This is a long article. Even after the rewrite, it’s still long. So, I’m going to trim the Long, Rambling Introduction™ into a Short, Rambling Introduction™. But I’ll try to preserve as much of the original character and humor as possible.

People ask me why I call myself the ANGRY GM instead of the HAPPY GM or some other lazy reference to the characters from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I tell them I’m angry for lots of reasons. But I’m trying to cut five hundred words from this introduction, so I can’t list all my personality problems here. I can tell you one reason I’m angry, though. And I picked it because it’s relevant to the article and therefore provides a useful segue. I’m angry because most RPG designers don’t address what I think are crucial issues in their rulebooks. For example, most RPG designers don’t provide any useful advice about how to handle it when players are unable to participate in the game. There’s a variety of reasons why that might happen, and some of them are hyperbolic and therefore quite funny, but the most common in-game event that sidelines players is character death. And I have a lot of amusing ways to berate players for getting their characters killed. But I’ll save them for the body of the article which will hopefully answer a bunch of questions people sent me about how to handle it when a player gets sidelined.

Getting Benched

You might say that RPGs are pretty open-ended. And that’d be kind of like saying that Angkor Wat is a little run down. A massive f$&%ing understatement. RPGs are defined by their open-endedness. Anything can – and will – happen. So what happens when a character ends up temporarily disabled? Or permanently dead? Or temporarily dead? Or permanently disabled? What happens when a character just ends up off-screen for a little while? What happens when players get stuck dealing with some real-life event instead of showing up to your game? What do you do?

This article is about what happens when a player is sidelined. When a player’s out of the action for some reason, whether it’s an in-game reason or an out-of-game reason. And it’s about deciding, in advance, how you and your players should handle those situations. Basically, its about setting policies and expectations. Which most GMs don’t do. Most GMs don’t think about this s$&% until it comes up. And that’s a mistake. Because then, my e-mail box ends up bursting with e-mails about what to do about absent players, crippled characters, dead characters, permanently insane characters, and characters whose brains have been devoured by psychic star-nosed moles.

Now, let me tell you what this article is NOT about. This article is NOT about whether any of that stuff SHOULD be a part of your game. That’d be a stupid article. If you want to remove death and maiming from your game or discourage your players from ever splitting up, that’s your problem. You don’t need my permission to run your game any wrong way you want. But don’t expect me to tell you why it’s bad. Again.

Likewise, this article ain’t about the BEST way to handle sidelining in its many and varied – three – forms. I will tell you about my general policies. The ones I follow in most of my games. But they’re just examples. I’m mostly going to tell you the different issues you need to worry about so you can set your own policies before the game starts and tell your players what to expect.

But first, I’m going to tell you the issues you DON’T need to worry about.

Non-Issues and Imagined Problems

Sidelining is a GMing hot topic. Like a$&holes, everyone has an opinion about sidelining. And like a$&holes, they all stink. And the reason they all stink is that GMs get really distracted by non-existent issues and imaginary problems and focus all their energy on dealing with them. Usually completely ignoring the actual problem.

Take, for example, the non-question about whether sidelining should happen in your game. It’s going to happen. If you try to avoid it, you’re removing the open-ended agency from the game. And you’re trying to do the impossible. You can’t force perfect attendance. Especially these days when apparently some memo went around telling everyone that it’s no longer extremely rude and disrespectful to fail to show up after you committed to be in a specific place at a specific time. You can’t stop the players from splitting the party sometimes. And you can’t prevent characters from getting their a$&es killed stone dead either. You shouldn’t. It cuts at the very core of what makes an RPG an RPG. That’s agency. Remember, agency is about both freedom of choice and the fact that choices have consequences. Take away the choices OR the consequences and you don’t have agency anymore. Adventuring is deadly dangerous. If players can’t handle death, maybe they should stop flinging their precious little treasures into life-or-death combat with such reckless abandon.

Another non-issue GMs worry about too much is how much it sucks for a player to be out of the game. I’m not going to disagree. It does suck to be out of the game. Just like it sucks to bury a character you couldn’t keep alive. Just like it sucks to lose a combat. Or fail an attack roll. Lots of things suck. Suckage is not a good measure of what should and shouldn’t happen in a game. A game without some suck isn’t a game. It’s just extended masturbatory wish-fulfillment.

When I was in kindergarten kid, we learned about taking turns. About being politely attentive and quiet when it’s someone else’s turn. A player should be able to handle being out of the game for about fifteen minutes. Maybe twenty. And staying quiet and polite and paying attention during that time. I know some selfish players find it offensive when I say that, but considering those people don’t understand something that used to be taught to toddlers, I don’t lose much sleep over telling them to find some other game to play because Angry’s Daycare Center is closed for business.

And I need to remind the GMs out there of the same thing. If the players settle into an extended planning session or interaction scene around the campfire, you should be totally capable of politely and attentively sitting and listening. And YOU – a GM – should be able to handle it for MORE than fifteen minutes without shuffling papers and zoning out.

A third sidelining non-issue that GMs lose their s$&% over is metagaming. When the party splits or some player goes off on their own, lots of GMs collapse into paroxysms of panic. “What should I do,” they wail, “when something happens in the game that only some of the players know about in character? Should I send the rest of the players out of the room? Should I run the scene away from the table? Should I stab the sidelined players in their eyes and ears to prevent them from hearing and seeing what their characters wouldn’t?” No, you moron. Just play the f$&%ing scene right there in front of everyone. Trust your players to handle it like f$&%ing adults. And don’t go bonkers if the waters between player-knowledge and character-knowledge get a little muddy because it doesn’t f$&%ing matter.

Those are the issues that aren’t even worth considering when it comes to dealing with sidelined players. Now, let me tell you the issues that really DO matter.

Actual Sidelining Issues Worthy of Discuission

When a player ends up sidelined, it DOES create problems. That’s why you – as the GM – need to know ahead of time how you’re going to deal with it. More or less. That way, you won’t get blindsided and you can tell your players what to expect. And also your players can go find another table if they don’t like your expectations before it turns into a fight.

First, when a player is sidelined, they’re basically not playing the game. They’re forced to spectate. “But Angry,” I hear you saying, “you just got done ranting about how that’s a non-issue!” Well, you need to read more carefully. I said that players should be able to quietly and attentively sit out the game for about fifteen or twenty minutes now and then. That’s reasonable. It’s unreasonable to ask a player who showed up to play a game to not play that game for an hour or two or four. Players should be able to spectate for short periods without losing their f$&%ing minds or breaking out their f$&%ing phones. But not indefinitely. They signed up to play, not to watch other people play.

Second, there’s continuity and consistency. Agency and consistency together comprise two of the three things that make an RPG an RPG. I talked about all three in my book. Sidelining can really f$&% with continuity and consistency. Having a character disappear from the game with no explanation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Neither does a character wandering alone into an extremely dangerous dungeon that the party is barely surviving just to catch up with them because that character’s player was absent last week and he stayed home. And remember that part of consistency is the willing suspension of disbelief. You can invent whatever stupid explanations you want for characters coming and going, disappearing and reappearing, but if those explanations strain your players’ credulity, you’ve breached the suspension of disbelief contract. And you don’t want to do that lightly. It breaks the world and makes the game unplayable.

Third, when a character gets benched, the party can lose access to important resources or skills. In games like D&D where everything has to conform impossibly to some ideal, mathematically perfect sense of game balance, losing a character from the group can be a disaster. In any RPG with a halfway decent skill system – or even a s$&%y skill system like D&D’s – losing access to one character’s skills can make some challenges exceptionally difficult or impossible. And if the benched character had any vital equipment or supplies, the party might be screwed if that equipment goes to the bench with the character.

Those are the real issues to consider when a character gets benched or a player gets sidelined. But here’s the problem. And it’s a problem I have to explain over and over. The problem is that when you solve one of those issues, you usually make another issue worse. If Alice the Unsteady plummets into the volcano with the party’s entire stock of food and water in her pack and the party is deep in Vulcrax the dragon’s lair, the consistent thing to do is remove Alice’s character from play, send Alice home, and force the rest of the players to play out their grim death march to starvation. Or, more likely, death by dragon since Alice had all the ice magic. Consistent and realistic, but it’s also a gameplay screwjob and it could keep Alice out of the game for an entire session or three.

Some GMs are actually totally okay with that, by the way. Hell, I’m one of them. The party should have spread the food and water out amongst themselves. And Alice got what she deserved for attempting that climb without a potion of fire resistance and a feather fall spell prepared. If the party ends up in a TPK situation because one-fifth of their number died, they had a bad plan and they deserve what they get.

But not all gaming groups are quite that… umm… let’s say hardcore. Some tables are just full of pussies who are willing to dial down the continuity and use block-and-tackle to suspend their disbelief if it means one stupid action and one failed die roll doesn’t doom the demoralized party to death while Alice sits home alone for two weeks.

Point is, different tables – and different players – have different priorities. That’s okay. The world needs real gamers and the world needs pussies. Otherwise, who’d buy all the indie games and write all the blog posts about failing forward? There aren’t any right ways and wrong ways to handle sidelining. Each group needs to agree on a set of priorities. And each group needs to decide how to handle benched characters and sidelined players accordingly.

And now that you know the REAL issues to consider when you have to decide how to handle a sidelined player, I’m going to explain the three major kinds of sidelining you should be ready to handle before you start running a game. And I’ll tell you how I personally handle each based on my own priorities.

When Players Call in Sick

Run a game for long enough and, eventually, one of your players will miss a session. Usually, they’ll feed you some kind of bulls$&% excuse like a sick kid or a work emergency or a funeral, but their reasons don’t matter. All that matters is that they’ve made your life more difficult because now you have a character at the table without a brain to run it. Which just proves how selfish players can be.

What’s your policy for when someone calls in sick? Well, the first thing to consider is whether you can even run a game with a missing player. If your players are reliable and absences are rare and you play regularly, you can just cancel or reschedule games whenever someone calls out. But, if you tried that s$&% with some groups, you might never play at all.

The minute you organize the game, you should figure out your attendance and cancellation policy. And that policy should include asking players to give you advance warning if they’re going to miss a game. I know it’s just a game about pretend elves, but the humans at the table are real people and there’s such a thing as courtesy. Joining a gaming group is making a promise to people. Asking for advance warning of absences – and dumping players who frequently fail to show up without warning – is totally reasonable. Just remember that some emergencies can’t be predicted in advance. And they take priority over pretend elves. When I get hospitalized, my GM is the last person I’m thinking about. Even if it is game night.

My policy is simple: I will never run a game for less than three players or for less than two-thirds of the group. If there’s only three players in my game, even one absence forces a cancellation. If there’s six players, I need at least four players there to run the game. Otherwise, the game’s canceled. And if there’s a player who misses too many games – even with good reasons – I ask them to withdraw from the group. A person who misses two out of every four games, for example, can’t keep up with the kind of game I run.

Let’s say the game must go on, but you’ve got an absentee. What do you do? There’s a few ways to handle it. You can remove the player’s character from the game for the night. You can remove the character from play, but assume they are still following along behind the party. Or you can have someone else control the character. Or control it yourself.

Each solution has problems though. Removing the character from the game can cause consistency problems unless there’s a good, in-game explanation that doesn’t break suspension of disbelief. And that usually depends on where the party is and what they’re doing when the character disappears. If the party is dicking around in town, it’s easy enough to draw a character away with some responsibility or personal issue for the session. But if the party’s deep in some dungeon somewhere – or in the middle of a pitched battle – a character can’t just disappear. Keeping the character on-screen but inactive isn’t much of a problem. Just assume they’re doing stuff, but they’re having a crappy day and they’re not very effective. Or they woke up with a stomachache or something. Even that can strain credulity, but it’s much easier to handwave it as an acceptable break from reality. Either way, though, those solutions can screw the party out of resources and skills. And that can be really bad for the other players.

Letting someone else drive the absentee’s character keeps the character in play, but has its own issues. Some players just can’t handle playing two characters. Some players don’t know the game well enough to do it. And if it’s a complex or high-level character, even experienced players can get overwhelmed. And, frankly, as a GM, you’ve got a lot of s$&% to do. You don’t need the burden of playing someone’s stupid character.

Control swapping can also lead to character inconsistencies. A player can generally handle making die rolls for someone else’s character or using their skills and abilities, but they can’t be expected to role-play the character properly. Hell, most players can’t portray one character very well. Making them handle two can be a nightmare.

Here’s how I handle an absentee’s character: first, I try to get them the hell out of the party if it’s reasonable to do so. If the party is in a place where a character can leave on personal business, they leave. I invent some personal responsibility or duty or business matter or religious obligation or carousing-related jail sentence to pull the character away from the action for the night. One that is consistent with the character. And we all agree that we won’t pry too deeply into the details and that there will be no permanent repercussions. The party can’t get mad at the character for ending up in the drunk tank and dock their share of the treasure or whatever. If the character has vital resources or supplies, he hands them over to the party before he departs. Or the party retrieves them from his inn room. Whatever. And the party will just have to get by without his skills and resources and plan accordingly.

If the game ain’t in a place where a PC can leave and come back, I ask for a volunteer to drive the character in combat and make die rolls and stuff. If no one volunteers, I do it myself. Apart from participating in battle and using his skills when asked, the absentee’s character just goes along quietly with the rest of the party. But if the party does something that I feel the character would strongly object to – or if the player controlling the PC makes a choice I don’t think the absentee player would – I step in, speak for the player, and veto the action.

The minute the game reaches a place where I can write out the absentee’s character, I do. If the party returns to town, the character disappears to handle personal business. And if I’ve written out a character and then the party does something that might make it impossible for the character to rejoin the group later, I write the character back in under my control. Or under a volunteer’s control. If an absentee’s character is sitting in jail, for example, and the party decides to leave town and head for the dungeon, I ask them to wait until the next day to leave, release the character from jail, and put the character back in the party.

That policy balances the issues nicely, I feel, but it emphasizes agency and consistency. Yeah, it’s a pain in the a$& sometimes. But there’s no world in which an absent player isn’t a pain in the a$&. You have to pick the least painful pain that works for your table’s a$&.

Split Parties and Off-Camera Antics

You know that saying about not splitting the party. F$&% that saying. It’s bulls$&%. Splitting the party can be dangerous. But sometimes, it just makes sense. When the party’s in town, for example, or investigating something, it makes sense for the social characters to go question the witness while the strongarm characters go bully the suspect and the criminal characters break into the crime boss’ office to see what they can find out. Beyond that, everyone likes to have some time in the spotlight. And everyone has the right to pursue a personal goal now and then. I ain’t going to deny my players that stuff.

Sometimes, some of the players’ characters will be off-screen. Off-camera. And you need to decide how to handle it.

Thing is, this is the easiest thing in the world to deal with. You don’t need a policy at all unless you believe that non-issues are issues. Remember, it’s reasonable to ask players to attentively wait their turn for about fifteen to twenty minutes and meta-gaming isn’t something smart people give a f$&% about. So there’s no problem at all with split parties and personal scenes.

Unless…

There’s two times when split parties become problems. The first is when one or more of the players end up spending SUBSTANTIAL amounts of time on the sideline. You can’t turn players into spectators for too long. And the second is when one of the players likes the spotlight too much and becomes a lone wolf.

My general policy on split parties and personal scenes is something this: sounds fun; let’s do it. But I do keep an eye out for significant imbalances. If I feel – in my gut or based on the way the other players are behaving – that there’s a player who is spending too much time on his own, I stop playing out his alone time at the table. I just summarize their personal scenes. And I make it clear that the camera is going to follow the party, not them. “Okay, you get drunk at the bar for several hours. While you do that, the rest of the party meets with the king…”

When it comes to juggling split parties – which is a crap-ton of fun, opens up a lot of interesting story and pacing possibilities, and forces you to get better as a GM – I just make sure to switch between the parties frequently so no one sits out for too long. I use TV show pacing. You know, A-Plot; B-Plot? And that means you always cut from one plot to the other just when things are getting really exciting. If the scouting party has been on screen for ten or fifteen minutes and someone’s about to blunder into them, I cut just as “something comes around the corner! Meanwhile, the rest of the party…”

Split party stuff is easy. Don’t sweat it too much.

The Dead and the Might-as-Well-Be-Dead

Characters die. And even though it’s funny as hell – especially if the player cries – it also really f$&%s things up. That’s why every GM needs to know what’s going to happen when a character does manage to bite it. And so, it’s f$&%ing insane that most rulebooks barely talk about how the PLAYERS and the GM should handle character death AT THE TABLE. All you get are rules for determining when someone’s dead and how they can come back. Do you have any idea how many people have ended up saying, “yeah, but when do I do AFTER I feed the character sheet into the paper shredder?”

Now, I’m not just talking about PC death here. I’m talking about anything that removes a character from play permanently or semi-permanently. Anything that leaves a player with no character to play for an extended time. Sometimes characters get turned to stone. Sometimes their brains get eaten. Sometimes they end up permanently insane. Sometimes, they get permanently crippled beyond the ability to adventure. Sometimes they get taken away because they violated my ‘No Evil PCs’ rule. Sometimes they disappear for a year to train with the Guru of Mount Weiss-Gaigh.

Such a character loss results in a player being out of the game for an intolerably long time. Forever is a lot longer than fifteen minutes, after all. And yes, I know all about ‘new characters.’ I’m getting there. Hold your whores. And such a character loss also means the party loses a bunch of skills and resources – and a slab of meat to soak up monster damage – forever. Those are some big issues.

There’s two easy ways to deal with those problems, though. The first is to let the player make a new character and rejoin the game. And note that you don’t have to do this. It isn’t automatic. You can run a permadeath game if you want to wherein any player dumb enough to get their character killed is out of the game forever. Or at least until everyone else is dead and a new game starts. Most modern gamers can’t handle that kind of pressure though. They’re entitled little things who can barely handle having to live with a replacement character. Which makes you wonder why so many player-characters refuse to flee from combat. That’s gamers for you.

The second way to deal with those problems is to make character loss reversible. Allow characters to come back from the dead. Or come back from anything, really. Petrification can be reversed, madness can be healed, limbs can be regrown with a regeneration spell, and permanent alignment changes can be cured by not giving a motherloving f$&% about alignment. Funny thing though is that, while D&D does make pretty much everything reversible, it does so in a way that usually doesn’t actually address the problems.

For example, you can bring back the dead with some powerful magic, right? But that magic is usually pretty costly and time-consuming. If the party doesn’t have the resources right then and there, they might have to gather them through gameplay. They might need to find magical components or raise the money for them or hire a spellcaster to actually do the dirty work. And the same is true of spells that can reverse things like permanent curses, transformations, and dismemberment. So, absent any other assumptions, the player that got their character killed is still out of the game for a while and the party has to go through a bunch of adventuring rigamarole while one of their number is sitting in the purgatorial penalty box.

Now, it’s pretty obvious that if you don’t have the nads for real permadeath D&D, you have to let players replace the characters they break and come back to the table. Or you have to make reversing character loss a lot more efficient. You can’t make a player a spectator for more than about twenty minutes and you really can’t ask a player to sit out more than one session at home. Most people don’t even like to do that. But do remember that skipping a session because you’re out of the game isn’t the same as being forced to sit and watch people play. It is still unfair, though, to ask a player to skip too many sessions. Honestly, asking a player to skip more than one session is unreasonable.

But replacement characters create huge continuity and consistency issues. It’s bad enough figuring out how to realistically write an absentee’s character out of and then back into a dungeon. Writing an entire new character into the party is a massive f$&%ing headache. Especially because there’s more at stake than just suspension of disbelief in the immediate game situation. There’s issues of party cohesion, trust, and established relationships. When a party forms at the start of a campaign, they’re usually united by some sort of common motivation or value or task or whatever. And managing that usually takes some background work and a session or two of play to establish properly. To bring in a replacement character for someone’s corpse, you have to fast-track all that.

In theory, anyway.

That’s why most GMs avoid the issue. Either they break their backs to avoid permanent character loss at all or they make every permanent loss so reversible as to be inconsequential. But those just aren’t viable solutions. They tear at the very fabric of the game.

And when GMs actually confront the issue, they usually worry about all the wrong s$&%. Like the non-issues I mentioned above. Or they freak out about the conflict between fairness and justice. That is, on the one hand, they want to make sure the replacement character is precisely and exactly equal – power-wise – to the dead character. Even including things like magic items and gold and s$&%. And that issue is further complicated when a PC leaves a corpse loaded with magic items and treasure behind and the rest of the party can’t loot that s$&% fast enough. It’s pretty crass, but most players skip the funerals for their fallen comrades and move right to dividing the estate. On the other hand, most GMs have an innate sense that there has to be some kind of setback or penalty or else death – which should be a pretty big deal – will become trivial and meaningless.

But those problems are tiny. REALLY tiny. That paragraph took more effort to type – and to read – than the problems it discussed actually deserve. You’re better off just doing whatever’s most expedient than losing sleep over game balance and punishment issues.

Still, it’s complicated, right? There’s a lot to think about. Which is why I’m telling you to figure out upfront what you’re going to do about it.

The thing to remember – the thing that’ll make it a little easier – is that death is rare and extraordinary. Well, it should be anyway. And because of that, it should be big and complicated. It should majorly disrupt the game. It’s f$&%ing death. When a PC dies, it’s actually good for the game if everyone sits around for a minute wondering what the f&$% happens next. At least that’s a response.

But you need to have some idea of what actually can happen next.

If death is reversible, what does it cost? If it costs the party resources, who gets to make the call about whether the party spends them or not? Does the corpse’s former player get a say in whether the party carts their stinking remains back to town and ponies up the dough for a resurrection? Can the player who was dumb enough to let their character die decide not to come back? Can he haunt the party until they bring him back? Yeah, the rules provide some answers here, but you’d better make sure you like those answers. Because this s$&% can cause bitter feelings and break friendships. And because the rules’ answers are kind of s$%&.

What happens if the survivors don’t want to – or can’t – get back to town to reverse the death? What if they can’t do it in the field? What if the current quest is too important? Or the town is too far away? What if the players who didn’t get their characters killed feel like they can win with reduced manpower and don’t want to waste their time dealing with the death now? What if they have to choose between reanimating the body or winning the adventure? Like if there’s a time limit?

And if all this s$&% – everything involved in bringing the wayward spirit back to the land of the living – is going to take a bunch of time, what will the corpse’s former player do in the interim? How will they participate in the game? Or do they have to sit home and wait?

If the player who can’t keep their character alive has to make a new one, how are you going to bring the replacement meat-sack into the game? When? What if the players are in the middle of a monster-infested wilderness alone and won’t be able to return to civilization for days? Or weeks? What will the player do in the meanwhile? They’ll be occupied making the new character for a couple of hours, sure, but after it’s done, how long will it be before they get to play it?

You – as GM – have to be ready to answer all of those questions. There’s lots of possible answers. You just have to figure out what your priorities are and then pick the appropriate ones. And keep in mind that some of the specifics will have to be worked out on a case-by-case basis. So, you really just need to figure out what your default approach will be and then adjust it to suit each situation.

Given that, let me finish this up by telling you my default approach. Well, the default approach I’ve used in many of my games, but not all of them. I handle death differently depending on the campaign. The approach I’m going to tell you about though is my favorite one. The one I use most.

First, death ain’t generally reversible. The dead usually can’t come back. And if they ever do, it’s so ridiculously difficult and time-consuming to pull off that most people don’t even realize it’s possible. It’s the stuff of myth. If you want to bring back the dead in the Angryverse, you have to pull an Orpheus and hope Eurydice can keep her eyes on the f$&%ing prize this time around.

Second, continuity and consistency and party cohesion are really important in my games. They take a damned high priority. High enough that I’m not going to bend or break my reality with any stupid contrivances just to get your character back into the game. Sorry. As far as I’m concerned, death is a gigantic pain in the a$& and players have lots of ways to avoid it. Any player that gets a character killed is just making my life difficult. They don’t get a lot of sympathy.

Hence why I tell my players right out of the gate that if their character dies, they will have to create a new character and they will probably end up missing at least one full session of play as a result. Also, I tell players that when a character dies, the current session is probably going to be over right then and there.

See, when a character dies at my table, the game stops and we all have a meeting about what the hell to do about it. At least, once the current danger has passed and the surviving players have a chance to sit down and deal with the reality that one among them wasn’t smart enough or strong enough or talented enough to keep from dying. We talk about what the group wants to do and what the player wants to do and the different things the characters in the game could do. We talk about whether they should head back to town and bury the body and post a classified ad at the local adventurer’s guild seeking a replacement. We talk about whether the survivors want to keep going and how we can manage that. Because, unless the player who just killed off his character volunteers to sit out for longer, anything that happens has to be resolved in just one session. Plus whatever time we have left that night.

Of course, I can make adjustments to the game based on what everyone wants to do. If there’s an upcoming opportunity to adapt an NPC, I’ll offer the player the chance to kill off a temporary character with their incompetence. He can play that character for a few sessions – desperately struggling against his inferior skills to keep it alive – until the party gets back to town and allows him the chance to bring his real character into the game for future death. NPCs are great for temporarily allowing a crappy player the chance to keep playing even if they couldn’t keep a PC alive if their life depended on it.

Ultimately, I try to strike a fair balance. Just because someone got their character killed, that doesn’t mean they get to derail the game for everyone else. If the party feels they can continue, they should have the chance. But getting your character killed shouldn’t keep you from playing the game for very long. It isn’t right to exclude a player. And often, I’ve been able to find ways to avoid forcing a player to miss more than an hour or two of play. That said, the threat of having to miss a session if you get your character killed does make you value your character’s life a little more. I’ve noticed players are more responsible when they know this rule is in effect.

Whatever solution we come up with though, it’s usually a compromise. And I – as the GM – will be the bad guy and force the compromise if I have to. The idiot whose character has been reduced to a pair of smoking boots might be forced to settle for a temporary character for a couple of sessions. The capable, competent survivors might unjustly be forced to decide their characters can’t go on and return to town to recruit a new member because it’s the only way that’ll let the player back into the game quickly enough. Or they might be forced to trust a prisoner more than they’re inclined to so as to let a temporary PC into their midst.

In short, we compromise. Like f$&%ing adults. Which is why I can’t have any selfish toddlers at my table.

But that’s just an example. That’s just how I handle it. At least in my long, serious, story-heavy campaigns. But that might not work for you. If you just run some adventure of the week crap casual online game, you might just handle it the old-school way:

Bob: Hail and well met. I am Remmington the Second. I’m in search of my brother, Remmington the First. Have you seen him hither?
Carol: Alas, your brother was struck down on this very spot by yon owlbear you see roasting on our fire. But you seem a trustworthy sort. Do you care to join us on our valiant quest in his stead?
Bob: That depends on whether there’s a drumstick left.