Anthology Games: One Solution to a Missing Player
In my main 5e campaign, I had a problem. We have three players, excluding myself, and those three players all have complications in their real lives that means they sometimes cannot make it to our weekly sessions. This, of course, is a normal problem to have. It is also pretty normal in a group of this size that all three players would prefer not to play if we have someone missing. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead to a situation where we miss more weeks than we play. So I went looking for a solution.
Whenever one of my two players cannot make it to a game, I run a two-person one-shot with PCs I pregenerate for the players. The adventure takes place in the same setting as my main campaign, involving characters the PCs have met or situations they have heard about. Sometimes we just check in on something they have a connection to; other times I use these sessions to introduce ideas I plan to build on later. (I try to avoid introducing anything plot-critical because one of my players is absent, but it's a good place for a bit of lore, a new perspective on something familiar, or a new NPC I might bring into the main campaign eventually.) Because they are related to one another but not in any strict narrative relation, one of my players started calling these sessions anthology games, a term that I have now also adopted.
Let's get specific. Here are some examples:
- the crew of the party's ship fends off an attack by chuul and skum;
- two members of an adventuring party, made up of lizardfolk and bullywugs inspired by the PCs' example, investigate a village infiltrated by the cult of a fungus demon;
- two deer from the Thoughtful Valley, a region full of Awakened animals that the party discovered, look into rumours of a haunting;
- prospective students to the College of Illusion try to fulfill the idiosyncratic entrance requirements, ie. navigating an illusion-riddled swamp;
- current first-year students of the College of Illusion participate in an end-of-year tradition by trying to break into the headmistress's office;
- two soldiers from one PC's backstory stumble on a camp of stranded enemy mercenaries and decide to cause problems for them;
- in the middle of the drow civil war underway during the campaign, two drow squires on the PCs' favoured side hold a bridge;
- kenku spies, working for an information broker the PCs know, investigate a strange package brought through the city docks.
The anthology sessions have by and large gone over very well with my players, and they have the following advantages:
- they let us play D&D when we otherwise would not;
- they offer the players a chance to learn things about NPCs or the setting that the PCs might not realistically get a chance to learn;
- they offer the players a chance to play with classes, subclasses, or other mechanical elements they might not otherwise get a chance to experience;
- they let me break up the pacing of the game, adding combat in narrative-heavy stretches or low-stakes puzzles in combat-heavy stretches;
- if I am clever enough to reuse NPCs I already built for the main campaign as the characters I assign to the players, they let me reduce work by repurposing existing assets;
- they provide an opportunity for foreshadowing, reinforcement, or other narrative techniques.
(If you read my previous post about giving the players some NPCs to control [link], you might recognize some of these advantages. After all, there's a lot of overlap between the two techniques, and the success I had giving my players NPCs is what gave me the idea to try these anthology pieces.)
The primary downside to the anthology sessions is that they can take a lot of time to prepare, and sometimes they take even more time to think up. Despite what I wrote above, I often don't reuse existing NPCs, in part because I don't want to repeat anthology concepts too frequently. And because I try to target anthology sessions to particular pairs of players, including mechanics they have expressed an interest in exploring, I need to have three anthology sessions ready at any time if I want to be able to use one on short notice. Indeed, my annual survey for my players now includes questions about mechanics or topics they want to see in anthology sessions. If I was a less diligent GM it might be easier, but that is not in my nature – or at least not in my current practice. (As it happens, I sometimes cannot keep up and I do not always have an anthology game ready when I need it.)
My understanding is that lots of tables have the same problem I had. A West Marches format is one possible solution, but it's not something you can easily introduce into an existing campaign. If you are a GM facing a lot of last-minute cancellations that derail your regular gaming schedule, perhaps consider trying anthology games.