The Empty Chair: What To Do When a Player Misses Session Twelve

Somebody's out and their character is missing from the table. Here are three ways to handle it that don't break immersion or hand another player's choices to someone else -- and the one question that tells you which to use.

Somebody's sick, or working a double, or just forgot to mention they'd be out of town. Whatever the reason, you're staring at four players instead of five, and Marcus's character -- the one carrying the only rope, or the one who talked the guard captain into trusting the party -- isn't at the table tonight.

Most GMs handle this by instinct, and instinct usually lands on one of two bad options: pretend the character isn't there and hope nobody asks, or hand them to another player who ends up making choices the real player never would have. Both create problems. The first breaks the moment someone says "wait, where's Marcus?" The second risks a character doing something out of voice that the actual player has to live with next week.

There are three options that actually work, and which one you reach for comes down to two questions: is this a one-off absence or a pattern, and is the missing character load-bearing for tonight's scene?

Autopilot, on a short leash

If the absence is a one-off and the character isn't central to tonight's plot, hand them to another player with one rule: they can act, but only in ways that keep the character safe and don't spend resources the real player would care about. No selling the family sword, no proposing marriage to the tavern keeper. This keeps the character present in the fiction without anyone making decisions that aren't theirs to make.

Sideline them in-world, out loud

If the character would be conspicuously missing from tonight's scene -- the negotiation only works because of the trust Marcus built, say -- give them an in-fiction reason to be elsewhere: guarding the horses, running a separate errand, recovering from the wound they took last session. Say it out loud at the table in one sentence. This costs nothing and it's the option that ages best, because nobody has to pretend later that something happened that didn't.

Skip it and patch it in next time

For a genuinely minor scene -- a shopping trip, a short travel montage -- sometimes the cleanest move is to just not mention the character this session and give one sentence next time: "while you were gone, the party did X." Players are more forgiving of a skipped beat than a badly-piloted one.

The part that actually causes problems isn't the session itself -- it's the follow-up. A week later nobody remembers whether Marcus's character used their favor with the guard captain or not, and the story quietly stops being consistent. Whatever option you pick, write down what happened to the absent character in the same place you're already tracking NPCs and open threads -- GameMasterCraft's session notes are built for exactly that. The empty chair isn't the problem. Losing track of what happened in it is.

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The Empty Chair: What To Do When a Player Misses Session Twelve