions that I’ve raised in this article is too high for my tastes, and not worth the “purity” of game system or maintenance of a casual attitude. You don’t have to change anything about the way you game, if you don’t want to, or don’t think it necessary; but at least you should make a conscious decision not to do so, in light of the possible repercussions. Or, to phrase it a different way, we’re serious about having fun, here at Campaign Mastery!

PS:

If any other members of Saxon’s Wednesday group wants to comment, I welcome their thoughts. The same goes for the rest of the readership here at Campaign Mastery, of course, but I wanted to extend a special invitation to them, since they are at the heart of the incident that sparked the discussion.

Alas, this article is being posted late; I lost track of time working on the Tavern Generator. My apologies to anyone affected!