Split up PC's

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

[eyes widen!]

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It was a common occurance for the Fringeworthy game. I think the GM spent as much time in there as in the living room for some of the sessions.


If you're running into issues where certain players are simply not going to have any screen time then you need to re-evaluate your campaign and session.

Figure out a way to get them together and give them a reason to keep working together.

For MonkeyFist's Left Behind game, we had an Author, a high-calibre Escort, a martial arts competitor, a soldier, a doctor, a college student, a teen prostitute/thief and a computer hacker (who had a computer programming skill of 11!). We met at a therapy session for people who had been present when a family member was Taken.

And, by the end of the first arc, all but one of us were still in "good" shape. We left the hacker, tied up, in the motel room we were using so the Russian Mafia could come get him and he would stop screwing us up.

80% of that game was spent with the party "split up." Actually, let me rephrase that: 80% of the game was spent with the Doctor trying to figure out, and debate, about what we should do next while the author, escort, soldier, and teen went out and tracked down leads. If we were lucky, two of us were in the same place at the same time. For two entire sessions, the teen was fighting her way out of a cultist encampment (6 dead, 18 injured; she took a grand total of 1 HP the entire time--she was very dodgy). She was already messed up to begin with.

To be honest, the martial arts competitor (whose day job was a computer programmer for a Japanese Bank; and he had a computer programming skill of 16!) spent a lot of time supporting those of us in the field (and tracking down what had happened in Japan).

But, what this says it that you don't have to keep the party together to keep the story going. It helps, but we spent more time apart than together. Even the last session of the arc, when we were all supposed to be together, we still had four groups. The escort was by herself, the soldier spent the majority of the session away (only to be the cavalry at the appropriate moment) and the rest of us were at the concert. Oh, and the fourth group was the hacker, waiting to see what happened with the Russian Mob.

At no point did anyone feel slighted or passed over (except the hacker who was doing a horrible job being anything but a pest).

Don't fear splitting the party. Accept it as a reality and deal with it the best you can.

[Toboo]

Originally Posted by jahn

When this happens to me I

1. keep the spotlight short, five minutes max, before moving to the next group.

2. always break before anything significant happens. "You open the door and see, oh my God!" (go to next group)

3. don't allow dead time. If I have to look up a rule, make it up instead. If the spotlight group starts discussing things amongst themselves move on to the next group. This gets a bit tiring because the GM has no downtime during a session.

4. don't worry so much about keeping timelines in sync. Some groups will be in a fight while others research. You're going to have to hand wave time differences when the groups get back together.

This is very helpful, my issue wasn't stopping the PC's from splitting up, like I said it's me that's splitting them up quite often, it's keeping the other players interested and stopping them from getting bored, I really quite enjoy the conflict, it makes player interaction really awesome, Example: The former mentioned flapper girl was being held by the Mobster Boss players body guards and being questioned at gunpoint by the Mob Boss player(for asking too many questions), in an act that proves she has bigger balls than any man that's ever lived before her, basically gives plenty of sass to the man pointing a powerful revolver at her, this resulted in her getting shot in the foot, which made it all the better.