“We Split Up”

If you’re anything like me, “we split up” is one of the phrases you most dread hearing from your players.  You’re only one person — how do you keep multiple players involved in a game when their characters are all in different places, doing different things?  Party splits can’t help but lead to situations where at least one character is “out of play” for a while.

There are a couple of things you can do, both before and during play, to help in that situation, though.

Avoiding Party Splits

The least problematic way of dealing with a potential party split is to keep it from happening.  This tends to be best accomplished through out-of-character discussion before the game.  Simply ask your players to stick together as much as possible, and explain that this will help you give attention to all of them simultaneously.  This goes a long way to avoiding “we split up.”  It alone isn’t going to be enough, though.  Inevitably, a situation arises where the players feel it’s best if their characters split up.

It helps if there are in-character reasons for the characters to avoid a split, too.  However, these reasons too will be overruled eventually, unless there’s some in-character mechanism for enforcing them — perhaps it’s a “Dirty Dozen” situation, and the agency the characters work for has guaranteed their cooperation by fitting them with bomb collars that will go off if they’re further than a certain range from each other (or if they’re tampered with!).  A fantasy game might use a geas or curse of some sort to similar ends.  These sorts of mechanisms are heavy-handed, though; it’s the sort of thing you can get away with for one plot arc in a campaign, at best.  Even then, expect the players to try to find ways to circumvent it.  Most players, rightly, hate feeling forced into anything, even working together.

In-character incentive for the PCs to stick together, on the other hand, can work nicely.  The rub:  Sometimes it’s difficult coming up with rewards for staying together that don’t feel forced.  Consequences for splitting up are generally easier to engineer in a way that seems logical in-game, but incentives take more thought.  One thing that can work well is to have the government or another patron provide a base of operations, giving the group a reward of mundane resources and local influence.  This could be a small keep or manor in a fantasy game, a headquarters in a superhero game, or a starship in a sci-fi game.  One plus to this scheme is that these rewards come with their own responsibilities:  when orcs attack the village, the peasants look to the keep, and the PCs, for protection.  When pirates attack their spaceship, the PCs are probably not inclined to hand it over without a fight.

One other thing you can do to avoid a split situation is to discourage character roles that tend to require it.  Hackers (especially in cyberpunk), infiltrator or cat-burglar types, forensic investigators in police drama, and other specialist roles that tend to require action most of the party can’t effectively participate in should be de-emphasized.  If such a role is necessary to the party in a campaign, consider assigning it to an NPC, who can do the work “offstage,” so you don’t need to devote much narrative time to his exploits.  This doesn’t really help if you have a character who absolutely must play the hacker, but short of that situation, it’s a good way of cutting down on party splits.

Dealing with Party Splits

No matter what sort of incentive or consequence you employ, though, chances are, unless you’re entirely Draconian about the matter, the players are going to split up.  You’ll want to have some policies in mind when they do.

Personally, I have a standing policy in games I run:  when the party splits, I give attention to each group based roughly on the portion of the total party it represents.  If one character in a group of six goes off to do his own thing, then he can count on about ten minutes of spotlight time in a given hour — the other fifty will be spent on the remaining group of five.  Furthermore, the characters who split are given lower priority than the main group — so that lone character might be waiting up to 50 minutes for the rest of the group to reach a good break point so I can switch to him.

In practice, the time is rarely spent in such monolithic blocks, but I make sure all of my players know and accept that it could happen.  These table rules tend to serve their purpose, which is to ensure that players only split up if they think there’s something substantial to be gained when they do.

There are a couple of other things I do to help minimize “split time” and keep everyone involved:

Identify likely splits. In my Dungeons & Dragons games, for instance, I can usually count on the party members each having something specific they’d like to do when they return to town.  As such, I try to “schedule” their return to town toward the end of a session.  When I can’t, I use my next point.

Skip it and play a solo adventure between sessions. Many times, it’s possible to gloss over the events and “fast forward” the session to a point when the party would be together again.  You can then come back to the character who split later.  You can use IRC, a messenger program, a MUSH, or an email or forum exchange to handle the particulars of the side adventure.  This doesn’t work when the outcome of the sideplot would have a major effect on the session as a whole, but it’s very useful in cases such as visiting towns.  It works best, in my opinion, when the side venture is roleplay-oriented and offers little or no treasure or experience as a reward.

Come up with something for the other players to do. If the group splits in half, you don’t want half your players to be bored at any given time.  To keep them involved, let them do things.  If the party is traveling with NPCs, those players can play them for a while.  If half the split party runs into some monsters, let the players of the other half control the monsters.  If they go to speak to the Grand Council of Wizards, you probably want to keep control of the Chief Wizard, but let the players who would be left out play some of the other wizards.  It’s very likely that the players will come up with some memorable characters this way, and you can take notes and reintroduce those characters later.

Switch Early, Switch Often. While proportional attention is the fairest way in my mind, dividing it into large chunks of time isn’t the best approach.  Instead of spending half an hour on one half of the group followed by half an hour on the other, try to switch whenever a good breakpoint comes up.  Even more than usual, it’s essential to keep things moving.  Make sure each group has its fair share of spotlight time, and don’t allow either one to run overlong before switching to the other.  If the party is split into more than two groups, this is doubly important.

Related posts:

1. Never Split the Party
2. Character Development: Hot Potato
3. Captured! …Now What?