A Quick Note on Splitting the Party

(Hey all, I got kind of swamped at work this week so instead of a full entry, today I'm just sharing a few off the cuff thoughts on a common problem.)

Pictured: the most famous party splitters of all time

There are a number of good reasons not to split up an adventuring party at any given time. Firstly, most of the encounters in a campaign will obviously be designed and balanced to accommodate the full complement of players and will be difficult to overcome with partial strength. Secondly, your party members are made with special abilities and powers to support and aid one another and it would be foolish to waste those resources.

But the top reason to not split the party is to show respect for the your fellow party members and the game master. Splitting the party forces your GM to do double duty and divide his attention between more than one scenario at the same time. It also creates a situation in which players have to wait for long periods of waiting for their allies' scenes to finish before they can play out their own actions. Overall, it's a less than optimal setup that undermines the cooperative nature of the game.

There are ways to run split-party scenarios that can be fun and intuitive, but they have to be executed carefully. A crafty game master can come up with things for a player to do when they are not in a scene, like playing NPCs or helping with the battle maps. They can create encounters that can allow for the players to break into smaller groups in order to fight on two fronts. They can even encourage party-splitting as a regular technique in their game sessions.

But this needs to be something that is planned for. If a GM doesn't feel ready to handle it, or some of the players aren't up for it, don't do it. It's an off-beat style of RPG gaming that is infamous and criticized for a reason. It's not just reviled because it kills your players, it's disliked because of its tendency to kill their fun. And that's the worst thing that could possibly happen to your favorite tabletop campaign. Be smart and stay close to those who bring out the best in you... your fellow player characters!

Happy ventures!