Dungeons and Dragons for d8 Players

One of the challenges we came to see as my gaming group aged was attendance.  People got jobs, started families, and with that, had other responsibilities that they considered more important than attending a weekly (or bi-weekly) gaming session.  While they were clearly wrong, I've been challenged with how to accommodate a variable number of players while still providing content to those who can make it.




1) Sliding Encounters

The simplest of these is designing encounters for a variable number of players.  Combat can be challenging to balance, especially when you don't know exactly how many people will show up.  Our usual D&D DM goes to fudging things to make an encounter flexible, but I prefer to have a plan.  One of Wizards' better tools available to subscribers is the Encounter Designer.   It's based around the formula in the book, where different types of creatures are worth different amounts.  It also lets you adjust on the fly.  Once I have the encounter balanced for my expected party size, I add/subtract numbers of the monsters I've chosen to make an appropriate encounter as low as 1 and as high as 7.

2) Modular Sessions
 Modules have been core to the D&D experience, and from them, I draw my next inspiration. As a DM, flexibility is the biggest tool in your arsenal, right ahead of extensive planning and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the rules.  If you have 4-5 sessions planned, you can substitute one for another depending on how the players present.  You may even give players the choice.  D&D can be approached similar to episodes of the A*Team even outside of a dungeon -- you have a roving band of adventurers.  They can follow any number of leads, and do a variety of things.   And -- the secret tool in the busy DM's arsenal -- you can recycle the module for later if the players don't bite and are disinterested, saving you time.

3) Monster-of-the-Week Modules
One of the big contributors to player disengagement is not being able to invest in the plot.  If I miss a session, I've missed essential information and I come back feeling like things have moved on without me.  While I can push on and participate anyway, it's not quite with the same level of enthusiasm.  Imagine if you had gotten up and gone to the bathroom during the movie version of Two Towers during one of the many slow walking scenes, and when you got back someone had to explain that Gandalf was dead, and that there was a Balrog in Moria.  On the other hand, when you don't have a core player at a session, you should be able to press on.
My solution to this is to draw from shows like the X-Files and Supernatural.  In these shows, "plot" episodes are accompanied by quite a good deal of Monster-of-the-Week episodes.  Each of these episodes has hooks into the plot that keep you intrigued, but these are really just teasers for the next plot episode, and do not themselves advance the plot.  Modular sessions work wonders here, because for every plot session you have planned where Gandalf dies in an epic battle, you have 3-4 Monster-of-the-Week sessions ready to go for when you have players you think might check out from being told, "Uh, dude, Gandalf's dead," or "Snape kills Dumbledore."

4) Session Chunking
The monolithic all-day sessions are pretty much done.  Even the 4 hour sessions are a bit long, and some players are on their phone playing Bejeweled after even an hour.  As I'm designing, I try to cut my modules off after an hour.  If the players have time to play 2-3 of them, that's wonderful, but I let players decide the cap on a session.  It also provides convenient opportunities for breaks, food, homeostasis, and the such, and makes it not so difficult to continue after a single player has to leave. 


5) Players Need a Base
Much like any good superhero team, they need a place to go for "downtime," and need to be able to go there between mini-modules.  Whether it's to accomodate a late player, to take a break, or for you to give more exposition.  It ensures that every module begins and ends at a location where it does not break continuity to have a character leave or arrive.  It also solves for the awkward DM-controlled PC scenario in situations where a player leaves mid-dungeon or a dungeon lasts multiple sessions, because it's avoided completely.  Similarly, characters need to be doing something off-screen.