I don’t have a fun and entertaining way, but I wanted to put in two cents anyway. My husband DMs frequently, and regularly has players miss sessions. Life gets in the way, whatever, no biggie. He always explains players being gone as a story that is told long after it happened - different people remember things slightly differently, sometimes they remember certain important figures being there and sometimes they don’t. They might even argue about it, ten years down the line. To him, every session is just another chapter in a story, told by imperfect people with imperfect memories.

I was in a weekly game for preteen girls and their dads. Our standing rule for missing players was that their character was with the party but had terrible diarrhea and was off in the corner, shamefully pooping the whole time.

It worked for the game’s demographic. Fun and gross and gave everyone a chance to lightly tease the player who missed the last session.

I’m running a game for a discord server and by its nature people will drop in and out. So I wrote it into the overarching plot. Reality is literally coming apart at the seams. Objects and creatures from other worlds have been leaking in. At the same time things have been dissappearing without a trace. Not just stuff either, an entire city just vanished in a flash of green light. A powerful wizard is investigating and needs adventurers to go out and do the grunt work. They’ve been traipsing about the planes trying to find the missing city and some clue as to what is happening.

There’s also a monk who’s working for the wizard. His job is to escort adventurers where they are needed via portals, meaning people will occasionally appear mid-adventure. Sometimes people slip out of reality. They experience it as a few seconds but the real time elapsed varies.

I let my character be used as a hostage while I was catching up at work and came home midgame to find out they were stripped naked and whipped, which still gives me weird vibes to this day. I don’t really want my shit “in play” when I’m not there.

I don’t d20 anymore because my schedule doesn’t really allow it, but my other regular DM would essentially work out canonical side-stories “once you’re back” if the absence is prolonged, otherwise “generically separated.”

Not everything IRL needs to be explained in-game.

You can use a generic excuse that works for the table at large, but ideally you can find one in the character’s backstory somewhere. This just helps tie it all together a little bit, helps maintain better immersion.

Some various excuses are visiting someone, be it friends/family/mentor/whatever, training time, some other responsibility (a cleric might be told by their order to go do whatever), medical issue, extreme bouts of sloth, basically being Batman, paying a debt, taking care of a small solo mission or whatever comes out of your ass that day.

Once heard a guy tell me about a game he was in. When a player didn’t show up the character turned into a gold coin. And when the player returned the coin would turn back into a character. During the game the party found out the BBEG was the one doing rituals to turn people into the coins.

I actually decide with the players one of 3 methods for missing players after I got sick of trying to come up with ways that they pop in and out every session. A. Your character was assumed present but invisible, you get filled in and were there in character B. Your character ceases to exist, there is no in-story explanation and you’ll need to catch up on the details in character. C. The missing player comes up with a reason for their disappearance and what they were doing

But I’ve also had some fun with it before, One of my players in high school warned me ahead of time that once school started up again they’d not be able to make it until the next break. This resulted in them being possessed by the BBEG and culminated in the party saving them as the break started up again, I then had the perfect excuse of them being partially processed by the defeated BBEG who was taunting them with their past, so when they missed a session it was because of possession or manipulation by said character.

I’ve also heard of people having some on-the-nose solutions like getting whisked away to another dimension to help them defeat an evil villain between sessions or getting lost in a pocket dimension/ethereal plane.

After 15 years of playing I came to the very easy conclusion that, at the start of the game we talk about how we as a group would like to handle a missing player. What the group wants is often the best way.

My personal preferred method I always suggest along side that is “If a player is not there, their character is not there and we don’t try to explain it in game, we just play.” - it is in my experience by far the best way, not “But Pyke should still come with us and help us!” hour long discussions. No “Well sorry Dave, last session when you weren’t there, Gimmerleaf died.” garbage. No one is going to spend that PCs resources or make a judgement call on “what that character would do” or how they would react to things.

It keeps the agency squarely on that players court while letting the rest of you just keep playing without having a bunch of in game worries about an IRL issue that is not under your control.

I have a good core group of five players, but we’re all adults, so it’s pretty common that one, for whatever reason, can’t make it to the session. I basically plan to run with four people, and which four it ends up being is always a fun surprise.

If a player’s not here, their character turns into basically a non-combat pet. Not targetable, not interactable, not doing anything, just tagging along behind everyone and occasionally glitching through a wall. The character knows everything that happens in the presence of the group, they hear all the conversations, they know who we fought and who we saved, but they’re otherwise a little intangible cosmetic. I’ll post a recap in the Discord server before the next session (which reminds me, I have a recap to write).

The only exception is if the missing player has a thing that the party really would like to be able to take advantage of in session.

If the missing player was the one holding the McGuffin, and the McGuffin would be really handy to use here, their non-combat pet version hands it to somebody to use for a second and then takes it back. If the missing player had the Keen Mind feat and someone’s trying to remember the truename of the Thief Lord they learned five sessions ago (which would be like three months in real time, since we play my game every other week), the non-combat pet chimes in with the answer and then goes back to being silent. If the missing player is the Cleric and someone goes down for good, the non-combat pet casts Revivify (on lair action initiative) and then vanishes back into the mist. If the party needs to get back to the wizard tower and the only one with Teleportation Circle has gone to visit their grandmother that weekend, Teleportation Circle gets cast.

If they have a power that solves or trivializes a challenge, which would otherwise be a massive pain in the ass (or a complete show-stopper), they use it and we go on. I’m not going to punish the player for not being here, and I’m also not going to punish the party for the player not being here other than the DPS/healing loss in combat (and, obviously, their contribution to social situations and their ideas for puzzle-solving).

The big thing I try not to do is not base anything super-important to the plot on any one character. They all have their personal backstory/patron quests, but they’re all tied very loosely to the main theme of the campaign. It’s happened before where I’ve had a session ready to go, and the events of the plot hinge on that character’s backstory mic drop moment, and then they can’t show up and I basically have to cancel the whole session. “This is the session where the Warlock finally gets to meet their real parents! And his parents are actually the bad guy’s henchmen! And they know about a piece of his True Plan! So after the emotional, tear-filled reunion, they give the party the next clue on how to defeat the villain, and reveal what the McGuffin is good for! …oh. The Warlock’s grandma got COVID? He won’t be here for… a while? Fuck. I got nothing.”

Nowadays, it’s more like “And this session is where the Warlock will finally meet their real parents! …oh, Warlock’s grandma got COVID? He won’t be here for… a while? Ok, no problem; the parents are in the next town, and everything else that’s happening in this town will just happen first.” Occasionally I have to do some minor retcons, but it’s not nearly as big a deal.

Alcohol poisoning - drank too much the night before and can’t face the day. They’ll catch up later!

If you must have them with the party you could run them in a supportive role and simply buff the party where possible (bless, guidance) and keep them off the front lines.

If the players trust each other enough you could have one of them run the character in a similar way to lighten your load.

Beyond that others have suggested good ideas: shopping, a job from their holy order, helping someone in town are always classics.

You could perhaps have the guard arrest them for something and have a jail break as well 🤣