The party usually operates as one unit. When they come to a major decision point, they get everyone's perspective and maybe take a vote. When they come to a complicated situation, each person contributes what they can to the course of action. And unlike in film or TV, the "camera" is pretty much always pointed at the party the entire time, with no occasional dramatic cuts to the villain's lair to show him talking to his cronies or whatever. That's the idea, anyway.
This does not always work out. Sometimes just because of circumstances outside of anyone's control, but oftentimes it's because of a deliberate decision. The party will eventually find themselves in a situation where they ask, "should we send the rogue to scout up ahead alone?" Even most experienced players will be uncomfortable taking the risk, and still always try to return to the status quo as soon as possible. "Don't split the party" is one of the most oft-repeated mantras in tabletop gaming.
Why You Shouldn't Split the Party
So the normal objections to splitting the party are either:
- For reasons related to balance and difficulty and stuff
- Meta reasons
The first one, I believe, can be dismissed out of hand by anyone who has even slightly old-school tendencies about how to run their game. If you don't bother balancing your encounters to begin with, then there's no way for a split party to ruin the adventure by disrupting the delicate balance of difficulty. I mean, yes, there's intrinsic strength in numbers regardless of the "math" of whatever game you play. So it'll always be easier for your party to succeed in the face of grave obstacles if they stick together. But the game is all about taking calculated risks, is it not? If everyone knows the risk that the rogue will be taking when they scout ahead, and the rogue's player is prepared to avoid any combat he can't handle alone, then all of that is fair and fun gameplay. Being in a situation where you aren't able to fight isn't a fail-state of the game, but rather something you should get used to.
The second one is more worth discussing. And this one itself has two primary concerns I've heard. The first is that people don't want to run the risk of metagaming by gaining knowledge about stuff happening to other people's characters while they aren't, themselves, "on screen." The second is the communal responsibility to uphold the social contract of making the game work for everyone. It's unfair to people when you ask them to sit out for the next hour, and most mature, cooperative players will want to make sure they aren't making in-character decisions that'll affect the out-of-character experience in such a way. Which, yes, is itself a form of metagame thinking.
But both of these are noble concerns! They both come from a place of good intentions, from players who want to play the game "right." I really appreciate how much effort my own players put into avoiding metagaming, even though I'm quite open about not thinking it's really that big of a deal. And I really appreciate that my players think about stuff like, "is this going to bore everyone if we just stay here analyzing these lore descriptions for another 15 minutes?" or "should I attack the troll when it's 9:30 and we all agreed we wanted to be done by 10? Maybe not."
And while I do still think that good and thoughtful players should strive for these kinds of thinking, I also think that splitting the party is one of the more acceptable instances in which one might risk breaking from these ideals.
Let me tell you a story of an adventure I ran a few years ago. It was called...
March Across the Styx
This was part of a loose campaign I abandoned called The Libation Bearers, although I still have intentions to revisit my plans for it and maybe adapt it for publication. It's a tour of my setting's Underdark during a time of total warfare between all the peoples of the deep. Inspired by the Thirty Years' War, each adventure would show some different situation created by the war aside from just battles and marching, to spotlight the less-glorified consequences of living in wartime. The players get to enjoy a spectator's view of things because they've been hired on a quest to go deliver some huge kraters of sacred wine to the dwarven kingdom for their centennial festival, keeping them uninvested in the war politically yet thoroughly involved in it nonetheless.
I am a pretentious storyteller, yes.
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| Some Dwarves |
Of course, it didn't go that smoothly. Hobgoblins are fucking bastards. So while they were told that the hob Voivode would be taking court appointments in three days' time and would hear them out to see if they should be granted passage, that inevitably got delayed until further notice. And while they were told that they'd be treated as outsiders to the conflict, they still had to lodge in a prisoner camp and do hard labor while waiting for the chance to speak to the Voivode. And while the players fully intended to keep their heads down, you can only endure seeing so much cruelty and oppression on an innocent civilian population before you try to do something stupid.
So within the first, like, day of them being there, the different party members each found themselves either fighting hobgoblin officers or cooperating with an underground rebel movement being arranged by the few remaining dwarven leaders. They also quickly got separated.
- The two monks intervened to protect a child being whipped by an officer. One of them attacked the officer but had to flee from a hail of crossbow fire, so she took the child and ended up running towards the city's keep and infiltrated it. Taken in by the dwarven house staff, they were cleaned and hidden there from the hobs.
- The other monk got punished for standing up to the hobs, and it wasn't the last time he made a ruckus. He later started a fight in the labor camp and was then put in the stocks for a few days, where he ended up spending much of the adventure.
- When the party bard made her talents known to the hobs, she was called to serve as entertainment for the Voivode and his lieutenants instead of participating in the labor, allowing her to act as a fly on the wall listening in on all of their strategizing.
Aside from those initial splittings, the other 3 party members each had individual experiences interacting with people and events during their time as POWs and eventually got into some trouble themselves. Compound this with the situation evolving from factors outside of the PCs' control, most prominently a big coordinated bombing attack conducted by a faction of kobold merchant POWs that nobody saw coming. And of course, rather than helping the situation, all it resulted in was greatly tightening security measures and further splitting up the party.
The thing which managed to tie it all together is that various characters were approached by members of the dwarven rebel movement and looped in on some of the discussion, being asked to conduct a few tasks for their plan to work. It became kind of a Robin Hood situation, with PCs sneaking around the streets of the city and hiding in the houses of sympathetic locals, spying on hob guards and sabotaging their work, passing messages along and stealing important things.
The players who were split from each other also made sure to get in contact in whatever ways they could, whenever possible, to loop everyone else in on all the latest developments. Sometimes this meant reuniting in full, but sometimes it meant stopping by to drop a message and then choosing to remain split. A prominent example is the monk who could have been rescued from the stocks several different times, but felt it was wiser that he remain there and befriend some guards rather than further destabilize the situation by escaping.
A bit more detail that'll be important: while I did basically tell the players what their goals were (sue me), they were all very open-ended problems. For their part in helping the rebel plan to succeed, the various party members were requested to find the answers to two questions and complete two errands:
- What is defending the rune tree? Every dwarf city has a tree covered in runes at the very highest level, and each rune can be activated to alarm another dwarven city that their security has been compromised. It's an emergency "help" button, and for various reasons the dwarves were prevented from triggering it during the hob siege. So their best plan is to reach that tree, trigger it, and hope for reinforcements to liberate them. The problem is that the hobs surely know about this tree and have put up some kind of defenses around it, so goal 1 is finding out what those are.
- What is defending the wharf? The dwarves are expecting any reinforcements they receive to come from the Styx wharf at the very lowest level of the city, especially since they've been told they can expect their allies the ghouls to come digging up from below in a few days. The players also have a personal interest in knowing the answer to this one since that's their primary exit route.
- Get weapons and armor for the team that'll be going for the rune tree. All equipment was confiscated at the beginning of the occupation, so a huge part of the challenge of this adventure was these normally-powerful 5E PCs having to operate like a bunch of normies for once. Part of this task was also deciding who would be part of that team performing the operation, since not all the players were necessarily going to be included. Plus, after spending several days on this adventure, they might have some ideas about NPC allies who they'd like to be there.
- Find and acquire the key to the rune tree. One of the original dwarven defenses of the rune tree is a big adamantium door with a complicated, unique lock. Their sheriff always kept the key on his person, and now it's in the possession of the cruel Worg sheriff the hobs have installed instead. He wears it around his neck on a collar, so the PCs needed to get a clear idea of his daily routine and how they could steal it from him.
Specific end results must be achieved, but the paths to reach them are completely undefined. Not as sandboxy as I normally do, but it made for a good adventure, and I'm interested in trying something like this again.
So let's talk about the effect that splitting the party had on the experience of running and playing the game.
Not Just "Not Bad," But Actually Kind of Better
So for one thing, just as, like, a problem-solving scenario that poses unique challenges to the players, this was neat. They had to work in small groups or solo, they couldn't rely on their friends' features, and they often needed time to work through complicated problems on their own. For 5E especially it was refreshing to not deal with a party who had a million tools in their belt at all times (spellcaster-heavy parties can be kind of exhausting to DM for).
But for the meta experience, it also had a surprisingly positive effect. The general flow of play ended up being a round-the-room series of solo games. I would DM one group or one person for around 30 minutes, find a good spot to leave them waiting, and then switch over to another group or individual. Everyone patiently waited their turn and was fully engaged once the camera was on them. At multiple points in the 5 or 6 sessions this adventure lasted, all six players were isolated from each other. And I understand why, initially, that probably sounds like a bad time. But here's why it worked:
Because they each had an open-ended problem to deal with, a fairly-complicated scenario within which to accomplish this, and a decent (but not perfect) understanding of that scenario (players freely got access to the city's map and quickly learned a lot about the factions in town and how the hobs run things), every player was kept busy thinking about their next moves even when it wasn't their turn to play. It was actually kind of fascinating to see. A player might spend 2 hours on the sidelines waiting to take their next action, but they'd spend the whole time sorting out their options and considering all the factors and risks involved. Every now and then they'd interrupt the current players' turn so they could ask a quick question about the scenario, and I'd usually answer it pretty freely. Partially because I didn't really mind, but more because I'd like to stimulate their planning a little longer so I could continue "stalling."
I ran the whole damn adventure like this for 5 or 6 sessions. Yeah, the juggling is kind of stressful and you can't guarantee that each person won't be left waiting for too long, but I have patient and understanding players who took things seriously enough that this worked. And it has some side benefits, too.
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| Some Hobgoblins (except they'd be riding on worgs) |
Half of the scenario was just based around the acquisition and distribution of information, with myriad key facts steadily coming in through different sources of intelligence over the campaign and players needing to account for how they could deliver messages they'd heard to other players who weren't present. If, like in most games, everyone was sharing the same "player knowledge" anyway, it would be really tedious to spend so much effort justifying how they could all share the same "character knowledge" (hence why I normally don't think metagaming is really all that bad most of the time). But in this case, they literally didn't share their "player knowledge"! I didn't even have to separate them into different rooms. The players were all sitting around the same table, just having constant side conversations with their small group or working things out in their notes on their own.
Another positive thing was how well it supported the open-ended nature of the adventure's design, which I think can often be tricky to get right. If you create a really robust and interesting open-ended scenario, then a lot of time might need to be spent just thinking and experimenting and not necessarily "moving things forward." And some DMs get impatient with that sort of thing, even though it's the exact outcome the situation is built for. Not to mention that the DM might prepare lots of material that goes totally unused, which is frustrating. Say what you will about railroading DMs, but they sure as hell don't have that problem.* But in this situation, literally nothing I prepared went unused.
Think about it: if you prepare three locations but the party only goes to one of them, then that's two locations that go unused. If the party splits up, you can use all three. Just make sure that each one is dynamic enough that you can leave a group of players waiting there for 30-60 minutes just debating about what to do next.
In fact, the added difficulty of splitting the party is another benefit to the adventure. Not just because I prefer hardcore games and I like challenges and stuff. But because combat is oftentimes the easiest solution whenever it's viable. But for characters who can basically never get into a fight, they have to instead be very calculating. That helps to keep them occupied with planning for a while, since they have to think about outside-the-box solutions. If combat were an option they'd probably be ready to play again after about 5 minutes.
Eventually they all reunited and got their equipment back and finished the mission. It got ugly, since the ghouls betrayed the dwarves and burned the city down, but oh well. There was a very satisfying merging of information, quite like the plot formula they've used in each season of Stranger Things (i.e. three separate groups each discover a piece of the puzzle, then reunite to put them together before the climax).
This was the adventure that made me begin writing recaps of what happened immediately after the session ended, because man was it necessary. But I'm glad for it because that's a habit that's helped me a lot with all my DMing since then. Part of that included writing down who knows what so that, when recapping the previous session, I could basically do each person separately and continue avoiding metagaming issues.
I've never attempted another situation this complicated or with so much party splitting, but it's valuable all the same just to know that you can easily get away with having at least one split happen for a session or longer. Especially now that I play online, it's an even easier ask of players to sit on the sidelines for 30 minutes, since they can more easily keep themselves occupied if they get any free time before I revisit them. Some DMs will advocate allowing the "inactive" PCs to play as NPCs on screen who are "extras" (I think the Star Trek Adventures RPG has this built right into the rules). Some DMs will do solo stuff on the side as a play-by-post style game. Maybe give that a shot, too.
I've been a player much more frequently than DM in the last year but splitting the party has been a recurring thing in every game I'm involved in. Sometimes you just gotta do a solo mission, and it's been far more liberating for everyone to accept these situations than to bend over backwards trying to avoid them.
Splitting the party, metagaming, and totally open-ended scenarios can each, normally, be tricky to navigate individually. But combine them all and they work perfectly. Train yourself to create complicated situations with difficult goals and a lot of information available to the players, and you could probably leave the game on autopilot for a long time as they just sit there strategizing. And to be honest, re-reading the recaps I wrote down years ago when I ran March Across the Styx, I felt that the party splitting really made the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
-Dwiz
*Well, unless they suck at railroading, too.
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