I’ve managed to talk 3 people to death, I love bards

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.

that likely means your instance hasn’t federated with lemm.ee or has it blocked, check the block list and if its not blocked search the text “!osr@lemm.ee” in your community search, it will show not found but if you leave it a second to index it and try again it should work

The most useful advice I’ve got is to plan only a few sessions ahead (in detail) so you don’t lose too much when the players change direction. This doesn’t mean you should ignore larger plots, just try not to get hung up on details.

Apart from that try not to prep plot but prep situations, which is to say: “the players will then talk to the wizard to ask about x” is very limited but “most people in the town know the Wizard is an expert on x” gives more freedom as to how the scenario will go.

I personally also like to focus on factions and characters and their motivations. So knowing the villain’s plan or how factions are coming into conflict and then relating that into consequences the players can see works for keeping things feeling consistent and lets me work up new plot threads on the fly

IMO it goes triply so for games with guns, if regular enemies can just shrug off bullets to the head I have difficulty enjoying it cause it just makes the weapons feel weak