The party in my game split. Or rather, one player was missing for a session, the party left them behind in town, and entered a magical cursed forest that's almost impossible to get out of.

Normally I just let the players "poof" into the game and join the action when they were missing last time, but this time it would begger too much disbelief for the left behind character to make the trek, as the big selling point of the forest is its old school D&D resource management, man vs the environment.

So the player is in town, and wants his character to figure out where the others went and do some other things in in the meanwhile.

How can I resolve this outside of the game? As in, what level of abstraction do you normally operate on when figuring out "downtime" activities? In this case, the player would play minute-for-minute if they could until they catch up to the rest of the party. However, this is unmanageable and would make it so they never actually catch up in the game's timeline, as they are almost two weeks behind now.

We took two or three sessions just to play out one day, and while it was fun, it's obviously going to mean he never catches up.

But at the same time, I feel like by abstracting the situation I'm cheating the player out of control over what happens. "You can choose three things a day to focus on achieving," etc., but normally they'd have much finer control over what they do. And so forth. Or let's say they want to spy on an enemy guild; normally they could go through all sorts of strategy to try and make it happen, but here I'd probably reduce it to two or three dice rolls and then tell them the overall result of their goal.

Also it means if they involve themselves in potentially dangerous situations like combat, then it would be simply one abstracted dice roll away from "you're in jail now" or even "you died" which just feels cheap. I dunno.

On the other hand, there's no other way.

What's the best way to handle situations like these?

Actually, I might as well throw in the situation the main party itself got into as well.

They got trapped into a room with a sealed demon. The demon offers them power and knowledge if they remove the seals trapping it. They don't want to, but need to figure a way out of the room they're trapped together in before hunger and exhaustion force them to cut a deal with the demon out of desperation.

At what point should I start "fast forwarding" time to be, they're stuck for a day, two days, three days, or am I going to have to play out every single solitary minute as they try to figure out how to get out?

I'd fast-forward the missing player's actions, time-compress then, resolve anything seems to need resolving, then put them right on the trail of the rest of the party. Then I'd allow the outside player to somehow become part of helping the trapped party's escape strategy, if such a thing is possible. Otherwise, prepare to solo game the one player until they've scratched all their peculiar itches. (maybe an out of game discussion about the need to reassamble?).

Depends.  How long is it going to take for the party to be done do you think?  Why did the guy miss?  He get called in to work, he just say "fuck it" or did he want to watch 9 1/2 weeks on cable with his girlfriend because that's the only time he gets a blowjob?

There's really only a few options.
1. Handwave the catching up.  "Oh my god, what a miracle you made it here alone." then move on.  Real people, real world. It takes precedence sometimes.
2. Tell him sorry.  You're willing to do some solo stuff, but you can't essentially double GM.  Might not be his fault he missed, but it sure as hell isn't yours.  He'll get some play, but going to have to abstract some time with no real benefit.
3. Double GM.

Quote from: CRKrueger;937312Depends.  How long is it going to take for the party to be done do you think?  Why did the guy miss?  He get called in to work, he just say "fuck it" or did he want to watch 9 1/2 weeks on cable with his girlfriend because that's the only time he gets a blowjob?

There's really only a few options.
1. Handwave the catching up.  "Oh my god, what a miracle you made it here alone." then move on.  Real people, real world. It takes precedence sometimes.
2. Tell him sorry.  You're willing to do some solo stuff, but you can't essentially double GM.  Might not be his fault he missed, but it sure as hell isn't yours.  He'll get some play, but going to have to abstract some time with no real benefit.
3. Double GM.

He's a world class violinist who travels around the world doing concerts. Normally he's always playing somewhere, but he manages to clear his schedule for when we play. Sometimes he can't though.

But he's pretty dedicated. One time he drove down 8 hours all the way from Boston to make it in time for the game, played all night, then drove back up to play his concert.

And he's fine with #2, I think. I just am trying to nail down exactly HOW much to abstract. I was going to settle for three attempts at different goals a day.

So for instance, he wakes up on Monday, and decides:

1) First, he wants to establish some contacts in the thieves guild.
2) Next, he wants to infiltrate a mage guild on the behalf of the thieves guild.
3) He wants to steal the magic guild's plans.

Something like that. Maybe 2 and 3 would be combined into one. For the first I'd probably just roll one or two Persuasion checks and give him the results. The next, a Stealth check or two, the last, not sure.

This is opposed to, play out word for word the conversations and actions involved in all of those things.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937298What's the best way to handle situations like these?

Campaign turns, for starters.

Yes, it's perfectly fine to 'zoom out' and 'fast foward' a bit in resolving routine activities, as you can always zoom back in and resume game turns or whatever should a situation require it.

Let's take your spying on an enemy guild example. The player formulates a strategy: her character's going to pay the slop boy at the tavern across the street to keep an eye on the place while she searches the city records in the town hall for information. Keeping an eye on a gateway and pouring through books and scrolls don't require moment-to-moment action or resolution. Each evening the adventurer visits the tavern to receive the slop boy's report on the goings-on at the guild, and there's a chance she finds something noteworthy in the city records, but even this doesn't need to be resolved day-to-day - you could say that in a week there's x chance of finding y clues and the slop boy will confer z interesting observations. You can also introduce complications, like the slop boy disappears from the tavern one day and no one knows where he's gone, or someone grows suspicious of the wizard spending so much time in the stacks at the town hall.

In our Boot Hill campaign, my character is participating in the round up. Time is resolved week to week, with a daily encounter chance - if an encounter occurs, we zoom in for that, but otherwise the week is spent rounding up cows, branding mavericks, and negotiating deals for cattle, none of which need to be handled individually. Just like most of our day jobs, it's pretty tedious stuff, except when it suddenly isn't, as when a deserter from Fort Griffin tried to steal my character's horse and got kil't for his trouble.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;937320Campaign turns, for starters.

Yes, it's perfectly fine to 'zoom out' and 'fast foward' a bit in resolving routine activities, as you can always zoom back in and resume game turns or whatever should a situation require it.

Let's take your spying on an enemy guild example. The player formulates a strategy: her character's going to pay the slop boy at the tavern across the street to keep an eye on the place while she searches the city records in the town hall for information. Keeping an eye on a gateway and pouring through books and scrolls don't require moment-to-moment action or resolution. Each evening the adventurer visits the tavern to receive the slop boy's report on the goings-on at the guild, and there's a chance she finds something noteworthy in the city records, but even this doesn't need to be resolved day-to-day - you could say that in a week there's x chance of finding y clues and the slop boy will confer z interesting observations. You can also introduce complications, like the slop boy disappears from the tavern one day and no one knows where he's gone, or someone grows suspicious of the wizard spending so much time in the stacks at the town hall.

In our Boot Hill campaign, my character is participating in the round up. Time is resolved week to week, with a daily encounter chance - if an encounter occurs, we zoom in for that, but otherwise the week is spent rounding up cows, branding mavericks, and negotiating deals for cattle, none of which need to be handled individually. Just like most of our day jobs, it's pretty tedious stuff, except when it suddenly isn't, as when a deserter from Fort Griffin tried to steal my character's horse and got kil't for his trouble.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for. However, my first thought is, when focusing on doing one thing, surely that isn't 100% of the focus of your time. So couldn't the player say something like, "Why do I have to only focus on that, can't I multi task and fit in other activities while doing that first thing?"

Also, what if something would take less time than a week to normally resolve.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937322. . . [M]y first thought is, when focusing on doing one thing, surely that isn't 100% of the focus of your time. So couldn't the player say something like, "Why do I have to only focus on that, can't I multi task and fit in other activities while doing that first thing?"

Sure, you can do more than one thing, but your efficiency is going to drop and it's going to take longer.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937322Also, what if something would take less time than a week to normally resolve.

Set a parameter: searching the archives to find all clues relevant to the guild takes thirty +/- 1d6 man-hours - now ask the player how much time they care to spend each day.

How would you decide how your efficiency drops? Do you decide ahead of time how many days each activity will take, or hours, and then just let them split it up between them?

That seems like you'd be back to micromanaging every hour of the day though...

Have the player make a little list of what they want to do during the downtime. However long that might be.
Then sit down and parse out how long some of thats going to take and wether or not some of thats going to need a roll or two for success.

For example searching the library for records. Ask the player how long each day their character is devoting to searching. Then make a DC investigation or equivalent check based on their time allotment. Then do the same with any other activities that might need some checks to complete. Maybee add a bonus for each day. Or not. Or use the simple method in the 5e PHB for example.

But say the player wants to do research, and tail a suspect, and hit the bars each day. Then just ask how much time to each they are devoting. Give them 16 hours per day but let them know that if they dont devote some time to personal care like eating and such then its going to impact everything else. And remind them of travel time from point to point. Especially if its a big city.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937333How would you decide how your efficiency drops? Do you decide ahead of time how many days each activity will take, or hours, and then just let them split it up between them?

I eyeball it, and I don't let players get away with being Sonic the fucking hedgehog, trying to cram every gawdamn thing into as little time as possible.

The key here is, as I noted in the linked blogpost above, is ask the player what they want to accomplish, and then figure out how long you think that should take and what resources they need. If the players can come up with a reasonable strategy for simplifying the task, then adjust, but remember, some things can only happen so fast. Going through tax rolls and deed recordings for scores of years to uncover the sketchy fuckers who first owned the site of the guild hall takes time and patience.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937333That seems like you'd be back to micromanaging every hour of the day though...

'I'll spend four hours each day at the town hall checking the records' is hardly micromanaging every hour of the day.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937298The party in my game split. Or rather, one player was missing for a session, the party left them behind in town, and entered a magical cursed forest that's almost impossible to get out of.

Normally in these situations, we take the missing player's PC on as a pseudo-NPC, not doing much but hanging along, to avoid exactly this situation.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937298Normally I just let the players "poof" into the game and join the action when they were missing last time, but this time it would begger too much disbelief for the left behind character to make the trek, as the big selling point of the forest is its old school D&D resource management, man vs the environment.

So the player is in town, and wants his character to figure out where the others went and do some other things in in the meanwhile.

So, the rest of the party just disappeared while he popped into the tavern, violin shop or Little Adventurers' Room?

Maybe they told the missing PC where they were going or where they would be in a few days time. I wouldn't assume the PC doesn't know anything about where they are, unless their destination arose through gameplay while the player was not present.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937298How can I resolve this outside of the game? As in, what level of abstraction do you normally operate on when figuring out "downtime" activities? In this case, the player would play minute-for-minute if they could until they catch up to the rest of the party. However, this is unmanageable and would make it so they never actually catch up in the game's timeline, as they are almost two weeks behind now.

We took two or three sessions just to play out one day, and while it was fun, it's obviously going to mean he never catches up.

OK, so it took three sessions of gameplay to cover one day of game time. That means the PC is one day behind, not two weeks behind. Or is the PC two weeks behind as the campaign has moved on by two weeks? It isn't clear.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937298But at the same time, I feel like by abstracting the situation I'm cheating the player out of control over what happens. "You can choose three things a day to focus on achieving," etc., but normally they'd have much finer control over what they do. And so forth. Or let's say they want to spy on an enemy guild; normally they could go through all sorts of strategy to try and make it happen, but here I'd probably reduce it to two or three dice rolls and then tell them the overall result of their goal.

Also it means if they involve themselves in potentially dangerous situations like combat, then it would be simply one abstracted dice roll away from "you're in jail now" or even "you died" which just feels cheap. I dunno.

I seem to remember that your party likes to micromanage everything, sometimes going on an hour by hour description of the days. In this case, this is not advisable. Let the PC wait for a few days, realise the party isn't coming back and then do something about it. Asking around is only dangerous if someone has something to hide. Drop in NPCs who know something about the party, did they meet anyone on the way, could someone have seen them? If necessary, allow an NPC to tell the PC something important, or drop a big hint.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937298On the other hand, there's no other way.

There's always another way.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937298What's the best way to handle situations like these?

First of all, don't let it happen. Seriously.

If it does happen, then don't stubbornly block the PC's attempts to find the party.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937309Actually, I might as well throw in the situation the main party itself got into as well.

They got trapped into a room with a sealed demon. The demon offers them power and knowledge if they remove the seals trapping it. They don't want to, but need to figure a way out of the room they're trapped together in before hunger and exhaustion force them to cut a deal with the demon out of desperation.

So, how long has it taken for them to do this? It isn't clear.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937309At what point should I start "fast forwarding" time to be, they're stuck for a day, two days, three days, or am I going to have to play out every single solitary minute as they try to figure out how to get out?

I'd fast forward straight away, personally. No point going through every minute. Say "A couple of hours pass, what are you doing?". Carry on as often as required.

In game time, the party is about two weeks ahead. It's been two weeks since they left, and the traveling originated when that player wasn't there. We have only caught up one day for that player.

So the MIA player is 2 weeks behind the rest of the party in the timeline?

About all you can do here is have the player figure out what they want to do in that time and leave the rest to just milling about relaxing, practicing, whatever. It doesnt have to all be adventure related or even relevant. Focus on getting group A done and then skip forward to the reunion and carry on if need be.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;937363In game time, the party is about two weeks ahead. It's been two weeks since they left, and the traveling originated when that player wasn't there. We have only caught up one day for that player.

How long will it take the character to figure out where everyone has been? (Fast forward talk, RP a key NPC as needed)
How long will it take the character to track them down? (Fast forward travel, punctuated by a couple of hazards/encounters)

As long as that number is about 13 days, you're all set.