Yikes. I’m at the bar right now but I can give you my advice.
I DM two groups right now. One I met online that for two years has met every Tuesday, at my home, barring my vacation on Tuesdays. The other is my realife buddies that play every other week online.
My irl Tuesday group is a party of 5. I only have one person who has to miss occasionally because of work(coast guard shifts). The only other person who has issues is less excusable (tired) but for the most part people show every week because they want to be there and plan for it. Things very rarely come up. One player in my group is married, one is engaged and another is in a LTR. Two others are single.
The man in the coast guard misses maybe once a month due to work or his kid(special needs kid)
But we move on. I have a solid core of 3. But I rarely have only three it’s normally 5 or 4 + a skyper.
They want to play. It’s a fun social event where we drink and hangout. We are just friends. The campaign moves a tad slow but we have a solid time.
My advice for that would be make it so they want this more than feel obligated?.
My other group online I just have like a 7 person party size, use a module and normally get 4-5 of the seven to show up. Sometimes I get 7 everyone has a blast but not much gets done.
Not sure this helps but if you have a few who always miss. Talk to them maybe try to change times or you may have to remove them. Or see if there is something that they don’t like try to make it better.
Also it doesn’t hurt to have a one shot in the back pocket for two or three players. Then those that always show will talk about that good time everyone missed.
As for flashbacks. You could just play the events of someone’s backstory. That time I hunted the griffon praying on wild turkeys and became my local towns legend!
yeah its really just one person and im bummed/worried i might have to do this esp cuz everyone else always seems so bummed when he flakes which in turn makes them not invested. its just really ahrd for me to do because this has been a party for about ~1.5 years now and its only become an issue in the last month so i dont wanna kick someone out for what in theory could just be a couple of inconvenient things happening recently.
also its at such an exciting part of the campaign and i would be really bummed if his character wasn't included in it
ive only ever played 3.5 (love it) and 4e (hated it) but i feel like i might be missing out on other good rulesets cuz i was so put off by 4e. Im a lot less biased against rulesets than i used to be and wanna try something new.
ive heard good things about pathfinder and 5e im startging to think as much as i love 3.5 it might be too much shit to expect new players to learn
part of me is into the idea of doing a very minimal rules campaign where theres jsut a few basic ones like stats and classes maybe where most of the outcome is determined by the dm but might be a bad idea to have such little structure.