We all struggle with scheduling games or cancelling games when people aren't available. I've found a stack of three tools that help me keep continuity at my table.
Kate over at Kate Plays recently wrote a piece called "The Open Table" and it is worth your time. She makes a strong case for the Open Table as a structural answer to Schedule Tetris. Her argument is essentially that a game built around a rotating fellowship of players, anchored to a persistent location rather than a fixed cast of characters, is more resilient than one that depends on the same five people showing up every week.
She's right, I've run and played this way, the Open Table is a real solution, but it's not right for everyone.
- My table runs small, usually four or five people. We're a small group of friends who play games during our lunch hour at work, so an Open Table isn't on the table for us.
- Playing during our lunch hour makes it hard to run a full delve per session. We can't really run the expeditionary model Kate proposes. (Though we certainly lean into the location driven, chronical model.)
With these constraints, here are the three tactics, we use to preserve continuity. Bubble Wrap preserves characters. Love Letters preserve player ownership. Demo Games preserve momentum.
What It Looks Like in Practice
These three tactics stack. On any given week, I'm looking at who's at the table and deciding which combination applies.
Full table: run the campaign normally.
One player missing: bubble wrap the absent character, run the session. Write a Love Letter before the next session opens.
Two players missing from a four-person table: this is the edge. I'll sometimes still run, depending on which characters are absent and what the session requires. Love Letters for both on return.
GM missing, or more than half the table gone: pull a demo from the library.
Tactic One: Bubble Wrap
The first tactic comes from watching John Britton over at 3d6 Down the Line. It's exactly what it sounds like. When a player can't make it, their character is still present in the fiction but is wrapped in protective foam for the session. They're there. They participate in the scene-setting. But they don't make moves, they don't take consequences, and nothing significant happens to them while their player is gone.
Before I started doing this, there was a standing joke at the table about the time I was "ghosting" a missing player's 1st level (AD&D) Magic User and I burned their one spell that day on a bunch of tunnel prawns (almost as dangerous as giant rats). It still comes up occasionally.
This is a social contract more than a mechanical rule. It asks the table to agree that a character's story is the player's to tell, and that the GM won't advance or damage that story without the player in the chair. It works because it's honest. We're not pretending the character is somewhere else. We're acknowledging that the fiction requires the player to be real. It's been a popular change with my players.
Bubble wrap lets us run most sessions at reduced capacity without compromising anyone's investment in their character. If three of four players are there, we play. The absent player picks up where they left off.
Tactic Two: The Love Letter
Bubble wrap handles the absence. But it creates a problem on the far end: the player comes back, and the game has moved without them. Their character was present but passive for a session or two. There's a gap between what the character fictionally experienced and what the player actually played. That gap needs to be bridged.
The Love Letter is my answer, and the credit for the original form goes to Vincent Baker, who introduced them in Apocalypse World. A Love Letter is a short, personalized move written directly to the absent character, addressed by name, that catches them up and immediately puts them in the action. It does two things at once: it acknowledges the fiction that happened without the player, and it gives the player something to do with it right now.
Here's one I wrote for Cedric, a legionnaire in my ongoing Dungeon World Arden Vul campaign, after he missed a session that ended mid-combat:
Cedric, training takes over before thought does. The chest crashes through the doorway. The crossbow fires. Lorez's fireball turns the room into an oven. In moments like this, legionnaires don't wait for orders. Tell us what command you barked as the fight exploded. Then roll +CON.
On a 10+, hold 3. On a 7-9, hold 2. Spend hold, one-for-one, during the opening moments of the fight to:
- Put someone exactly where they need to be.
- Spot a threat before it acts.
- Create an opening for an ally.
- Keep panic from spreading.
On a miss, hold 1, but the GM will tell you what danger you completely overlooked.
Here's another I wrote for Swalthazar, returning to the Plundered Catacombs in one of my Beneath Ahknoor playtests after two sessions in bubblewrap:
Here's a more recent one I wrote for Swalthazar, returning to the Plundered Catacombs in my Beneath Ahknoor playtest after two sessions on bubble wrap:
Swalthazar, you were there for all of it. You watched the chapel fall into chaos. You watched Caspian look away from an explosion like he'd planned it. The cursed spear on your back hasn't spoken to you for two sessions, and you haven't decided yet whether that's a relief or a warning.
Tell us: what were you doing while the others were making their moves? And what did you notice that nobody else did? Roll +VIT.
Depending on the roll, Swalthazar may return with new insight, lingering consequences, or an uncomfortable conversation with the spear.
The Love Letter works because it makes the returning player's first action about their character's interiority. They're not just picking up from a pause. They're narrating what it was like to be present without acting, and the roll shapes what that costs or rewards them.
Done well, a Love Letter lands a player back in the fiction faster than any recap could. And, it engages the rest of the table at the same time.
Tactic Three: The Demo Game
Bubble wrap and Love Letters together handle most situations. But there's a threshold where even that isn't enough. If the GM is missing, or if half the table can't make it, running the main campaign doesn't make sense. You either cancel or you do something else.
We do something else. We've been building a small library of short game demos: complete, self-contained scenarios that can be picked up and run in a single evening with minimal prep and a reduced group. I heard about demo games from two sources: Justin Alexander and the +1 Forward podcast.
The pitch in both cases is roughly the same: a well-designed demo scenario is short, punchy, requires no prior knowledge of the system, and gives players a complete experience with a beginning, middle, and end. It's not a tutorial. It's a real game, just a small one.
What I've added to this is intentionality about what goes in the library. I'm not grabbing demos at random. I'm looking for games that might be candidates for an upcoming short arc: a holiday special, a one-shot, a mini-campaign to run on the days we set aside for exactly that purpose. The demo doubles as a proof of concept. If the table responds well, we know we have something worth returning to.
I recently ran a demo of Enigma (by Andrew Pelham, PWYW on itch.io) for a couple of Beneath Ahknoor playtesters when the other testers were away on family vacations. We got a complete session out of it, I learned something about the system I wanted to know, and the players got to play a session we'd have otherwise cancelled. Both player mentioned it was a game that they wanted to bring to their non-work groups.
Other games in the library include:
- Scum & Villainy (played)
- Escape from Dino Island
- Cthulhu Dark
Next week I'll share what's actually in my demo library and how I decide which games earn a permanent spot.
If you want to see the campaigns where this is in use, I have an index for Beneath Ahknoor and for Arden Vul. Both pages have links to session recaps, short posts about what I'm learning, and more posts like this.
