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What's the right way to handle splitting the party? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 6 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

You know the situation: the players have decided that splitting up is a good idea. Maybe they're on a shopping trip, maybe they're investigating a dungeon/mothership, maybe some of them were arrested.

What's the best way to handle the situation outside of combat? How do you keep it interesting for the players, while moving the story forward?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

"Don't split the party" never felt like an axiom to me, the more appropriate guideline is knowing when and for how long to shine a spotlight in player's affairs, but also to maintain a singular objective across the party in your particular narrative. A lot of my time playing (outside of combat) has been with a split party, and with my current Lancer campaign that I've been running for a few months the players are also comfortable trying things at their own pace.

It helps to have a Common Objective that all PCs share and want to fulfill, so the "main" missions of the narrative will involve all of them together, but any kind of bonding scenes, Downtime, narrative hangouts and such, don't necessarily need to have everyone together. You still should prod other characters about their thoughts on [X]'s PC idea/action/feelings, and give them a chance to intercede. Also when [X] talks about doing something, ask if they don't want to take someone together - or ask someone if they don't want to join.

Relationships between PCs will grow organically, so over time they'll have more interests and goals in common, giving you ammo for any time they want to do something. If two players have a shared specialty and one of them wants to act on that, ask the other what they think. If two players share a hobby, and one of them want to make a show of it, ask the other player for their opinion.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

"Don't split the party" is mostly just a warning to players that I'm not going to lower the difficulty of the encounters just because half of them decided to wander off.