I'm looking to start a group to play the Imperial Assault campaign but one of our players works on an oil rig and basically he's on shore for 2 weeks then on the rig for 2 weeks.

We were talking about running the campaign with two groups, one group with that particular player and another group (on another day/time) with different players.... so basically running the campaign 2x with some players playing on both groups. This just seems like too much work though and also even with the randomization, it'll "use up" the game much more quickly.

I was wondering if there is any suggestion with dealing with that one player that can only make 2 games out of 4? I'd really like to game with the other 3 players as much as possible and progress through the campaign as a team, but the group really feels guilty if the other guy has to miss out on 2 games.

Then again, one of the regular players is his brother so maybe the brother can run 2 heros? Or get someone else to play that hero for 2 games? Seems like we're just using that other player as a "proxy" though.....

Suggestions welcome!

For my first campaign we had a similar situation. All we did was add the 4 side missions for each character. Then whoever showed up played that day. We've played most of the campaign with 3 but have had a few missions with 4. All we do is keep the XP up for every character but only gave credits for those in the mission. Its worked just fine for us but we've decided the next time we will just run all 4 heroes and someone will just run 2 if anyone is unavailable.

I think that is the better idea there... always run 4 heroes and just have someone else play the 4th if someone is missing.

If you are going to do that, then you obviously want to save the credits and XP that hero gets for them to be able to assign when they are present, but otherwise all other decisions will go to the people who are there.

Basically what Crabbok said, when you get together to play let someone else play the mission as him. He could even look at the different exp upgrades and just say what ones hes interested in. He will miss half the campaign unfortunately but it's your best solution.