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Fallon Kell
Commodore
Joined: 07 Mar 2011
Posts: 1846
Location: Tacoma, WA
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 Posted: Sat Jan 25, 2014 12:08 pm Post subject: |
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Fainting spell.
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Or that excessively long "Noooooooooo" was the Whining Side of the Force leaving him. - Dustflier
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DougRed4
Rear Admiral
Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 2272
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2014 12:22 am Post subject: |
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I'm not really one of the new people anymore, but I'm new compared to these threads that are nearly a decade old, so they're still new to me! 
This has come up for us a few times over the years, and here's how we handle it.
If it's a planned absence (that player can't make it this session, due to work or something else), we have that character hang back (stay with the ship, not participate on the active mission, etc.
If it's an emergency, where the player suddenly has to leave unexpectedly, someone else (or the GM) will run them for the continuation of that scene/battle.
We've long had a general rule that 'your PC can't die if you're not there', even though character deaths are really rare for us anyway. Of course the first joke out of everybody's mouth upon seeing that player again is "Your character was blown away!" (or some variant). 
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griff
Captain
Joined: 16 Jan 2014
Posts: 507
Location: Tacoma, WA
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| Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2014 1:36 am Post subject: |
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Unfortunately my gaming group never had a really solid campaign to make any difference to the story arc to make much difference if a character was missing. Years ago on an episode of the X Files there was the episode written by Steven King where Schully was off on vacation which turned into a adventure where Fox was back at the office and only interacted with Schully over the phone. I would run a gaming session like that no real influence over the canon of the campaign but just something to give the player some trigger time and CPs.
The Force is out there. |
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garhkal
Sovereign Protector
Joined: 17 Jul 2005
Posts: 14168
Location: Reynoldsburg, Columbus, Ohio.
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| Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2014 1:39 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | We've long had a general rule that 'your PC can't die if you're not there', even though character deaths are really rare for us anyway. Of course the first joke out of everybody's mouth upon seeing that player again is "Your character was blown away!" (or some variant). Wink |
Is this cause players rant and raise heck if they die cause they were not there? or for some other reason?
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DougRed4
Rear Admiral
Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 2272
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Tue Jan 28, 2014 6:40 pm Post subject: |
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| griff wrote: | Unfortunately my gaming group never had a really solid campaign to make any difference to the story arc to make much difference if a character was missing. Years ago on an episode of the X Files there was the episode written by Steven King where Schully was off on vacation which turned into a adventure where Fox was back at the office and only interacted with Schully over the phone. I would run a gaming session like that no real influence over the canon of the campaign but just something to give the player some trigger time and CPs.
The Force is out there. |
Dude, you score major points with me when referencing the greatest show of all time (the only franchise I like better than Star Wars!) 8)
| garhkal wrote: | | Quote: | | We've long had a general rule that 'your PC can't die if you're not there', even though character deaths are really rare for us anyway. Of course the first joke out of everybody's mouth upon seeing that player again is "Your character was blown away!" (or some variant). Wink |
Is this cause players rant and raise heck if they die cause they were not there? or for some other reason? |
Players don't "rant and raise heck", and we've done this for a long, long time. I suppose the rationale would probably be that we wouldn't find it very fair for a person to lose their character due to somebody else screwing things up or rolling bad or whatever. Frankly, PC deaths are pretty rare events for us, and often they're worked out ahead of time with the GM, so they can be heroic, dramatic, and pivotal to the story.
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griff
Captain
Joined: 16 Jan 2014
Posts: 507
Location: Tacoma, WA
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| Posted: Tue Jan 28, 2014 7:32 pm Post subject: |
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Long live the Lone Gunmen.
The death of a character was never a big thing for my gaming group, If someone rolled a One on their wild die our Mucnhkin GM would breakout the D6% for mishap. 11% and 12% the character would always die, due to their ship crashing, the blaster exploding (minimum normal damage x3). After awhile we just showed up with three characters. Especially if you weren't there, your character died, and most of the time you went out like a punk. The most combined experience for our group was character creation.
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Tinman
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 26 Dec 2013
Posts: 110
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| Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2014 3:04 pm Post subject: |
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| It depends on the circumstances and the character. Sometimes the game is halted and we just start playing Chez Cthulhu or something for the rest of the evening. It the sudden absence of a character can be explained away easily in a situation, we've gone with that instead. Sometimes this can even be used for dramatic effect. We once had a character step away from the group to "powder her noise" (because the player had to leave unexpectedly) shortly before the rest were captured by Imperials, and showed up at the beginning of the next session with reinforcements to rescue them. (It was planned that they be captured, and the other unit was supposed to break them out, but her being with them fit well within the circumstances.) |
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garhkal
Sovereign Protector
Joined: 17 Jul 2005
Posts: 14168
Location: Reynoldsburg, Columbus, Ohio.
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| Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2014 4:12 pm Post subject: |
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| DougRed4 wrote: | | Frankly, PC deaths are pretty rare events for us, and often they're worked out ahead of time with the GM, so they can be heroic, dramatic, and pivotal to the story. |
Sounds almost like you play where characters have a sort of script immunity, where nothing bad happens unless the plot calls for it.
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Esoomian
High Admiral
Joined: 29 Oct 2003
Posts: 6207
Location: Auckland, New Zealand
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| Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 12:33 pm Post subject: |
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Generally speaking if someone has to go I do my best to find a reason for their character not to partake in the adventure. I don't think it's fair to have potential bad things happen if a player has no say in it.
A total party kill would probably still get them though depending on what it was.
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DougRed4
Rear Admiral
Joined: 18 Jan 2013
Posts: 2272
Location: Seattle, WA
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| Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 3:22 pm Post subject: |
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| garhkal wrote: | | DougRed4 wrote: | | Frankly, PC deaths are pretty rare events for us, and often they're worked out ahead of time with the GM, so they can be heroic, dramatic, and pivotal to the story. |
Sounds almost like you play where characters have a sort of script immunity, where nothing bad happens unless the plot calls for it. |
Not at all, and we've had characters die before, numerous times. They are just rare.
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Centinull
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 30 Sep 2013
Posts: 156
Location: The Outer Rim Territories
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| Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 10:45 pm Post subject: Re: When they have to go?? |
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| garhkal wrote: | | What happens to his character. |
If the characters are in the middle of a situation that it would be difficult for the character break away, like a gunfight fight, they usually hand off the character to the GM or another player to finish the battle.
After the dust settles, we find a conveninet excuse for their character to be absent.
In our current campaign, we have a minor Jedi who spends more time "off training" than he does with the group, since the player only shows up about half the time.
Other conveninet excuses include, guarding the ship, sick in bed, floating in bacta, and the classic washing of hair. |
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Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)
Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 10402
Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy
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| Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2014 10:54 pm Post subject: |
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| garhkal wrote: | What happens to a person's character if they have to leave the group MID session?
Does it become an NPC under the play of the DM?
Does it become an NPC under the play of another player?
Does it just go "Poof" out of existance or something else?
If one of the former ones (where someone else runs it), do they get some form of "plot immunity" in which they won't take damage or have other bad things happen to them? |
My adventures tend to take 2-3 sessions to complete, so a player leaving mid-session could be the same thing as a player not being available for session 2 or 3: leaving mid-adventure. The option you didn't mention above is the PC being written out of the adventure (or that night's session of the adventure). No, not poof gone - That would be silly. We try to come up with some logical reason for the character to be separated from the group at the first opportunity from that point in the narrative. Until we get to that point, I prefer another player to take over the character at the mutual agreement of both players, but I'll take over the character if needed. While another player or I run the character as a part of the group, they don't really have script immunity. When the character is "off-screen", they do tend to have script immunity, but the PC is also not earning CPs for the portion of the adventure they are absent from the group's story. If the character's skill set is absolutely vital for the session, then we usually reschedule but we rarely might have someone else run the character.
| garhkal wrote: | | DougRed4 wrote: | | Frankly, PC deaths are pretty rare events for us, and often they're worked out ahead of time with the GM, so they can be heroic, dramatic, and pivotal to the story. |
Sounds almost like you play where characters have a sort of script immunity, where nothing bad happens unless the plot calls for it. |
Didn't read you saying somewhere that PC death is very rare in Sparks?
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garhkal
Sovereign Protector
Joined: 17 Jul 2005
Posts: 14168
Location: Reynoldsburg, Columbus, Ohio.
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| Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2014 3:13 am Post subject: |
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Which is one of the things that grates me about the group. But was it not for them, i would be RPG dry for going on 8 years now..
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Darth_Hilarious
Lieutenant Commander
Joined: 17 Apr 2013
Posts: 129
Location: Somewhere over there --------->
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| Posted: Sun Feb 23, 2014 6:56 pm Post subject: |
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Last time i had a player that had to take off for real world problems last 20 minutes of game time before he had to leave he got arrested by the local authorities and had to wait for a Judge to come hear the case and those sector judges travel at they're own pace........ PC sat in jail for 3 months and when player got back the judge finally showed up to hear the case and handed out a 150 credit fine and time served 
worked well in that case lol
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Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)
Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 10402
Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy
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| Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2014 2:09 am Post subject: |
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I like that idea.
| garhkal wrote: | | Which is one of the things that grates me about the group. But was it not for them, i would be RPG dry for going on 8 years now.. |
If you and I are both going to be in Columbus for a while, maybe you can play in my next campaign. It's still a few years off though.
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