Missing Characters and Messy Character Sheets

One decision I have made in the past that I am reconsidering is what to do when players are absent. In the past my call was that if possible the character belonging to that player does not appear. If in combat or in a situation where they wouldn't normally expect to leave they stick around, but if possible they aren't involved in the adventure.

Their are multiple reasons for this. One is a particularly painful memory where I missed a session and my character died. The other players apparently used my character as bait for a red dragon and when I returned the next session I found that I had been reduced to ashes. Especially painful was that this was a character who only died twice in his career. Another reason is that I just generally don't like it when you come back to a game and people say "Oh, your character did this" or "This happened to you". I also prefer to have players focus on their own characters instead of spreading their attention to multiple characters.

I also find that when other people play your character, they never do a very good job. With complex characters it is often hard to figure out how to utilize them. I have had players basically have other characters they were controlling do very little because they didn't know how to use them. One of the reasons behind this is the character sheet is often hard to understand.

I have seen many different ways to represent character information. I have seen pencil writing on a variety on pritned out sheets. I have seen handwritten pages with various formats. I have seen single page custom printouts that get updated with pencil scribblings, and printed characters sheets spaced out over more than five pages. It turns out that character sheets can be hard to read. Even if they were easy to read it would still be hard to know the spells and tactics of another character well enough to play them effectively, but making character sheets easy to read would be a big step.

Having a single type of character sheet that is easy to understand and complete would probably make a big difference. In my current game the players have copies of their character on the game wiki. I could enforce more standardization in their notation and ask them to make sure things are updated, but I suspect this would require harassing and I am not sure how well it would work.

The reason I am reconsidering my decision is that increasingly at high levels the presence or absence of a single character makes a huge deal. Encounters that would be easy for five become hard for four, or encounters hard for five become impossible for four. It becomes difficult to balance things as a DM since the party strength swings rapidly. For basic survivability the players need every single character.

So fourth edition eases this problem since they have a strong format for character statistics and the game itself is much simpler with fewer interacting abilities. Third edition also has a standard representation, but it is a poor one and it is also one that players don't tend to find appealing.