Stunt Doubles for Absentee Players
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The 4e DMG2 debuted official rules for ‘companion characters,’ which are basically just monsters that work for the PCs. I’ve been doing similar things for a while, and have even used this concept as a replacement for an actual PC when I had a player (the ubiquitous tag-along-significant-other) who didn’t do well with the complexity of a full character.
Now, one problem every game has to find a way to deal with is that of absentee players. Clasically, I’ve been in the school of thought that PCs of absent players either are not present if the story permits or otherwise fade into the background– they’re technically there, but are not played in combat, don’t get any treasure/rewards, etc). In 4e in particular, PCs are just too damn complicated to ask a player to take over someone else’s.
But… a companion character is quite easy to control in addition to your normal character. It’s basically a monster, everything relevant is on a handy little sheet.
So I started thinking: what if the players, in addition to their normal character sheets, also maintained a ’stunt double’ companion character, which could be run by someone else if the player can’t make it.
So to make a stunt double, here’s what you do.
The stunt double gets the PC’s hit points, healing surge value, healing surges, defenses, and ability scores.
The stunt double also gets one each of the PC’s basic melee and basic ranged attacks.
The player then chooses one at-will power, one encounter power, one daily power, and one utility power; the stunt double gets all of these, using the PC’s normal numbers. Care should be taken to choose relatively simple and straight-forward powers, but also ones which are ‘iconic’ to the PC. In particular, the stunt double should still be able to fulfill the PC’s role in the party (so, for example, a cleric PC should almost always give his stunt double healing word as the encounter power). Ideally, it should be both easy for anyone to play this stunt double and also feel like the same character as the PC.
Finally, the player chooses any three skills and the stunt double gains those skills at the PC’s normal values; all other skills are rolled at ability score modifier + half level, as normal.
That’s a neat idea. I wonder how well that would work for a slightly stripped down version of 4e, having everyone play “stunt doubles”
David´s last blog ..Dungeoneers Parchment
Would probably work pretty well, although you would need to make sure everyone was capable of fulfilling their class’s roles. For example, the player I mentioned who played essentially a companion character had inspiring word as a recharge 456. Obviously could be used more often than the real thing, but that was to make up for the fact that she lacked any other healing or buffing powers.
Having done something similar to this in my first 4e campaign, I can testify that it works very well indeed. And I just used the DMG1’s NPC rules; I’m sure it’d work even better based on on the companion character rules.
[...] Stunt Doubles for Absentee Players Have missing players quite often? Don’t want to resort to playing board games on your RPG night? Me neither. Want to play someone else’s character while they’re gone? Me neither. Here’s an idea to keep some of the power levels in the group up while players (and therefore characters) are missing from the game. [...]
I like this idea alot. I can really see using that as I have people they miss games due to work from time to time.
Deacon´s last blog ..Xp November session 1
How would you adapt this to deal with the complexity of characters, especially wizards in 3.5?