Split up PC's

[Kalzazz]

Never Split the Party!

Heh, last game I played in, we were going to a Gun Store of Doom to commission some Awesome Ammo of Doom

The party had a mostly human, handsome, charming, gunsmith guy and also my character, the magical flying pony

So thinking it is better for the 'qualified to go into gun stores without courting social disaster' other PC to go undertake this challenge without my character providing 'assistance'

So 'Luna goes to catch a movie "See you guys later!"'

Luna goes to catch a movie resulted in 30 dead, untold others scarred for life, police and Federal intervention, and general chaos

Going to the gunstore? No fuss, no muss, the ammo of awesomeness handily created

[Aneirin]

The way to do it, is to make sure the PC's are interesting. If the PC's are all making hard fearless people, then they may not want a horror campaign. If they are making weaker people, perhaps dissacoaited, this can in fact work in benefit of a horror campaign.

Think of a zombie flick, a bunch of different people, different backgrounds, some who may try to kill each other at some point, and many other horror films.

Very few horror films I can think of focus on one person, they have a group, often with a divergent group of people, and you should use this to your advantage, not try to get rid of it.

As for splitting the group because you don't like other players knowing what other players know, unfortunately this will make it exceptionally difficult to GM. Either trust your players, learn to not care about metagmaing, or construct the campaign so it isn't dependent on only one person knowing something.

I would always reccoment sticking with GURPs (simply because I like it and would hate to see someone leave it, just go with GURP's lite for simplicity...or what ever you feel will work best for you even if it may be another system), even if going for beer and pretzels gaming. It just may need a different approach to GM'ing (one of the biggest problems can be GM expectations, expectations of wonder and bewilderment, unfortunately through trying to accomplish this you sound like your players are getting annoyed an inpatient, so it may be best to learn to accept you may not quite gt the wonder and excitement you want, but at least can have players who are enjoying themselves, unless I am over-estimating how fed up they are getting waiting for their turn and not knowing what other players are even getting up to and not being involved in the story at all)

Originally Posted by Toboo

Wow I didn't expect all these helpful answers so quickly. Just to clear things up them being split up, is my doing at this point due to the fact the It's a horror campaign, and it's hard get the feeling of horror when you got a team of 5 guys, now when were talking about a chubby black man and a 16 year old girl, that's a different story. One thing I'm thinking is having them play a simpler RPG(not hard to find an RPG simpler than GURPS) with a GM being rotated around as needed, the adventures would be nonsensical and the players would be ridiculous but it would just be a small thing to keep them interested, as well in the roleplaying/tabletop mood. I saw a free RPG by the name of Broken Urthe, it even has a big ruined city generator complete with the contents of every building and randomly generated loot and monsters, I was thinking I could let them romp around the city, possibly facing monsters so weak the players completely destroy it, or so powerful it would squash the players like bugs, kinda like a rougelike I guess, does anyone know if broken urthe is any good though.
EDIT: also when it comes to not having players not know things other players do, I don't enjoy that because I'm afraid of them meta gaming(because I know they won't) it's the effect it has on the players of them actually wondering in real life what the other players know that they don't.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Toboo

So currently I'm running a lovecraftian GURPS campaign, all my PC's are realistic normal human beings,( for the most part) a crooked cop, a mob boss, a flapper girl, an up and coming black musician and a slightly paranoid paranormal investigator. A lot of these characters have little reason to work with each other, in fact, most of them have reasons to not want to be near some of the other characters, so what I have been doing is having them being split up in sessions, whether its alone or with a few other people, this creates mystery of some players knowing things others don't, I do plan to have times where they'll all be working together, but I definitely don't want it to be all the time. There's only one problem, a lot of the players are getting bored/irritated when they have to sit out during other people's sessions, any suggestions on how to solve this, making each session quick so the players don't get bored waiting, have some of the players put together small campaign for simpler RPG's they can play in the meantime like dungeons and dragons? There are probably a lot of GM's that are more experienced dealing with PC conflict than me so I would like to hear some good input.

For each session, note who will be playing. Send out an invitation to everyone, but note who will be playing and who will not, and for the latter, remark that attendance is optional, and that they'll just be watching.

Then run the session only for the pertinent players. Anyone else who comes knows they're coming as an audience, not as participants.

I do this when I run "downtime" sessions, or when I've split players up in such a way that they cannot meaningfully interact with one another (like in a recent session where the party split three ways to participate in three different battles).