Party's split up

[treeplanter]

As an introduction, just let me resume our last gaming session

Party's in Asgalun (west Shem) and start in an empty room armed with one-handed weapon and poniard, and unarmoured, in the temple of Ishtar, where they are suppose to wait for an important meeting they have been convoqued to.

However all of sudden the floor open to a pitch black pit (reflex save). 2 PC avoid the fall and quit the room, fight some guard and priest, while the 3 others falls, and make their way through an underground complex of cavern, figthing undead and devils and enduring traps.

In the ends, both group converge to a big room where the High priest is performing a ceremony with an hundred of priest and a naked girls on an sacrifice table (classic). The high priest hypnotize a PC, the shemite nomads girl, who fail her will save and start walking to the autel while disrobing herself (whe was pretty happy). The PC try to hack their way to the high priest. 2 more get hypnotized, but the barbarian and the borderer finally reach the sorcerer and hack him down.

So my question is does other play group experienced party split up? How do you like it? I feel it's pretty cool storywise, but the con is you have to play one group while the other is waiting. To adress that I try to run switch fast between the 2 groups so they don't fall asleep, and if possible you can also run separates combat as one encounter. Other suggestion?

 

[Ichabod]

We've had bad experiences with it. But, that seems to be a function of the players.

Our players aren't the type to give a damn about what other players are doing, so there isn't any interest in running the antagonists or even making any effort to reunite the party.

 

[Dark Mistress]

I can be very good and add a lot to the game and the adventure or it can be horrible and kill the game.

In my experience is don't focus on one group to long and switch back and forth when you can and try and leave them at spots where they can RP among themselves like. The come to something and they need to figure out a way around it and then switch to the other group. The first group can use the time to think, plan and RP among themselves.

The final key in my opinion is don't do it very often, every now and then it can work if you are ready for it, but do it to much and player will get bored.

 

[bradius]

While it makes great sense from a story standpoint, it hasn't worked for us at all as a game. In fact, as a GM, I made a blanket rule that prohibited party splitting. However, that was violated last session. Too often it results in one group sitting around while the others do stuff. Perhaps a more skillful
GM with a playgroup that was into it, it might work. My advice is to avoid it.

 

[Hervé]

I think RP gaming has to follow some rules (other than game mechanics) in order to function properly. It's a lot like Classical Tragedy as you have to maintain unity of time, action and place within the party if you want the whole stuff to work.

There can be some small party splitting of course, but it must not be too long, even if you switch between groups, or else rythm and interest will soon fall.

The worst players I've ever met are the ones that systematically create a character that is always the opposite of the rest of the party, and that want to live their own story outside the scope of the adventure. Even more than the average munchkin, I think these people haven't understood what RPGs are about...

We recently played Escape from Innsmouth Campaign from Chaosium's CoC, which presents an alternative to party splitting:

The first part of the adventure follows more or less the novel, with the party investigating in the town, asking questions to the wrong people until they have a whole town of Deep One hybrids hot on their tails. This part ended with the party fleeing the town.

The second part of the adventure takes place some months later, when the US government plans the raid against the town. The PCs are taken along as advisors, as they have some Innsmouth knowledge. The raid is split into five different objectives and each character is placed on a particular objective, while the other players play military NPCs. This trick allowed every player at the table to take an active part in each objective instead of waiting patiently for their turn. We did not play one raid at a time, switching instead from one to another to keep the story evolving.

In the end it worked pretty well (if you don't count madness and death, but that's Cthulhu after all...).

 

[Clovenhoof]

In our Conan group, splitting the party is generally not an issue, since we are only 3 PCs anyway. Sometimes the Temptress had to stay behind (see other thread) but that was only for a few minutes at a time, and now we're bound to fix her character so that won't be necessary in the future.

In our D&D group, the players sometimes get ideas to split up "to save time", but I keep reminding them that there is only one DM, who can't tear himself apart. So while the party may save a bit of ingame time, it doesn't save a bit of time and rather takes longer that way, while half of the group is always idle. Hence we don't split up, and when I dm (we alternate) I never set up adventures that require the party to split up.

Many years ago (>10) we had a game that revolved around two competing parties, with two GMs, and the idea was kind of a good-vs-evil treasure hunt where each party wanted to get there first. The basic concept was cool but the realization was a complete and utter failure, because one of the GMs hedged everything in favour of "his" group, broke the rules/changed the game world without notice, and so on. Eventually the unfavoured group left the game because it was entirely pointless, and then the favoured group also quit (possibly for the lack of competition/victims).

 

[Hervé]

Party split up has also been a major problem of "netrunning" based games, such as Cyberpunk or Shadowrun, where the decker was running his "solo dungeon" while the rest of the party sat waiting. It didn't work at all.

I think it has been corrected in the most recent versions, allowing the whole party to dive in the matrix.

 

[Clovenhoof]

I think in SR4 it's the other way round; the Decker can run along with the party and "jack in" per wireless, performing his matrix actions parallely and on the same initiative cycles as the rest of the party acts in the real world. Something like that, but I never played SR4 so don't take my word for it.

In SR2/3 it was exactly as you say; in 2 it was extremely shitty as the Decker had to hack through a "dungeon" of nodes while the rest of the group sat around munching chips. In SR3 it was slightly better for the other players as a net run could be handled with just a couple of rolls, so it didn't take long, but now that was pretty unexciting for the decker.
Consequently, in our SR games we banned the Decker as PC job and outsourced decking jobs to hired NPCs. Everyone was happy.

 

[Halfbat]

Our group has 6-7 players and, yes, they split up from time to time but are very aware that if they do so the chances of their survival are very low.

A simple solution is to allow one party to run the NPCs in encounters. There's often a glint in player's eyes when they an legally and friendily attack their co-players.:twisted: I've found most players are fair about it, and accept what happens - but they'r ealso much more effective than a single GM running a number of NPCs. And when a party member is killed by one of his mates running an NPC it's talked about for months.

And drives home the lesson it's best to stick together!

 

[treeplanter]

Hey nice idea Halfbat, never tough of it!