Hello, Internet. Seth Skorkowsky, and today we’ll
be discussing Splitting The Party. One of the age-old mantras of Tabletop Gaming is to "Never
Split the Party." It’s emblazoned across memes, t-shits, there’s even a cute little song about it.
A couple years ago I was talking to a non-gamer friend of mine, and she said that while
she knew nothing about tabletop gaming, she did know that you never split the party.
It is a law etched in stone and inked in the blood of countless dead Player Characters who ignored
it. And like with many words of absolute wisdom, it isn't true. At least it's not true all the
time, or... There's a ton of exceptions to it. So that’s what we’re going to talk about
today. When you shouldn’t do it and why, and when you should do it and why, as
well as some tips for both Game Masters and Players on how to do it more effectively.
I’m pretty certain that the saying originated in the early days of tabletop gaming
with D&D and other Role-Playing Games, which were most often dungeon crawly in nature.
Often, a character might split away in search of treasure and encounter a bad guy, or would trigger
some deadly trap, and without anyone there, or at least enough people to help them
out, that character would die alone. Even in my own first group game of Dungeons &
Dragons, we were exploring the moat house ruin in The Village of Hommlet, and immediately we
all split up. And giant rats kicked my ass. Unable to take the hint, I then later broke off
again with another Player Character so we could loot some treasure, and we ran into some trouble. The
other character escaped while my character died. Now there are several good
reasons not to split the party up. First: In-Game Challenges Are
Often Designed for the Full Party. In a group game that's designed to challenge whole
party, heading off alone or at half-strength, often means that those characters are
ill-equipped to handle those challenges which were designed to be for a larger party.
Or at least that character needs to have second person with them in order to treat their wounds.
I’ve talked about in previous videos how lone wolves that go charging off on their own often
find themselves in need of making a new character. Next, while In-Character it might
be faster to split up the party and you can cover more ground in a shorter time,
it saves no time around the gaming table because there’s still only one Game Master, that Game
Master has to do the scenes one at a time. Often it can take longer out-of-character
if the group splits up because the Game Master might want to spend more of an an equal
amount of time with each of the sub-parties. So if half the party goes this direction in order
to do some task, and it takes them 5 minutes to do it, or it takes 5 minutes before the Game
Master then flips it over to This group that's doing their task. And they only really need 2
minutes in order to accomplish whatever it was that they were planning to do, a lot of Game
Masters are going to feel compelled in order to give this other group an equal amount
of playtime that they gave the first one. So instead of it just taking 7 minutes that it
would have taken if the group had just stuck together and gone to one location and then to
the other, it's now going to take the table 10 minutes to complete the same amount of tasks.
Next It can Be Harder for the Game Master to Run. Running a game can take a lot of mental
energy. And when a party splits up into 2, 3, or 5 different groups, a Game Master has to start
switching gears as they flip between the different groups, from going one, to another, to another.
This can lead to them making some mistakes or just wearing their brains out faster, which can
lessen the overall quality of the game. Another problem is that it Reduces
the Other Players Into Spectators. So let’s say your group splits off into 3 different
directions, and a Game Master gives 5 minutes to each sub-group, rotating their attention
around the table. That now means that the members of each subgroup have to wait 10 minutes
before they're allowed to have their turn again. Meaning that they're only getting to play 20
minutes out of every hour, and the rest of the time they're just watching other people play. And
they're not really able to join in because their characters aren’t present at whatever is going on.
This can lead to a lot of boredom and frustration, which not only diminishes the fun of those players, but
it can also hurt their own ability to play once the camera flips back to them and they have to
get themselves started up again in order to play out whatever the scene is that they're playing.
OK, so those are all really valid reasons not to split the party up. Some of those are Character
Reasons while others are for Player Reasons. Some people might argue that your
character not splitting up the party for Player Reasons is really just
Metagaming, and I guess technically it is. But as I’ve talked about before, there is a Good
Metagaming to ensure a more enjoyable game for everyone around the table. So now let’s
flip this around and discuss when and why Player Characters should split up the party.
First, When There’s Little to No Threat. In a dungeon or in a haunted castle, when you
know that there’s deadly monsters and traps around every corner and that everything there is
trying to get you and is trying to kill you, dividing your forces probably is
probably not in your best interest to do. But if the characters are in a town or in some
location that feels reasonably safe to them, such as they’re going shopping, the characters
might reasonably decide to split up. If the characters feel safe, it's a bit
ridiculous that they’re now refusing to let each other out of each other's sights.
Next, It’s Great for Short Recons. So you and your party are outside
the villain’s stronghold and you want to check the place out before you go
charging inside or starting your heist. Two of the characters, maybe a rogue and
a tracker have great stealth skills. They could do this with no problems at all.
However, you also have heavy fighter that's in big, shiny armor, and they can't
sneak at all, and they're going to surely get spotted if they try to sneak up on this place.
So it just makes a lot more sense for those 2 stealth characters to do a quick little scouting
mission, gather the intelligence, and bring that back to the rest of the party, than it would
be for everyone to go on this scouting mission, thus just increasing their chances
of getting spotted by the bad guys. It’s also Good For Short Thief Runs.
Burglars are gonna burgle. And if the PCs are hanging out in some urban
environment and we’re between adventures, a rogue character might take that opportunity
to use some of those rogue skills that they got. I mean, after all, they probably chose to
play a rogue in the first place just so they could use those rogue skills. And as long
as it’s a short side job of breaking into a house or plundering a merchant’s strongbox,
that should be perfectly fine for them to do. But the key to that is that it's short. If
the player runs off and takes far too long, or engages in combats, or otherwise just starts
hogging all the session time and taking that away from everyone else, then that can be problematic
for reasons that we’ve already discussed. So if they do want a longer Thief Run, they
might want to instead discuss doing a 1-on-1 adventure or a 2-on-1 game where they can have
the Game Master’s undivided attention and they really aren’t going to end up stealing time
from the rest of the players around the table. It also works great for Personal Agendas.
Some characters have their own agendas. Sometime is might be linked to their Backstory, or
maybe it's tied to some other reason like they’re being blackmailed and forced to do something
against their will, or doing something that they don’t want the other characters to know
about or possibly see for whatever reason it is. And that gives them a great reason to then
head off alone for a bit, do their business, and then come back to the rest of the group.
The Aliens Roleplaying game requires each character have their own Personal Agenda, which
really helps encourage that the players to split up from time to time, maybe under the excuse of
they’re going to go fetch an item or repair some engines, and then perform their own agenda unobserved.
Ticking Time Clocks might also require that the party split. I mentioned earlier how splitting up
in order to save time out-of-character doesn’t really work that way around the table, but there
are times that the party might need to split up in order to speed things up inside the game.
Such as the Player Characters have 1 hour before the bomb explodes or the city
sinks below the waves of the ocean. But before it does or in order to stop it, the
Player Characters first must have to complete 3 tasks. They don’t have time to do all these
tasks just one after another after another, so they have to split up in order to finish all
these tasks before the time runs out on them. So, players, if you are facing a ticking time
clock situation, don’t stick to the mantra of Never Split Up the Party, because that's going
to start working against you in that situation. And Game Masters, if you want to encourage
that your players split the party up from time to time, using a ticking time
clock is a pretty good way to do it. Splitting the party is also great
for horror games. I’ve talked about this before in a dedicated video, but the
feeling of isolation and vulnerability of being alone really helps ratchet the fear up.
Now with horror, players are understandably a bit more hesitant to split the party up. So
Game Masters might need to step in and kinda help push that along, sort of encourage
it and give ways to make the characters have to split up for whatever reason it is.
Alright, so there's a few good reasons to split up the party or not to split up the party.
And because this is a decision, in order to split up to party, something that's most often done
by the Players rather than by the Game Masters, it's really up to the players to gauge when
its most appropriate that they try to do so. Now one other tip, and this isn’t really about
whether you should or shouldn't do it, but more like How you should do it, is to
schedule when you're going to meet back up. If the Player Characters arrive in town
or at the adventure location and they just break off in all their own directions with no set
rendezvous time, it can cause some directionless wandering because no one really knows what to
do, and where to go, and that can suck up a lot more time in order to get them back together.
So, if you say, "I’m going to check out the lighthouse and pick up a couple supplies, and
we’ll meet back up at the hotel this evening," or "I’m gonna walk the perimeter of this building
while you're checking out stuff in the library. If you don't hear back from me in 15 minutes,
you better come and find me," that establishes a timeline for all the players and for the
characters. Because once the player is done with whatever task it was they were going to go do on
their own, or with a smaller potion of the group, that can kinda help them determine if they've
got enough time after that's complete when they should get back together and where they should get
back together. Otherwise the player can just say, "You know what, hey I'm done with whatever it
was. I'm going to go back to the Meeting Spot and just wait for the rest of the group to arrive."
And the second reason this is handy is because it helps the Game Master plan out what events might
occur once the group is split because they know what the plan is among the different players
and the characters. Otherwise, the players, once they’re done with whatever their task
is, might just aimlessly wander around, soaking up more time, so having rendezvous
that's established before the characters break up really helps establish focus in getting the group
back together and keeping the game on track. OK Gamemasters, so your group has decided to split
up. Maybe that’s by design, and is some sort of great plan that you put in motion early on, or
maybe they just decided to do this completely on their own and now you’re scrambling and
sweating bullets trying to keep the game flowing. No problem. First, Let Them Split Up.
Don’t tell them that they can't split up. Hopefully they’ll know how not to get themselves
into trouble - hopefully they watched this video - but if they do, it can make for a really valuable
learning experience on the value of teamwork. Next, Rotate Attention Between the
Sub-Parties. Remember that the longer you spend with one group is the longer that
the rest of the group is going to be sitting and watching and not playing the game, so try
to keep it pretty tight. I recommend that you try to keep it under 5 minutes that you pay
attention to each different group of the party. However, if you can, even if it’s before
that 5 minute timeline, or whatever it is that you set your timeline at, go ahead
and cut if you've got a good Dramatic Hook. Such the Player Character's in a room and they
hear approaching footsteps, or maybe the door just bursts open and now the bad guy is standing
there with their weapon in hand - And Cut! Or the Player Characters, they finally manage
to pry open that chest or get that door open that's got the valuable McGuffin inside of it,
and they're hoping it's in there, and before you announce what it is that they find, you,
"Cut!" and then go to the next group of players. I did a good example skit of this in my How to Run
a Horror video, when I covered doing dramatic cuts in Horror, so go ahead and check out that video
if you want to see more on that particular topic. Also if a group’s scene has gone and it's run
its course and there really isn’t anything more to add to it, even if they have a little
bit more time that's left on their clock if you're giving them an equal amount of
time, it’s often best to just go ahead, make sure they're done doing whatever it
is that they need to do, and just go ahead and rotate to the next group of players and
keep the game moving at a pretty quick pace. Once upon a time many years ago, I would separate
all the players out if their group split up, essentially taking the ones that
I was talking to to another room, or I would kick out the other players who weren’t
actively in that scene, to make it more realistic that way no one would really know what was
going on with the other group of players. But now, outside of any special circumstances,
that are completely dependent on the game, I just go ahead and let the other
players watch what's going on. They key though, is the players that are watching
the scene that their characters aren't involved, that they aren’t distracting the active players.
They aren’t blurting out or involving themselves in any way because they're not in that scene.
Yes, the players that are sitting around watching are going to be privy to any information
that their characters don’t know about yet, but I just expect my players not to
metagame that and use that knowledge, and mostly just stick to the spirit of the game.
Then once the Player Characters all regroup, it saves us all the time of the PCs catching each
other up on what all it was that they did while they were separated, what all they encountered.
They player can just say, “Hey, I tell them what happened” or "I paraphrase what happened," and
that way everybody already knows what happened, now that we know our characters are caught up and
we can just keep moving forward with the game, rather than recounting what we've already played.
One of the biggest concerns that happens when a party splits is, "What if they Get into a Combat?"
As we’ve already mentioned, many of the threats might have been designed as a way
to challenge the entire group. So now that we've got half a group, or maybe just
one Player Character by themselves, that threat might be a little bit too much for them to handle.
The other big concern is that for a lot of games, combat can take up a lot of time around the table
as we're calculating Hit Points, and rolling dice, and kind of figuring out what all our abilities,
and researching spells, and all that stuff, which means that it's going to be taking
even more time away from the the players who aren’t active in that scene if you have a combat
while the group is split up from one another. So even if there is a way for the Player
Character, or Player Characters, that are in combat to radio the rest of the party and
let them know, or maybe the other PCs hear this combat going on, so now they're rushing
on order to get there in time, depending on the situation and how far apart everybody is,
they might not even be able to get there in time until the combat is well and truly done.
So combat is something that is best avoided if the group is going to be split up. Unless it’s
going to be something like a simple opponent that can be taken out in just one or maybe two rounds,
something maybe a Thief Backstab could take care of, but not really a head-to-head fight, because
that's still going to be taking away a lot more time from the rest of the people around the table
and that can end up sucking out a lot of the fun. And, like splitting up the party in the first
place, this is most often a Player Decision rather than a Game Master Decision if they're
going to be engaging in any form of combat, because they're separated from the group
and the GM can't tell them that they can't engage in combat so it's really up to the player
to decide, "Is this really worth it for me?" Game Masters though, you might be able
to hint or tell them that "This might not be a good idea," but one again, in the
end it’s still the Player’s choice to do. So this leads us to the next question,
"Should I tone the encounter down?" After all, you planned this scene to be for 6
characters and now it’s against 2 characters, so maybe you might want to even the odds a bit and
make the opponent just a little bit less deadly. That is totally your call if you want to do that
and really, once again, depends on the situation at hand. There’s no absolute answer that I can
tell you that works in every situation out there. But, for me, generally speaking, if the characters
knew that this was a high-threat environment, such as they're in a dungeon that's teaming
with bad guys, and they still chose to split up and go all their separate directions, then
I’m going to be less inclined to tone it down because there were plenty of hints that this
was not a good environment to split the party. But, if this was a low-threat environment like
it's just a normal day in a normal town, and the PCs had no real reason not to split up, I’m more
likely to go ahead and tone that encounter down to something a little bit more appropriate
to however many PCs are in that encounter . However, what I’m most likely to do, is instead of
just attacking the character, I’m probably going to give the character a good hint, an ability
to hear that bad guy ahead of time, or some other warning first that there is a threat that's on its
way, and that gives the character an opportunity to either sneak or run away, maybe round up the
rest of the group, and then all of them can return in force and we can have a big combat together.
So while this video has focused more on Temporary Splits, maybe taking just an hour or so worth of
game time that the Player Characters are split up from one another, but when I was studying
up on this topic and organizing my thoughts, I encountered an advice trend that I think
really need to be addressed when we're discussing Splitting the Party, and that’s Long-Term Splits.
This is when the party does a long-term, if not permeant, separation from one another. The most
popular example that's cited is Lord of the Rings when Frodo was all “I’m outta here,” and Sam's
all, “Hold up. I call shotgun.” And then we go two movies before everybody is reconnected again.
According to a surprising amount of advice on the internet, if a group decides to split up,
and go in two completely different directions, a good Game Master should accommodate that
by now running a second campaign. One for This party and a second campaign for This Party.
And while that sounds like a really cool idea, and a really cool ideal, I disagree with that.
And I think it’s poor advice to be telling people that a “good” Game Master should do this. And
if they don't do this, that would therefore mean that they're not a good Game Master.
First, this requires that a Game Master be willing, or even able, to run a second campaign. I
mean, that’s a lot of time and energy right there, and I doubt that most Game Masters can, or are
willing to accommodate something like that. But the second reason is the Group itself. I’ve
said before that while the Game is certainly very important to me, what’s also equally important
is the Group and hanging out with my friends, and many gamers feel the same way as that.
So if our campaign was to then split into 2 totally separate campaigns that are going on
simultaneously in the game world somewhere, that now means that we’re not all getting to
hang out as friends any more because we're now split up into two separate games, which was
part of the reason that we were even playing together in the first place is because we just
wanted a good time to hang out with our friends. So if a group has a Game Master that
is both willing and able to manage a second and simultaneous campaign, and all the
players are fine with the fact that they're not going to be hanging out with each other as much
because they're now in two basically completely separate groups, that is cool if you have
that situation. Go forth. Have fun with it. But I’m not one of those people, personally. So
if for some reason my group decided that they were going to split the campaign up, with
half the characters going one direction, and half the characters going another,
that's going to require that we have a talk. Either one group is essentially going to
write themselves out of the game, with a slim possibility of being revisited at some
future point, meaning that those players need to give me some new characters to replace
the ones that just left our active campaign. Or, the players could metagame this and
come up with a good reason that their characters should really stick around.
This is kind of like Han and Chewie at the end of Star Wars. They got paid and they
were all like, “Cool, we’re outta here. We're off to our own adventures.”
Then they were all like, “Wait, never mind. We decided to stick around
because we want to keep these characters.” So while yes, I’m perfectly fine with letting
my players split the party during the course of an adventure session, or maybe even run a special
1-on-1 game session for some side adventure that we're going to do, my players understand that I’m
not going to be splitting my campaign up for them. And no Game Master should feel obligated because
some stranger on a forum told them that’s what they’re supposed to do if they want to
consider themselves a good Game Master. Anyway that is it for this video. Hopefully
there was something here that you might have found useful for both you and your group.
Just remember that there is nothing at all wrong with splitting you party, at
least splitting your party temporarily. They key to it is both When,
and How, you go about doing it. Until next time gamers, you have a great day. Flashing colored lights and the smell of fried
food greet you as you emerge from the Fun House and back onto the Midway.
Well, that was a bust. Well, we at least got to rule it out.
This is the last night of the carnival, guys. If we don’t find that cannibal
clown tonight, he is going to get away. I say we go back to the Fortune Teller.
Something about her seemed suspicious to me. Todd, remember that Constitution
check that you failed earlier? Yeah.
Well, that hotdog that you earlier ate is not sitting well.
And you need to use the bathroom like Right Now. Uh oh. Guys you need to come
to the bathroom with me. Damn right. No way are we splitting the party.
You find a row of porta-potties tucked behind a partition. The area stinks, and these things
look like they are well past due for a cleaning. OK, then I’m going to try
to find one near the back. Wait, if he goes in there alone, something
could happen to him while he's in there. We can’t split the party.
That’s a good point. We’re all going to go in there with him.
Guys, there is no way you are all fitting inside of a carnival porta-potty, at least
not without a chance of knocking it over. Fine, then could I go in there with him?
Two of you could fit. I mean, it'd be pretty tight and kinda weird, but sure.
But if you go in there with him, that’s going to leave me out here alone.
He’s got a point. We can’t split the party. Wait, I could leave the door open,
and you guys can keep an eye on me. I’m not watching you poop, dude. Not again
I’ll watch you poop. Thanks, dude. And I’ll
watch you while I'm pooping. Nah brother, because if you and I are watching
each other, then nobody is watching Dweebles. So what we're going to do is I'm going
to watch you while you're taking a poop, and then you're going to watch Dweebles,
and then Dweebles is going to watch me watching you take a poop. That way none of
us are ever out of anybody else's sight. Sweet, then that’s our plan.
Guys, you know it'd be OK if you actually do split up here.
No way, brother. We are a party, and a party sticks together, even
in the face of carnie-dog diarrhea.
