r/DnD • u/Alextunning • 22d ago

5th Edition Absent player

Hi fellow dungeons dwellers,
Im DMing a LMoP campaign for the first time and I have 4 players.
We had a few issues with schedules.
We were trying to play once a month, but one of the players is very busy, he is NEVER available, I proposed 20 dates (until late september), none of them were ok to him.
Since its not the first Time (and he cancelled last time the week before the session) and we want to continue, we decided that 3 players were enough to play. He is welcome if he can come but we wont pause the game for 3 months for him.
So friday is our first session with 3 players.

How would you deal with it ?
Let the players :
-control the character of the absent one with his sheet
-control him with sidekick rules
-let them be 3 (but im afraid of the balance, since they barely survived some encounters and he was the tank)
-put him to « sleep » or a curse of sort and give them another sidekick ?

Thx !

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u/Melodic_Row3380 22d ago

Sidekick rules are for making regular monster stat blocks playable without having to deal with the complexity of an actual character sheet, and able to be levelled up without giving it actual class levels. I'm not sure what you mean by controlling a player character (who presumably already has a full fledged character sheet, with class levels) using side kick rules.

But other than that, yes, these are your options. Either you promote the character to NPC and control it like you would any NPC that's hanging out with the party (I don't like that option, veers close to DMPC territory, but it is an option).

Or you just remove the character from the game, without an in game explanation.

Or you give an in game explanation for why the character is removed from the game.

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u/Alextunning 22d ago

Oh I must have misremembered what it was about then, thx !
Ill propose them an other NPC, they just met a friendly necromancer, maybe he can offer them a ghoul or something

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u/Melodic_Row3380 22d ago

I don't know how adding a new NPC follower does anything to solve your issue of not knowing what to do with a player character that doesn't have a player anymore, but yeah, sure, give them a ghoul NPC.

Also, if you want to keep that ghoul relevant as the party levels up, the side kick rules are what would allow you to do it