no need to punish the characters, it is the players who are late. you must boobytrap their lives somehow.

Don't be the kind of prick DM that punishes characters for player actions.

But do tell your friends to stop being pricks because everyone else wants to play a game not sit around with their dicks in their hands.

They're probably busy fucking each other. When I used to play, the game started when it was scheduled to start, give or take five minutes, and the late player's characters decisions were made by the DM as he saw fit.

It worked pretty well, and mostly nobody complained.

I tend to enact revenge through cruel and unusual critfails, no matter what the slight.
Granted, they usually don't have long-lasting effects.
I might be too nice.

>>313186
However, it depends on the group.
I recall a specific incident where the DM was rather strict about people showing up on time and the person supposed to contact me didn't. Whenever a person didn't show up, the rest of the party controlled their characters by a vote.
It was a high-turnover campaign (World's Largest Dungeon, I think) and so we had three or four backup characters on tap.
So I'm sitting around eating lunch, when the DM calls me. It's been an hour since the session started, and I wasn't being called to remind me that the session was today- No, I was being called because my four characters had already been killed as cannon fodder, and I was 'Out'.

...I really hope I'm not as irritating as this suggests.

>>313187
Oh man, That sucks. D:

Sorry to hear that.

>>313182
Make them roll against gayness. For eachother. If they fail, they'll be a good reason why the characters aren't there for the first fifty minutes.

Bonus points if they voluntarily fail.

>>313189
Later on, someone apparently broke the game by getting the DM's word in writing that Shatter worked on sections of larger things and using Baleful Utterance to tunnel around and break doors from thirty feet away.
I wasn't very torn up about it.