How do you deal with absent players?

Sometimes players can't make a session. We all have a life to lead and sometimes this interferes with once a week gaming sessions, so sometimes it is an unavoidable problem. Sometimes, this can really screw up an ongoing plot- especially when it comes to "cliffhangers" left over from previous weeks. What are the ingenious methods you have employed to get around key players' absence?

Hi Birch,

if GM to groups.

The "Sunday" Group is made up of 4 players. The rule is "one out is okay".The pc is then lead by me, but "moved out of the way on the first oppurtunity. The pc is not gaining any xp for that sessions. This group meets about every four weeks.

The "Friday" Group consist of three player and we only have a session if everybody is available. This works most fine since 2/3 = one couple . We meet every 3 to 4 weeks.

Hallo Birch,

usually in my group we act like Gregorius' Sunday group: should somebody be missing that day, I (the GM) play his character, who that day turns into an NPC and doesn't interfere with the other players' choices.

If the story reached a cliffhanger or a tricky situation though, all the players have to be present in order to go on: so, should somebody still be missing, we instead switch to board games.

Not much of an ingenious method but one that works for us.

I use the method described by Gregorius, too, going foward with the game if one regular is absent, minimising that particular character's role in the session. We used to cancel games if more than one player couldn't make it, but that was leading to a lot of canceled DH games, so I had the players create secondary Deathwatch characters; now, when more than one player is absent, we just switch to episodic, stand-alone, combat-focused missions of DW for that session.

Depends on the group.
In some we play if just one is not there, in some we don't play if not all are around and in some we see if we get another group going.

For example I play DH and RT with the same guys except the RT group has one additional player. If he is the one wo can't come we play DH.
If I am the one who can't come they call the one guy who is in the Shadowrun group in which I don't play but everyone else plus one other.
If the one shadowrun guy can't come I am asked and we play either DH or RT instead of shadowrun. You get the point.

My group (6) plays every sunday, but we rotate what the game is. My actual DH game was every other sunday and the off sunday for a while was a kind of pickup RT game, we had a player who moved a state over for work and was no longer able to come on the regular basis so we wrote out his psycher and a new player joined in. When someone cant make it we decide as a group weather to run him as an NPC (usually one of the players takes him / her as a second character) or just to do something else, like board games. --Side note for board games try Revolution, came out about a year ago, soooo much fun-- But now my game ended last week and we had another player drop and another who can only make it every other week, and that first player I mentioned is now coming up about once a month or so, making it interesting. So we currently have 2 games rotating and it requires a lot of planning to keep the right players at the right game.

But the Main Point, we leave it up to a group decision when people are out, usually with 1 out we play more than that we usually do something else.