Managing a party that splits up.

[sir_pudding]

In my current game the party is split between support type characters and operations type characters and they split as a matter of SOP. I don't really have any problems with that. It helps to have in-setting communication available between the two groups though through technology or magic.

[Junkie]

I think Bruno and aesir23 are right. It depends on the players. Our group weren't all that close. Two of the group actually liked each other and everyone else just kind of tolerated each other. Incidentally, the two who actually liked each other were also the two who hogged the spotlight. Actually, it was mainly the girl who seemed to CRAVE it. The other guy just had a more decisive character. They weren't all to blame, though. In retrospect, I didn't really give my character a personality or interesting motives. To be fair, that was only my third roleplaying campaign, and the first two just fizzled out after a few sessions. You know, come to think of it, the two who had all the spotlight had also roleplayed A LOT more than I had. We're talking years here. In fact, just about everyone else in the group were roleplay newbies.

Originally Posted by Bruno

In the case of combat specifically, if I have a split group and one half gets into combat, I usually give the players on the other half NPCs or enemies to control - one worthy each or a handful of minions each. This trick makes my job easier, and keeps the "other party" entertained, AND usually makes the fight more interesting because two or three minds produce more creative and diverse combat tactics than one.

Originally Posted by Anthony

That can work in RP too. Give a player a NPC and some suggestions about his/her motivations.

I never would have thought of having the other players play the NPCs when the spotlight wasn't on them. That's a great idea. I may try that if I ever GM.

Originally Posted by digoraccoon

I generally keep a stopwatch or hourglass handy so that I can keep track of how much time one group gets and try to allow the other group an equal amount of time.

And the stopwatch is a good idea, digoraccoon. I'm surprised that never occurred to me. (Or maybe it did and I just forgot. That actually happens a lot.)

Originally Posted by Luke Bunyip

I stick them in physically different spaces, that is isolate them visually and audibly. Might give one half of the group a board game to play :-/ Deal with them in turn.

The board game idea could work, too, Luke Bunyip. However it would depend on the board game. It would have to be something entertaining yet not more engaging than the roleplay. In addition, it should preferably be something that can be picked up and dropped really easily like connect four or checkers or something.

Originally Posted by mearrin69

Our group plays lots of different games but the one's that'd "rather be playing D&D" *always* protest splitting the party, no matter what: such as when my Shadowrun elf "face" guy needs to go into a high-end club to meet Mr. Johnson and the Ork ganger's player thinks everyone should come along in case I get jumped. Makes no sense in the game world (when, really, there's maybe one other guy in the six-character party who can even get in to this place)...but it makes perfect sense in D&D, where you *will* get jumped...

For some reason that actually made me laugh out loud. I've never played D&D, but I heard stories about it.

Originally Posted by mearrin69

Mainly it involves making sure all of the players have something to do (and making sure it's something they *like* to do) and switching back and forth between the split scenes at just the right moment. I'm not saying it's easy, but I do think it's a valuable tool in games when you can't justify an eight-man team walking around like a military squad in your universe.
M

I see what you're saying. The difficult part is knowing what the player will like to do. That involves getting to know them better.

Our former GM wasn't exactly a "people person". He was mainly the GM because he was decisive, and he knew a little too much about math and various sciences as well as a bunch of trivia. He has admitted that he'd prefer to play a character, but he hasn't run into many people who could GM well enough for him to play.

On top of that, most (if not all) of us were introverts and mostly new to RP. We didn't know what we liked and disliked yet, and if we did, it was hard getting some of us to express it. Personally, I hate too much talking. I much prefer action--not just combat, but action. I like having to beat the clock, chase the bad guy, dual a master swordsman, and all that other fun stuff. Talking is good filler in between the action. For me, it serves as a time to cool down and reflect on that "close call back there".

Anyway, thanks for all the suggestions and anecdotes, everyone (including the people I didn't quote specifically). If you guys have anything else to add, I'd be happy to read it.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Junkie

I never would have thought of having the other players play the NPCs when the spotlight wasn't on them. That's a great idea. I may try that if I ever GM.

I heartily endorse it on the strength of extensive practice! In my current secret-agents campaign, only half of the squad's manpower (if you read the recaps I linked: Anabel, Qoqa, Vinnie, Wen, and Zhang) are PCs. The other half (Hamid, Jili, Klas, Lev, and Paul) are shared NPCs. When a player's character isn't involved in a scene that includes an NPC teammate, it's campaign SOP for the player to take over an NPC – indeed, there have been entire evenings where the spotlight was on the NPCs under player control! Even when a player's character is involved, I tend to distribute the five NPCs among the five players and have everybody play two very different roles (e.g., Qoqa is mediocre in a fight and Anabel is a liability, so their players also control Klas and Lev, who are scary combatants). This has several benefits:

• greater spectrum of abilities in the team and a higher headcount, allowing me to consider a wider range of possible adventure types and giving the players more agency in working out strategies and solutions
• realistic splitting-up along the lines of core competencies without leaving a PC sans backup or with "backup" that's at best worthless, at worst an active liability
• fewer (in my case, no) bored players in scenes where their PCs aren't engaged, whether that means "lacks suitable abilities" or "isn't present"
• fleshed-out NPCs, as you have the players helping you give them voices and identities
• better-liked NPCs, as they're subsidiary PCs in a sense, not just random help (and if the players care about the NPCs, well, there's more hooks for you)

The supposed hassle of extra character sheets is a bit of a red herring. The NPCs would probably be there anyway. All you're changing is who manages the decisions and provides the voices. In a sense, that makes the GM's job easier.

The difficulty of playing two roles at once is a more valid criticism if you get into odd situations such as one talking to the other. In reality, though, the whole point is to give somebody an active role when their main role is passive or out of the scene, so this rarely occurs. And anyway, I've seen experienced roleplayers happily do both sides of a conversation, complete with different voices, whilst firewalling information so that the two people they control don't act like a collective intelligence.

[mearrin69]

Perfectly understandable that you don't know what you like yet...I still don't know myself and am always learning new things that I'm interested in doing. It takes some getting to know the players to figure it all out. In my group I have two players that are easy to suss.

One almost always plays the skill monkey and likes collecting things but isn't so much interested in personal interaction between his character and NPCs.

The other is less interested in the numbers and more interested in coming up with creative solutions (she always has some gadget/potion on her sheet I didn't realize was there and comes in handy at just the right time) and interacting with the NPCs...even ones I *really* didn't even expect the party to even speak with.

For those two, breaking things up is easy. In our Star Trek game (just the two players, three characters each), the first player has the chief engineer, the main helmsman, and a Bajoran security officer. They just need a problem to solve with dice...though he often gets more creative with the Bajoran. The second player has the Bolian chief of security (who likes puns and collects macaroni art), a surly Klingon combat medic, and the Betazoid first contact officer. While the Bolian sometimes takes a shot with the ship's weapons, these characters are usually about interaction.

In a recent split scene on DS9, the Bolian and the FCO had dinner with the station security chief to convince him to give them some quantum torps. The chief was squeamish and Quark was exited to have a Bolian onboard (they'll eat anything)...and brought him just about every living dish he could think of, on the house. The FCO spent most of the evening covering and trying to keep the dinner from going south. They also caught Quark taking 'tips' from gambler's latinum stacks at the Dabo tables...so that helped.

Meanwhile, the Bajoran was on a sensor array being constructed nearby cleaning out an infestation of Cardassian voles, the engineer was upgrading the warp core (skill challenge), and the helmsman was dealing with some tricky manual docking things. Again, the Bajoran was the most entertaining (to me) of the three of them.

I've known these players for a while, of course, but their character creation choices really said a lot about what they were going to want to do in the game.

I'm sure that was too much information for you...but hopefully the example is somewhat useful.
M

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The difficulty of playing two roles at once is a more valid criticism if you get into odd situations such as one talking to the other. In reality, though, the whole point is to give somebody an active role when their main role is passive or out of the scene, so this rarely occurs. And anyway, I've seen experienced roleplayers happily do both sides of a conversation, complete with different voices, whilst firewalling information so that the two people they control don't act like a collective intelligence.

I haven't seen a lot of "sock puppet," even in campaigns where players had two or more characters each (one-third of my campaign go that way). But it did come up persistently in at least one: In my high fantasy soap opera campaign Manse, one of the players created a girl in her late teens who had fallen in love with an older man who, unknown to her, was her mother's lover. There were a number of scenes of dialogue between the two. It felt a little awkward at times, and there were "sock puppet" jokes, but the other players seemed to enjoy the drama.

Bill Stoddard

[mearrin69]

We had a little "sock puppet" action in the dinner scene I mentioned above but the player handled it pretty well. I'm not so good at it myself, as I found out in the first couple of episodes...so one of the players suggested they switch off playing the ship's captain. I try to arrange heavy interaction scenes to happen on the days the "talky" player is running him, problem-solving for the other player...with some switch-up, of course.

While I'm at it, if one of the player doesn't have someone to run in one of the split-scene action groups there's usually an NPC they can jump into, so both players generally get to take part in every scene. The ubiquitious Crewman Jones (security) is usually on-hand when one of the security people is off doing something. There are a few others as well.

I reserve the ship's XO, the ship's resident civilian scientists, and a few others for myself. The XO (a Vulcan named Tu'pak) sometimes serves as a check for the player-run captain: a la, "I feel I must remind you, Captain, that we are currently at peace with the Cardassian Union."
M

[Wildcat]

Back in college, when I could actually get a game together, I'd keep a few index cards with the stats and just a couple of RP notes for a variety of NPC types. On a couple of occasions, the party would get split, and when it made sense to have NPCs appear, I gave the non-spotlight players each a friendly NPC to run for a while.