Milestone leveling for a party of players who drop in and out?

Question

Historically I have generally used XP for tracking character progress in my party. But my latest new campaign I intend to move to a milestone approach.

However the one thing I don’t fully understand is the best way to manage milestones for parties where players drop in and out of sessions. Up front we have accepted that due to life my players will not be able to make every session and so we have agreed that sessions will take place the character will just be missing, or be jaegured.

What is the best way to manage milestone leveling in this case, should I track player attendance and take this into account, level everyone at the storyline moments anyway, or take more of a player by player approach (which feels like doing XP just without the XP).

I know DnD published material is moving towards the milestone approach is there any official ruling from them with regards to league sessions etc?

Answer 1

Missing a session sucks. Falling behind because I missed a session sucks even more.

When I DM for a group, at Session Zero I lay out this crucial principle:

We all want to be there, so missing a session is punishment enough.

We all want to be there. It sucks to miss a game. I am not going to punish you by lagging your character behind everyone else's because you miss sessions. The Dungeon Master's Guide speaks to this a bit, in the context of experience points and Absent Characters:

As an alternative, give absent characters the same XP that the other characters earned each session, keeping the group at the same level. Few players will intentionally miss out on the fun of gaming just because they know they’ll receive XP for it even if they don’t show up.

Usually, people are in it for the game, not the experience points.

Out of game problems require out of game solutions.

If it does become a habitual issue of missing sessions, I will never handle this out-of-game-problem by punishing your character. We are going to have a conversation out of game, out of character, and see what we can do to make things better, or decide that group isn't a good fit for you. But I will never punish your player character for it.

Discuss this with your players at a Session Zero.

I do not mean to say "my way is the best way". Talk about this with your players. Maybe they're okay with falling behind. Maybe they have the self awareness to know that possibly lagging behind in character advancement will motivate them to attend when they otherwise would not. This is okay too, as long as it is something you discuss with your table.

Answer 2

In my experience:

(1) It's probably best to stick with the milestone system and level up characters who are not there. The alternative is that characters fall behind, and the game becomes less fun for the affected players, which only makes them more likely to miss future sessions.

(2) To avoid characters suddenly appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, try to time things so that at the end of a session the characters have returned to some kind of base to rest. Even in the middle of the battle, you could say 'You hear the sounds of reinforcements arriving; you/the enemy retreats.' The players will probably understand the necessity for this kind of contrivance, but it's a good idea to warn them in advance. (An alternative way to achieve the same effect would be a magic item that teleports them in and out, and which they can't entirely control.)

(3) Always have something else going on; the missing characters are investigating a mystery, protecting the base, hunting for food, or similar. This justifies their absence, and why they're gaining experience even though they're not present for the main adventure.

Answer 3

As Thomas already pointed out, this is something to be discussed and agreed with the players in session zero.

I'm not sure you are doing yourself a favor by moving from a more gradual (XP) to a very binary (level up) system in this context. This prevents you from assigning partial points to those who were there for part of the time.

The primary question to discuss is: Do you want to keep the party on mostly even grounds, or do you want characters falling behind?

A simple approach would be to level everyone who was there at least half the time or otherwise made a considerable contribution to the success of the party. That leaves some grey area, and most of the time you want to err on the side of the player, but if someone misses almost everything, you can not level him. This will work well if your players are more or less equal in attendance. If one player has more pressing real life than others, he will fall behind.

The other approach is to consider the whole thing a group experience and simply level everyone all the time. This can level up characters who were largely missing, but keeps the group on even grounds.

I would definitely NOT recommend keeping an attendance record. You're not the school master checking on students, you're just another player of a peer group, even if you have a different role during the sessions.