Today's discussion:

Times a critical member of the party was not there and the GM planned for them to be there.


I got nothing.

One of my players was going to miss the next three sessions. The party had just leveled up and she wanted to dip into Cleric, so I said that she would run off and join a church in the city they were staying while the player was gone. I always try to aim for in-story reasons why characters are missing when players can't make it.

So, the rest of the party is now down the future cleric. They were told by the Guard Captain to go help out three different NPCs, in whichever order they wanted. I timed it so that one of the NPC quests would be done during the period the future-cleric would be missing. The rest of the party chose the quest that involved fighting undead in a graveyard...

When the other player finally came back, her first question was "What did I miss." Cue the rest of the party groaning about how useful a single Turn Undead would have been when facing down hordes of exploding skeletons.

So, we were playing a low-level Mutants & Masterminds campaign in a "supernatural detective" vein. The team normal had been abducted and forced to go through a series of deadly trials, "Saw" style while the rest of the group on the outside were presented with challenges of their own that they could complete to help assist the one on the inside.

At least until the one playing a sort of shadow-ghost just said "I'm done and I'm not coming back." No explanation beyond that. She just ditched us when I'd set up the challenges on their side of the RP to take the presence of a nearly-intangible party member into account.

The campaign basically imploded not long after that for reasons that went beyond her spontaneously abandoning us, but it certainly didn't help.

Well we had a story, where our paladin-player was playing with the idea of becoming a fallen paladin; of course for blackguard and similar.
I (as DM) threw a dungeon at them with a few random encounters and a "lesser deck of many things". Its similar to the one in the DMG, but not that insanely game breaking. But, for fun's sake, I included: "A Pit fiend appears". It was a 1 of 25 chance. Guess, what the paladin drew. So he pledged his loyalty and became fallen, that is until the next level up he had none of his abilities.

Next random encounter.... I roll .... Undead! Who's got the heaing spells? The Paladin was the main healer.... damn :(

Design the game so magic healing is required for any group to survive. Give magic healing to only 1 class. Make this class more powerful than all the other classes combined because otherwise healing would be boring. Ban this class because of all the overpowered stuff it can do. Wonder why pc's die all the time due to lack of healing.

In one pathfinder game we were in a major city, we were investigating the Blackrock museum about some dispearences that occured.
I was playing a level 2 human evocation wizard and I had pretty good knowledge bonuses in almost everything and knew about 11 languages, meaning I was the only one who could translate for the group.
However I was not in the museum when the party needed to use my skills.
We kept getting ambushed and fighting alot of pretty bloody battles that we ran out of healing items, so the group sent me to go get some from a nearby shop.
I had the lowest hp left at that point and had the fastest move speed in the group (I was pretty much a braver and more magically adapt version of Rincewind) to get more healing items.
While I was away the gm asked what the rest of the party was doing, they decided to go ahead and ended up in what seemed to be a dead end with a dragon statue coming out of the wall.
The GM then has the statue talks in an language that it turns out only the wizard knew (draconic), but everyone else didn't.
Our tank decided to attack the statue and the party got burning hands for there trouble, making most of the party in worse shape and one player dead.
Now I was gone for less than 5 ingame minutes and they managed to get into that kind of trouble.
I handed out the healing items and went to the statue, the rest of the party decided to hang back and in the tank words " watch the wizard get burned".
The statue repeated what it said which was " A Quest of love, Ends with me, Yet I am made Endlessly, If I am drop I say my name, If I touch rock, Secrets Revealed"
I replyed ring and touch the statue with a ring, the statue move out of the way to reveal a secret passage way to the boss.

It made my week.

I had to use notepad, no office.

Shit happens, and someone's got to sew together the pieces. But what happens when the medic/cleric/mad doctor wasn't there?

Tell your story about surviving despite not having a healer in the group, or when you lost said healer and it all went to hell.

Does it count if we only learned afterward that our cleric was not a cleric?

So there's five of us. Two wizards, a sorcerer, the cleric, and a fighter who was minmaxed to hell and back. He was level 8 and had a DR of 12, along with an armor class of 40+. He was basically untouchable, but he needed to be, since he was the only melee fighter in the group.

Our cleric used this prissy little light crossbow, and other than a couple emergency daggers, it was all he had bought, since almost all the party's gold went toward making the fighter immune to everything. Pretty much all of it, after spell components and other assorted vital things for spellcasting.

Anyway, there was a massive battle, and in the middle of it, a nasty bugbear barb manages to run past, right to where we were. One enormously successful whirlwind attack later, and we were down to single digits, with me in the red and bleeding out.

And then our cleric appears out of nowhere and slams his daggers into the bugbear's neck. One hit KO. He has us up and running in moments... and then a stray arrow hits him, and he drops his wand of healing. It rolled into a grating and was gone.

Now we had no healer, and one wizard acted out of desperation. He grabbed my pack and started chucking bottles at the hordes. Funny thing, I had a lot of lamp oil in there. And a couple alchemist"s fires.

In my own panic, I hosed the whole place down with lightning. Quick casting metamagic is a beautiful thing.

We won, and all survived, but we were pretty angry with the rogue for telling us he was a cleric. We had to go all the way back to town and buy a bunch of healing goodies.

Final battle of my first ever campaign. The party was facing off against a Big Bad duo in the middle of a whole slew of their cultists as they were trying to sacrifice an important person to summon some otherworldly nasty. The big two were what amounted to a Metal Genasi and a centaur-turned tiefling. It's one heck of a story, but I'll focus on the relevant part.

One of the very first rounds of combat, the centaur charges our dedicated healer with a huge lances and lands an enormous crit, splattering her against the wall from full health and making all of us first-time players go "Oh CRAP." Even the GM was wincing about that one.

Between the wizard and my paladin we still had some healing, but obviously we couldn't allow that guy to keep running amok like that, so... I charged him right back. Did well enough on my opening round to convince him to drop the lance and draw his sword (or at least gave the DM enough excuse to not continue that tactic). Problem was, I was the tankiest party member and he could effortlessly hit my AC, and after I managed to hit him back a couple times he started to take me seriously and switched into a more defensive combat stance. Suddenly I couldn't touch him and he was slowly but surely whittling me down. But the rest of the party had their hands full with the rest of the encounter, so I was effectively locked in to my 'duel'.

Fortunately the party did eventually manage do kill everything else and we could all focus on the tiefling centaur. He still nearly killed a few more of us, and interestingly we never did manage to hit him very much. We finally managed to kill him by poisoning him and then stalling. The wizard remembered he had a magic item containing many charges of Circle of Protection Against Evil --that he promptly cast and recast around the boss. My celestial mount knew a few spells that I didn't, so I mostly focused on deflecting blows and let her repeatedly Haste the poison we'd hit him with.

We joked that, in pokemon terms, we resorted to Toxic and Protect.

My GM has been running us through a Pokemon campaign, and through a series of strange circumstances, my character was turned into a girl, then turned back, then split into two separate beings, male and female. The male version is our party's healer and the only one with access to Special Attacks and status moves without his Pokemon.

Our GM tells us that we're going to be teleported to another world for a section of the campaign, and tells me that only one of my characters can come along, and that the other will be left behind. Given that she was fairly new and I wanted to get used to playing as her and her build, I picked the female. Almost immediately, I began wishing that I had picked the other character- we were taking lots of damage, had no status conditions or special attacks, and were pretty much relying entirely on our female party member's insane DPS to survive. We've gotten access to some stuff to help us out a bit, but it's still annoying to see something happen and go "wow, my other character would be -really- useful here".

What the heck kinda campaign are you playing?

Apparently Ranma 1/2 pokemon version

Make this a thing. Do it. I want to play a gamewhere I am cursed to go back and forth between a pokemon and a human.

That could make for some freaking awesome gaming!

Raxon makes a very compelling argument... I second this.

So if i were to start work on a Pathfinder, 3.5 or Mutants and Masterminds campaign and running it on Roll 20 or skype, who all would be intrested?

I would be up for that Malroth!

As for the story time, I was running a campaign in pathfinder where I was expecting the team druid (who was the primary healer) to be present. Five minutes before we run, she tells me she won't be there, so the group fights a miniboss without access to any healing at all. Cue them getting through with the front line fighters at less than 5 health at level 4. They had to run across a desert to get to where the druid was left behind. They never ran another session without her present.

remind me of a party where no one was wanting to play a healer, because it was'nt the style.
One character come up with a really tall guy who was a sniper with imropoved precise shot. he carried on his back a tank of healing potion linked by a tube to a weapon in his right arm. he could heal the party by shooting healing potion at them, either short shot or long stream. he had a similar weapon on his left arm, but linked to his poisonous reservoir, that he used to shoot poison at the enemy.
all fun until the time a treacherous NPC inversed the two tube behind is back, linking them to the wrong reservoir. he ended up throwing a burst of healing potion to the monster we where fighting.
could have been worse, he could have thrown poison or acide at one of us.