How do you encourage your players to stick together? The DM Lair on Twitch ▶▶ www.twitch.tv/thedmlair Free D&D Adventures and DM Resources ▶▶ www.thedmlair.com/ Join my Newsletter for free D&D adventures and resources ▶▶ thedmlair.getresponsepages.com/ Become a Patron ▶▶ www.patreon.com/thedmlair
As a GM< I do NOT actively encourage players to mindlessly stay together. I find it better to teach players when - and when not - to split up. This teaches choice and consequences.
My group has come to understand that as a DM I'm a bit of a nasty soul. So they know when and when not is an ok Time to split. For example a ran a session where I had a cleric, rogue, 2 fighters and a wizard. There were two quests/missions/objectives that needed accomplishing. The wizard and cleric chose to make peace with 3 lizarsfolk tribes while the 2 fighters and rogue went to a town to collect a specific item. Cleric now missing a hand and both tusks (elephant man) and the wizard is now dead. So short version, if they make a poor choice they go splat but they have some fair warning before they go splat.
Every once in awhile we have "downtime sessions" to allow the party to do less story heavy stuff, and those often involve everyone doing different things. Thankfully there's only 3 of us, but it was a lot of fun when one guy went to a strip club to sell red sand to random people while the others started a gang war across the district.
honestly in my group one of my favorite jokes is to threaten someone's character in an overly dramatic way, especially if its right before a big session or after they crack a good joke at my expense.
(I know I had a dungeon master screen here somewhere) (Who has my glow-in-the-dark twenty-sided?) (Hey, I can't find my character sheet, where's my character-- Oh, there it is) (That's my beer, you're going to have to roll a saving throw) (It's here with the cheetos) (If I catch somebody looking at my dungeon master screen, more than dice are going to roll) (I know I gave it to somebody over here and I didn't get it back) (You, roll for initiative) (I can't roll) (Eugh, now it's got yellow on it) We were skulking through this dungeon, a mighty sorry lot Old Galliard the fighter had been actin' like a sot Our cleric had colitis; our torches all were wet (Uh oh) But we had to find some treasure soon to get us out of debt (Alright, who had the damn lobster bisque?) So Galliard and Sonja were itchin' for a fight (C'mere) They both took the left fork, while we went to the right And that is when we heard it: the sound of rollin' dice We wondered why we had ignored these words of sage advice (Two words: diversified portfolio) Don't you know you never split the party? Clerics in the back keep those fighters hale and hearty The wizard in the middle, where he can shed some light And you never let that damn thief out of sight
one of the few times I was involved in a split party was when the GM split the party into the party members who didn't synergize well together just to shake up the party from just doing an all out resources burn. The other time one of the players was fighting in an arena and the rest of the party had money riding on the fight so the players where invested in roleplaying in the crowd in hopes of collecting some winnings.
Words of wisdom. I'll admit, my party a lot of the time have their own character driven machinations. Sometimes theres a session of micro splits happen. i need to improve myself in this regaurd heavily. One time the party split and it turned out okay. They went to an auditorium. And they split up at a fork in the hallway. Two went one waya and one went the other. At the end of the halls, the two ended up at the bleechers overseeing a fighting tournament. While the one that went alone (an archer. UA:ranger/fighter mix) was on the floor and became a suprise combatant. The literal spectating part of the party took up gambling and placed bets while the archer did all his traps, and fought well. It had a beer and pretzles sort of session by the end of it.
If a character feels like they would not go on a quest don't force them, we do that in the game I run I simply let the player make a temp npc as a higherling. I find this happens a lot with paladins. Sometimes you can not simply come up with a plausible motivation. When done correctly this can make the world feel bigger and more alive with more than one story going on at a time.
One game I was in, the party ended up getting split for almost 6 sessions, but we couldn't get the DM to agree on an alternative day for the split party. So we found a solution: Normally, we'd have a break half-way through the game to go to the nearby shops and buy dinner. This would normally take an hour or so with the whole group. The DM, since he didn't work on the day he ran games, would eat dinner before the group shows up. We'd do our recap and catch-ups, and then if the session was going to start with sub-party A, sub-party B would go out and get food, then come back and eat in the kitchen to avoid overhearing sub-party A's side of the story. Then we'd plan what our characters were doing and have RP interactions. Sub-party A would then go and get food and eat it while sub-party B would have their part of the game. Some of the characters from A kind of travelled between A and B sometimes to pass messages, so the later part of the session usually involved RP messages being traded between the groups with the "messengers" relaying information/misinformation. So we always felt included. The downfall of this system happened when the two parties (A and "messengers, then B) ended up being at odds and fighting for different political factions. It was great before that point, and we were already aiming to gather the party together, but party B had changed allegiences due to the situation the DM put to us. (For context, the whole party was being coerced into helping Faction A by force, but nearing the end of the split, Faction B ended up intervening and removing the magical compulsions forcing sub-party B to work for Faction A, so we ended up working for Faction B). If the DM hadn't introduced that, the split would've been temporary, but it ended up in a party civil war that party B won. Party A rolled up new characters and the game continued on (with thankfully no actual out of character resentment occurring: myself and another guy from party B were the best men at a member from party A's wedding).
When you have classes such as rogue and scouts which rely heavily on recon and information gathering that happens when you go off by yourself, not spitting the party takes away the point of playing out these type of characters. I had a scout character and my DM was such a stickler about not spitting up the party that no matter what my rolls for hide and sneak were, I would get caught just to teach me a lesson on not to go ahead of the party. Needless to say, I intentionally killed off my own character so I could start a new one.
When we were just dinking around in town, my rogue went off sneaking around for a bit on his own. Turned out to be a fantastic move because the local king was evil and had the party arrested in my absence, so it was up to my character to rescue them. And as luck would have it, my character was the one best equipped to do so, both with high sneaking, ability to disguise himself, and lock picking to get through multiple doors, and undoing all their manicals lol.
What!? Dont you know,you never split the party,clerics in the back keep those fighters hail and hearty,the wizard in the middle,so they can shed some light,and you never let that damn thief out of sight.
I'm super looking forward to your video next week about when to split the party! My current group of players splits up quite often when they're exploring or gathering information - which makes sense because they have some questlines that are time-sensitive. One time, though, they decided to split the party and only have two out of four characters go into an _obviously_ dangerous encounter (one of the characters even warned the two who insisted on going alone about it)... long story short, they got their butts handed to them, almost died, and hightailed back to regroup and take down the enemy together. Lesson learned, I hope.
Oh, no! I needed your, “right way to split a party” video this week. I wrote a party split/village siege for this upcoming weekend. Though, it’ll be fun measuring up to that video once it’s out. Just to see if I‘ve watched enough of your videos to be on the right track. Thanks for the content you make! It’s been tremendously helpful, and has lead me to the longest running DnD group I’ve ever been included in.
I was just about to yell in the comments about how it's possible to split the party and keep everyone engaged. Glad to know that the next video is about that.
At the begging of my older characters campaign, my character wasn’t introduced until a few hours in, but I was okay with it because it’s how I wanted my character introduced. And in the meantime, he was an oracle divination wizard, so he let me watch the party and use my portant rolls to aid the party.
I managed to split the party completely for our Halloween game, as all three players were thrown into their own personal type of nightmare. It was super fun! And played out more like a cut scene rather than them having to solve puzzles or anything. Because of the way I played it out, all my players had fun and felt like I did something that was for each and every one of them so none of them felt left out.
We're pretty tough on meta gaming, so if we have to split up the party, and once everyone is back together, I say "my character describes, in full detail, everything that happened to the group I was in. What happened to you guys while you were gone?" That way all important details are shared
A key word of wisdom I will share. Always split the party. Because you can cover more ground, and ultimatly its sometimes better to just leave the stealth and infiltration to the rogue, and him alone.
My group splits the party a lot, but mostly during social/exploration instances. If we know we're headed into a combat-rich area, we do our absolute best to keep the group together. Now sometimes social/exploration encounters can _become_ combat encounters, but even that has led to a lot of fun. On several occasions, things have gone sideways with one group without the other having any idea, and we've basically developed a running joke where the DM will occasionally cut briefly to the group not busy desperately fending for their lives and we'll have some incredibly mundane dialogue, a game of cards, or a couple of jokes at the expense of the absent party members before cutting back to the combat encounter. I think the main thing that makes this work is that we all understand and accept what splitting the party means. It's our choice, and it's a fine one, but the consequence is that you're not going to be in focus for a bit- whether that's now, or later. On a semi-related note, I spent the vast majority of my all-time favorite session doing basically nothing. Long story short, there were giants with some pet basilisk, and we'd already had a very rough day, so my Warlock stayed back to help cover the rest of the party's very desperate retreat. They successfully escaped, but you can imagine how that went for him. Group reactions were mixed between "we've got to get him back," "thank the gods he's finally gone," and "well I suppose it would be wrong to leave him after he covered our escape." And then came the line I was waiting for: "Wait, who has the bag of holding?" The only person who didn't groan in realization was one very happy Warlock player (me) who practically yelled "He's got life insurance b*tches!" As my character is normally the voice of reason and sound ideas, it was very entertaining to watch them track the giants and basilisks back home (one of them apparently thought my character made for decent decoration, and so removed him from the battlefield) and retrieve their bag of holding (and attached comrade) from his resting place about halfway into the giants' lair. And you'd better believe that Warlock was smug as hell that his insurance policy had worked.
I play a rogue kobold in one of my games and I love pulling a fred and telling the gang we should split up. Its great! No one ever takes me up on my offer. Instead they send me ahead to scout and see if the coast is clear... like its my job or something ;)
I really appreciate that you put subtitles on your videos because I have audio processing issues(have a hard time understanding words) so I appreciate it a ton thank you
Our group rather frequently split up, but usually it is just because we are currently in downtime and the characters are heading of to do various things. One is studying for our next expedition into the Underdark, one is picking up the custom armor he ordered last time we were in town, two are following up on a wounded NPC we helped earlier, that sort of thing. We just cut between the various events rapidly. The few times we have had actual party splits it was usually handled with standalone sessions with the paticular character. In paticular our Ranger has done it twice. First time was after we managed to figure out a magical artifact that had been in our possession for some time. It gave us a clue to the location of a friendly NPC we had been searching for, but we were not sure if we had interpreted it correctly so the Ranger headed of on her own to investigate and see if we got the clues right. The other time the Ranger tracked a Silver Dragon on her own after a paticularly brutal encounter that only really the Ranger had come out of unscathed. Resting then and there would mean losing the Silver Dragon's trail, so the Ranger opted to head off alone while the rest of the party recovered. Both of these cases were at the tail end of a session so it did not disrupt play, was handled in a solo sessions before the next big session and the Ranger in general roleplayed as a bit of a loner who is only slowly opening up after a tragic past, so it was perfectly in character that she would volunteer to go check it out alone. She also has access to things like Pass Without A Trace, Nondetection and a hefty Stealth bonus so she can realistically investigate without being seen and the promise is always to turn back if danger is sighted.
All this being said in my experience splitting up can be a great thing for role playing. It’s not so necessary for under 4 people games but sometimes it’s hard to get genuine character interactions with several people vying for attention at the same time. Also sometimes solo characters can be a breath of fresh air as long as they advance the story and stick with the party from time to time. We had a caster that basically did the Gandalf strategy of advancing the main story and interacting with the politics of the world while the others did side quests. Made it really easy to reboot the main story quest after finishing the side ones. Also lead to some great exciting last minute reinforcements moments
Hail Torm! My recent campaign had a bit of a problem with this. As our resident warforge would often go off on his own. Mind you he was an artificer so not as chunky. He ran into a horde of ghouls who literally jumped over each other to claw and bite him. Thankfully the Paladin came to his aid. He was lucky to be alive after that session.
Once Our party accidentally crashed an airship into a giant inter-planar portal and were scattered across the multiverse in groups of 2. It was a bit slow at times, but I really appreciated the opportunity for each character to shine at what they did best for a bit. For instance, my character, who was a wizard who focused on mobility spells, had to make a jailbreak from the underworld, assisted by the divine warlock who could stave off most of the evil poisons we discovered. Our divine sorcerer went to the plane of air with our hippogriph cavalier where he found out more about his backstory and used his charisma to outsmart a spectator. Our minatoar barbarian who built our airship in the first place and sailor ranger fought monsters on an island and had to fix an airship to navigate a cosmic storm. Our dragonborn champion and Halfling bard were sucked into the ethereal plane where they met folks from our other campaign who were reality-jumping. Anyway, the point is that, yes. I agree. splitting the party is not a generally good strategy, but used sparingly, it can be epic.
The one time we split the party the half of us who were watching our captive got ambushed and knocked out and the rest of us got blown up by dynamite in an underground tunnel. Everyone was fine but my poor dragonborn sorcerer was not doing too hot, she had like 6 hp left
One thing that works really well in terms of time management is to give the players some crunch. For example, I do like to play characters who do their own side thing for the party. This can be the alchemist who uses travel to gather herbs and who then makes potions out of them or the social character who builds an organization with a growing reach that will one day become relevant. The problem with many of those things is: actually playing through all of it would be a huge time sink in which other players don't necessarily participate. Things like research, gathering information or building contacts are similar in that regard. Because frankly, there are many situations in which not splitting up the party would be downright silly and erase the individuality of the characters. So I say: split up the party, but don't be stupid about it.
I learned this myself the other day... Basically, the party wanted to scout out the vampire's castle by letting the druid sneak in as a moth and explore. It was a great plan, but it resulted in the first two-thirds of the session consisting of me revealing more and more dungeon, and letting the druid talk me through where he wanted to go. The other players got to see the map unfold, but they basically had to sit there and be quiet, and when I asked them if they were doing anything, they basically just said they were waiting for the druid to come out, which was fair enough. Then, about two-thirds of the way through the session, I ask them if they want to do something, and I get an answer. They want to go off and capture a yochlol they left running around. So, instead of working out some way to flip back and forth, I just cut to them, and they spend the last third of the session capturing a yochlol and killing the minions it's been summoning. It was great, but now the druid doesn't get to do anything. And the players who showed up late or had to leave early? Yeah, they got to say about one line apiece the entire game. So, moral of the story: Don't split the party.
@@thejawgz6719 I probably should have, though I admit I didn't know how much of the dungeon they could and couldn't access (i. e. opening doors, seeing through doors, etc.)
My group decided to split the party once, and I think I handled it pretty well. It was a short period though, so that's probably why. There was a drow siege on waterdeep and the group was sent to try and break the siege. So, as it was day time, the drow were sleeping, one of our party members is a changeling and so decided to disguise himself as a drow slaver, and try and distract the leaders of the siege force by working with them. We focused on them for about 10 minutes, then I switched to the other half of the group before he had the chance to sell the party members. The other half of the party were the stealthy ones, and they were sneaking around the camp just trying to sow chaos. Dismantle siege weapons, set fire to tents, destroy rations, steal weapons and armor, etc. The whole thing only took about 20-30 minutes, and it focused on both sides pretty equally.
I gotta share some of my experience being the exception to the rule on this one, but my desire is for my words to agree with Luke here. My first campaign was in my college dorm and continued as our group moved out into renting houses in town. At our peak, we had 9 players at the table, not including the DM. There is no way to keep that many people in a single group through the whole session. That was when I discovered I had a knack for Improv DMing and my favorite tool for the groups of 2 or 3 players was the handy phrase: "Meanwhile..." Meanwhile can be just as powerful in an Improvisation Toolkit as the infamous, "yes and." The positives? The frequent downtime players experienced gave them time to eat their dinner between turns, socialize and catch up with their friends from the week of school work, but most relevant to RPing, sometimes either myself or one of my players would have a creative block that made us feel indecisive about our next step. Choosing that moment to switch to another part member gave myself and that player a bit of time to consider their character's scenario and think through exactly what they wanted to do. But later, as I continued running games, I started to find not all my improvised encounters turned out as fun as they seemed in my head. Most of the time, they were fine, but I started to see that there was definite room for improvement. That's when I started getting more serious about prepping game content outside of the session. So what does my experience say in relation to the topic at hand? If your game is more Beer and Pretzels style gameplay, where the game is more of a construct to facilitate a social event, the downtime created by switching between players can actually be advantageous. On the other hand, players who come for more serious gameplay will definitely feel bored. I could tell when the players who came for the game more than for the social event were the ones who went straight to their phones or their rulebooks when it wasn't their turn. And yes, running a split party is definitely more work for the DM, but there are tricks to managing your pacing that can take full advantage of the downtime. While one group of the party is running straight combat, which requires almost none of your creative problem solving most of the time, just adjudicating the rules and resolving the combat effects, you can let the other player's more unique problems that require time to think about simmer on the back burner of your brain, giving you time to have that eureka moment where you get an idea of how to handle their unusual situation. Overall, if you find yourself considering running a split party encounter at any point in your campaign, follow Luke's advise and carefully consider if it's really helpful or necessary first. in most cases, it will be best to avoid it if at all possible. But if it comes up naturally at the table or really is unavoidable, keep in mind the common pitfalls so you can mitigate the damage and capitalize on the playstyle's advantages.
Looking forward to your video on how to do the split party thing. Well know why not to split, but the problem is when you have to do it, how to do right.
This just happened in my last session, the party split in two to look through the city for clues on a series of murders and two of the members (the ones who suggested it) left when the other group started their part to play 2K20😂
I remember one time me and the party were trying to get into a lords estate. We basically had a massive plan laid out. I as the rouge would sneak in, and the Wizard followed with me. The Bard and Fighter had an audience with him to distract and keep him in 1 area. And the Sorcerer was sitting outside ready for his cue. I think we needed an artifact or some evidence against him, its been 4 years so I forget. Me and the wizard got past the guards through stealth, the distractions were negotiating a deal under a guise (its been 4 years so I don't remember what it was), and finally the sorcerer came in with the assist at the end when it turned out the lord was the bad guy. The instant he saw we were in combat he used fireball in order to bust down the walls on 10+ guards, killing them instantly. Then knocked down the ceiling on even more, which made the entire ceiling start collapsing. The party got out, and the encounter went smoothly... Until the lord turned into a monster. The rest of the guard fled. Then the real battle began.
I once had a session in which the party which sonsisted of 5 people needed to get into a castle. They decided to have the rogue and the ranger climb the doors while the bard and the wizard would pose as travelling merchands who want to sell rare ancient artefacts to the lord in oder to gain entry and also in order to distract the guards. The 5th party mamber who was a druid wildshaped into a white dove and the plan was that the wizard would cast sending and message him to do a figure 8 in the sky when the distraction starts so the others would know when to start climbing. Of course the big issues with that plan are that sending involves speaking the message which is pretty awkward while being in front of a bunch of guards and doing a figure 8 is not exactly common behavior for a white dove. So one group then had a pretty awkward conversation explaining to the guards why one of them said "let's go! No1 do the figure 8!" and the dove then was suddenly part of some target practice by 2 bored recruits whose attention it caught by doing areal acrobatics. The rogue and the ranger climbed up no issue, but then decided to save the dove / druid and attacked the recruits which then lead to the guards running back in order tostep in which then lead the the remaining party also stepping in which then lead to a pretty huge fight for the control of the castle taking place - which was what intended to happen in the first place and which was exactly what the paty wanted to avoid by splitting up and sneaking in in different groups.
I had a pretty notable experience with a split party as a player. The DM had my character kidnapped, which was cool. But then he had the rest of the party investigate for an hour while I played a game on my other computer, which was not cool
my cure for this was to have a guest DM to run the split parties portion. it takes a good guest DM that understands your playstyle and is not afraid to consult you if the players do something that can be world changing😎👍
20 Years ago I run a game where they had to go to the same location in the past, the present and the future at the exact same moment. They could communicate trough some stones or something (can’t remember). They still talk about that adventure. What I mean...if the adventure is meant to split the party, it can be really fun.
Setting the tone before the game starts works for me. The world is a dangerous place and people wandering off alone tend to not return. I also have a habit of saying if the character is not with the party the player is not in the room. So if the party splits into 2 groups neither group will have any clue whats going on with the other. People dont want to split away if they physically have to get up and wait outside. And if you need to use the bathroom you can just come up with an excuse why your character is outside earshot for 10 mins while the game keeps going. And I like dropping hints when some player is away to give players a sense of missing out when they split.
Had this happen with one of my groups back in June. I was a Ranger and was exploring a mine with the group. The fighter was Edge Edgeington and went off on his own since he didn't trust the group. He came across 3 Orcs and got cut off in a room. The party fought some goblins and killed them pretty quickly. I had to come up with a pretty good RP reason for why my ranger would know to go find the fighter. I came up with some excuse that I used my ranger's tracking abilities to figure out which way he want. I manage to arrive and save him just as he went down. It created a pretty cool RP moment where my ranger and his fighter bonded a bit for saving his life. Needless to say, the party didn't learn its lesson and we lost a player after the gang went all scooby doo in a spooky mansion 2 sessions later. On a side note; I was asked a couple of months ago by one of my groups to create a homebrew campaign with custom lore and some custom rules while using D&D races. I accepted the challenge and have spent a decent bit of time creating lore for the different races and gods to help players with back story creation. The end result is a world I am pretty happy with. The actual campaign is supposed to start in 2.5 weeks but we have a one-shot planned out that was designed to introduce the players to my world, get a feel for any small rule changes, and to give me an idea about how they play together. I am supposed to host this next Monday. 4 of my 6 players have created joke characters that either have silly, real world backstories or nothing at all. The response I get from them is "Who cares, we are never going to see these characters again anyways and it's just random one shot" despite me telling them the opposite a good 12 times already. On top of that, only 2 of my players have given me any sort of backstory or have spoken to me about their campaign characters. I haven't even started the campaign and I already feel really dejected about the whole thing. Only 2 players out of 6 have shown interest despite all 6 pressuring me into making this world to begin with. I don't mind silly joke characters, but I would have just gone with a campaign module rather than wasting my time if I knew this was going to be the response. Anyone who can give advice: Do you think I should just save myself the trouble and run a module or do you have any advice on how I might be able to run my campaign based on what I know now? I just want people to have fun, but I also want to enjoy DMing myself.
Ask for a decent bg to start the game. You can like prepare 8-10 key questions and says it's mandatory to have them answered to start playing. You can start with only your 2 willing players, the other might get the hint.
Hot take: splitting the party can be an excellent source of tension and drama. Less hot take: this does take a good bit of skill from the DM Frozen take: Hail Torm!
so far I think the only 'splitting up' my crew has done was like wandering around scouting, talking to merchants/locals, no real dungeon or combat splits they seemed to focus in really well. I think the only combat split is the rogues finding a 'safer' vantage point for sneak attacks and staying as far back from flying spells swords and arrows as they can. I think if you wanted to railroad them from splitting up you could always wing your dungeons to have glyphs or pitfalls that drop them back at the entrance of the area, or just get really really good at split party interactions
Oxventure OutsideXbox is my favorite D&D entertainers and Johnny the DM Spits the party all the time to often completely funny moments if have not watched you should It is D&D Light but that's what makes so good !
I support splitting the party in towns for shopping and selling. I try to equalize time between each player/subgroup during this activity, and while I may throw hints or plot hooks, I generally avoid anything resembling combat until the party can gather back together at the inn where they will share their information and sort out coin. That is when I will drop heavy plot or combat encounters on them - when they are all (or most of them) together. - I disincentivize separation while adventuring, other than battlefield tactics like "the fighter and the ranger set up an archery ambush while the cleric and the bard draw in the monster." or "let the rogue go check the next room and give us a count of the orcs." by slapping the "I want my own map!" player(s) with a party-sized challenge.
I'm glad you will do a video on when to split the party. I've seen it work well with tactical advantage. I will highly suggest to keep all players in initiative order.
I ran a masquerade ball session this past weekend. The party split up to gather rumors and come back together. I tired to keep going between characters quickly. Everyone enjoyed the session, even when they were just watching. I guess the story was interesting enough.
My group is a pro party splitter. Okay were 6 plus dm but its kinda fun to see what happens when some usual group ''leaders" are not there to influence others. Also were playing Vampire the masquerade which is prone to schemes and politics which sometimes favors smaller groups or flat out solo scenes . My Dm handles it much like Discworld's meanwhiles. He builds a cliffhanger than switches to the other group for a small while then switches back. So far, no phones got out. Granted, weve been on a cliffhanger end for 5 months due to recent events (we agreed it was better irl for our dynamics so we switched to dredsden file on roll20). Most of the party knows we are building a narrative and understand that splitting is highly beneficial to the trouble factor which ramps interesting to 20. (Youd be amazed how good we are at trouble. Just ask our first time player Tremere or our golconda seeking malkavian with a child personality switch). But I agree that it shouldnt be used constantly for many reasons. One being combat and the other being player coordination. But talkie walkies over short distances can do wonders for the latter, haha.
I played a 2 group game with one dungeonmaster, the idea was that things that happened in one game would affect the other. It was actually really nice because he'd do 2 hours with one group then switch and we'd get a nice 2 hour break to do things.
@@theDMLair Well in the game we decided to try and be assassins for hire, so we would plan our hit during those 2 hours. The game we played was about a dangerous sketchy type town that was run by mobs and had a corrupt guard force. The kind of place a couple assassins could make some nice coin! The other group (the girl group) decided they wanted to start a clean up crew for things like murders. We ended up getting them in a lot of trouble when we murdered two clerics in a church while dressed up as women. Fun times.
Last time I split that party I was playing a gunslinger in Pathfinder. Shortly after I left the group to explore on my own, the barbarian decided to follow. Out of all the paths we could pick, turns out we ended up at the boss fight. Three turns apart we each walked in and got hit with a ray reducing our intelligence scores to like5. We were told we basically have the fight or flight response. Thankfully I had magic gloves that let me naturally understand how something works so I could still operate my gun. Problem being when the rest of the party showed up and we finished the fight we had the two dps party members unable to recognize friend from foe and the party had to subdue us. Good times.
A solution I have to a split party is partly based on the setting which is modern with time travel as part of the game, they have special phones to text each other in game so they can chat box respond to events even if they aren't there.
The only time my group has split the party is when in town, when we take turns doing various things. We also have a time limit, if you're not done doing whatever you were doing, you put it on pause and the next person gets their turn, almost like doing an initiative order. Though it's not EVERY time we're in town.
That feel when Dungeon of the Mad Mage has a specific level with purely undetectable, completely unavoidable teleporting traps intentionally designed to split the party .-.
So i plan on running death house, my plan is to have the upstairs bedroom be locked and the only way of getting to it by using the service lift that can fit only one person. I also plan on having the suit of armor in the room rather than on the balcony on the third floor. In the dresser will be the item they need. A temporary party split, but seems like a good one based on the spooky nature of the house. I also plan on having the secret entrance in the library bring the player who pulled it into the room sort of like one of those scooby doo bookshelves.
I have a group of 6 Hags(Sea, Green, Night, Annis, Bheur, and Dusk) who have taken an interest in the technology of an ancient empire. They form a Coven together with double the spell slots, and occasionally show up and cast a special Green Fog. It seperates the party every time and puts them into solo battles, usually with the Simulacrum of one of the Hags. Nobody's died yet but the Hags do better every time. Initiative happens at the same time, the different groups just can't interact with eachother or eachother's enemies. I think they'll be using Quicklings and Displacer Beasts in the next Fog...
Good points. Splitting the party isn't always bad but most of the times it is. It can create amazing sessions as you said but more times than not it just turns Dnd into a spectator sport while taxing the DM. It is worth emphasizing that you shouldn't rebalance encounters. If you originally created an encounter to be 6 goblins but drop it down to 2 when the party split and the rogue sneaks off ahead only to get caught, then you are enabling party splitting by removing the consequences of solo play. If a PC dies then so be it. You aren't a bad DM for running your encounters as written. If a player gets pissy just tell them that the encounter was designed for the party not an individual.
Party splits are a strategic option, and like all strategic options, there's a time and place for them. The situation may call for it when the skill that the team wants to lean on will clash with others (Primarily Stealth), when multiple situations need to be resolved simultaneously, or as a strategic option when in-game time is an important consideration. If the group feels that any of these scenarios apply, a split party is not out of the question. Split parties are, in my own opinion, a natural complement to the built setting, in that the group doesn't find itself on a railroad. All values are strategic, however, and this very statement implies that there are times to put parties on railroads.
I remember one night, we were playing in a Cyberpunk campaign. Someone found out there was evil afoot, and the calls went out. Only they forgot to call my character. I read a book and has a great chuckle when the new player set off a thermite grenade on top of a container of ammo which the rest of the party was going through. The GM and I had a great laugh.
I tend to run small game, usually around two or three players. As such they usually don't feel the need the need to split up in a dungeon. While they are in town I let them take doing their own things, and they don't metagame from it. That said during the last dungeon crawl they got caught on opposite ends of a death trap with a split party of hag elves. They were able to reconvene in a adjacent room to fight the elves in.
We need the follow up video of "Why To Say YES To Splitting The Party" I HATE that players refuse to split a party (even so far as meta refuse), even when it would be SOOOO much fun to do so, as well as present so many new story opportunities, and allows players to feel their own character out without comparison etc etc. Soooooooooooo many great reasons to split the party, and it SHOULD happen FAR more often than it does.
One thing I want to try is making some smaller encounters and intentionally splitting the party. The trick is, I print out or copy the sheets of the monsters and hand them to the inactive players from group B. Repeat for when Group B is the active half of the party.
@A Real Lobster With An Internet Connection, most clerics have heavy armor proficiency and the spell spirit guardians which make them very good frontlines.
I once had a case where only one party member (say A) could speak the language of the NPCs they met on the road. He road forward to speak with them, so I moved him to my side voice channel on discord for the conversation. IRL and in character, this player SHOULD NOT be the face of the party (no diss on him, he would admit to the same), so when he realized he would be soloing without input from the other party members, he felt dread. I had the other party members roll two d20s without telling them what they were for. The first one was an insight/perception roll whichever each person was better at, the other was initiative. The solo player and I roleplayed the interaction, he ended up insulting the leader. I had him role initiative, told him to remain quiet while I briefed the others. Once in the main party, I explained that members B and C saw something bad happen and were ready. D and E, did not see anything happen, so they are considered surprised. A, the speaker, was not surprised either. After the combat, all players loved the temporary split. Not knowing what was going on for that five minutes, combined with two unexplained "naked" d20 rolls made the interaction feel very real. -- As for scouts, I had a person enter a cave with potential enemies inside. They wanted to see if the entrance area was safe, and got attacked (not surprised). Everyone rolled initiative, but since the agreement was they would wait outside until the scout returned, I did not allow them to do ANYTHING until the scout did something that would allow them to know he was in trouble. Scout had an initiative of 3. On his turn, he asked if he could "scream like a little girl" as a free action. I said yes. At that point the rest of the party could act.
About number 2. I mostly agree HOWEVER, there is a very small group of DMs(I only know myself) that can handle a split party and NOT slow Down the game. I can handle a split party ad my experience dictates and not slow down the game at all. I’ve ran areas of my campaigns both with split and non split parties and the parties were split in up to 3 groups and It was nearly just as fast with each party; but I do have a fairly good memory and don’t have to rethink where each sub party was stuck at and can just track on without any recap. I also tend to try and swap sub parties after each action. It gets confusing for the players but not for me at all.. but I am a very rare exception in this particular thing.
There was this time my players went to Neverwinter during the Goddess of winter's festival. They splitted to play carnival/festival like games and eat strange food. It took about an hour, and it was fun. Tough I'd never split in a dungeon.
I've been the DM in a party that LOVES to split for about half a year, in this time I learned some things: 1) Don't panic. 2) Give everyone something to do, if a character gets in a fight also make the others roll dice, I usually make my players roll more often when we're split. 3) It's the perfect time to create suspence! Player A opens the chest and... back to players B and C. See? Much stronger than "you open the chest and find X and Y, back to players B and C". You just created a moment of suspence that wouldn't have been there with a non-split party! 4) DON'T PANIC!
Splitting the party in a detective session is a must, imo. One half to question witnesses/suspects, the other half to investigate on site. I had such a session just this sunday. And it's not that split, just like 1-2 hours of ingame time separate from eachother. up to an hour and a half of irl time spent by dm going back and forth between the two halves.
The validity of this varies by game. For instance in Call of Cuthulu I often find it nessicary, as one PC needs to check town records and another hits up criminal contacts, for example.
Another reason to not metagame information your character wast there for is a more interesting scene as well. This one game i was in right before 2020 struck we had a pseudo split party. It was a tavern with a second story where we met the npc we needed info from and a group we were trying to avoid entered the tavern. Some of the party went down stairs pretty early and some of us were kind of stuck upstairs (including my character). One of the tavern patrons who we had spoken with was bought by the leader of our enemies and near the end of the while fight one of my party members dropped that npc. Next round I get down stairs and see this guy we were talking with and were somewhat friendly with so I used a spell to cure him. The guys who were part of the downstairs fight were kind of annoyed with me until I explained what my character saw. I think minor internal conflicts like that are a very good and healthy thing for the rp aspect of the game but I have seen way more instances where it just leads to frustration and annoyance from everyone else especially if something doesn't go their way after they split off
DM: "And before you, rises up, a terrifying tentacle monster" Combat: *Is muted and we watch the barbarian begin to stick his tongue out Me: "There's no hiding it, we all know what anime you've been watching."
In my campaign the players tried to split up once (they were lvl 9) so I told them that I would run the next two sessions separate for the 2 groups. And than on the session after that (third one) they came back together. I have a very lazy player in terms of roleplay but I made him tell everything in character or the other players could not know what happened to him. It's not a good example of how not to split the party. But it's a good example of how to take the "Split-party opportunity" and use it to engage your players even more in a game
Wow...I didn't realize it was such a problem for most DM's to multi-task different occurences at the same time...I should value my multi-tasking abilities more. Great video tho!
I actually split the party all the time. Both as a player, and I encourage it as a GM if the players feel it makes sense to split the party. (though occasionally the party gets split up via traps. Ahhh Falling portcullises.) whenever party's switch I divide time based entirely on how I feel it should be divided. Either 50/50, or if we have a case where the party wants to send the rogue forward to... Well one time they sent the rogue in to steal a map from the fortress they were planning to assault. During that party split everyone was watching the rogue trying to sneak through the castle. The players were on the edge of their seats and the rogue was sweating bullets. Knowing a couple of bad rolls. (I use multiple fail states) could end in his doom. The rogue returned Triumphant, and the cleric player finally took a breath they had been holding. Now if the player wants to go and do something completely different from the rest of the party. for instance follow up on a bounty they saw in town, or go try to steal a specific item from the mages collage. I will usually just do that as its own session with the player. I have recently been experimenting with alternating between the adventure with everyone present, and Westmarchs style side quests where players pursue their own ambitions. Seriously though I have never in 5 years (might be 6 actually) of playing D&D. I have never actually had a bad experience with splitting the party. That stemmed from splitting the party. Oh sure their have been moments we have gotten into trouble, and even a few times that a character has died (or kidnapped by drow). You shouldn't be afraid of splitting the party. It creates drama and tension sure, but that's a good thing, and just as often you can find splitting the party allows you to do things you never would have expected, and can lead to an amazing night. So next time you feel it would make sense. Think about splitting the party.
Having backstory motivation to be in the group is really important. We're level 6 and trying to retcon that component because surprise! Two of our party members are selfish "just in it for themselves" types.
Have you seen the Spy's Murmur magic item from Guidmaster's Guide to Ravnica? I had my artificer craft 5 of these so we could metagame peacefully everytime we had to split, like when someone goes scouting first, or that one time we had time pressure to save different people in different places. It's a life saver.
Oh man I had a "split the party"-scare during today's session. The players were approaching a young green dragon's lair in the woods, having dodged kobold traps and patrols. Just outside the lair were several openings to the kobolds' tunnels, as well as a kobold patrol. The party began to discuss how to deal with it as quietly as possible, and the NPC who was accompanying them gave the suggestion that she could lure the kobolds away with her, leaving the lair unguarded. I figured that could be a way for this NPC to be taken out of commission for the big dragon fight while also giving the party more inspiration and ideas for their plan. Not only did they not want to send her away, the warlock(who has the lowest AC and HP of the group) started going on about how he could be the distraction instead. Thankfully the others shot that idea down, but man oh man was I panicking behind that screen.
My method of stopping players from splitting up ties into my 'I will not give you blatant advice, aside from offering options your character would know that you might not, in the middle of a game, but I will warn you of stupid' agreement. I will ask my players 'Are you sure you want to do that' if they are doing something dumb. If they say yes or continue, I will ask again 'Are you really sure that you want to do that'. If they continue or say yes, I will ask them 'Are you sure you want to (fill in what is stupid about what they're doing)?'. So in this case it would be something along the lines of 'Are you sure you want to split the group into smaller groups, thus weakening each groups combat potential, and go exploring an unknown area presumed filled with hostile creatures?'. If they say yes.... then any party members dead is on them.
In my Mass Effect 5e game I'm running, one of our best sessions was with a split party. So they just escaped a Shrek planet, where one of the party members was too slow to run away and got one of his eyes pulled out by Shrek. When they get back to Omega, I let them go to the black market to get some new stuff with a lot of money they collected doing a job for their merc leader. So the one eyed guy decides he wants a new eye, wandering to a residential area, where he kills someone in an alley. He screws up getting the first eye, and realizes he doesn't like the colour anyway so he finds a child, gets kicked in the nuts, but eventually catches up, and gets his new eye. However, bystanders were not happy with this, and tried to stop him. He shoots an incinerate, but hits a guard, proceeding to have them start shooting civilians because they're an occupying merc gang. The others hear gunfire and go to check it out, as they know that the other guy went that way, and they proceed to have this moment where they have to rescue their party member from a war zone he started over an eye.
Our party has kind-of split more than once, most memorably when the rogue and cleric teamed up to dig up a buried treasure while some of the party stood guard at one end of the corridor and two others (myself - wizard and the party ranger/bard multiclass) fought off a dozen or so goblins at the other end (fortunately, not all of them at once, but I nearly died anyway). It worked okay because the DM treated it as though everyone was in combat so they all had to take turns, and the players managed to resist the urge to meta-game. My character had to run back to the cleric for some healing. That seems to be the way our DM handles a split party. It's treated as though everything is combat rounds until the party is together again. It both makes it fair since everyone gets to do something and discourages splitting the party since it's a pain for the players to have to stay in "combat rounds mode" constantly.
The only time i was in a split party, we just did different sessions for my character going off to Krezk to glean more information about Strahd. The other side of the party was checking out a tower because of alchemical shenaningans in Vallaki.
I design encounters for the world. I don't design encounters specific for the party or take into account people missing/split and I reward personal xp. You don't want split parties? Don't hold back on lone wolves and don't award xp to people who were not in a fight. My groups learn pretty quick to stay together, negotiate and flee if necessary.
I have a dungeon where you actually have to split the party. it's a puzzle maze, but if they are thorough in the last few rooms before they get to it, they'll have sending stones before they get there so they all know what's going on with each other.
Splitting of the party happens really frequently in call of cthulhu and delta green and stuff. Which is an even worse idea most of the time but sometimes time is of the essence and investigating multiple places at once is best
I’d say the simplest way to keep a party of adventurers together is to have the “don’t split the party” wisdom be common advice in-universe. I mean, it makes sense, it is actually a bad for reasons that are perfectly diegetic. Running around a spooky area you know to be filled with dangerous predators of people all by yourself is very contrary to normal human instincts, and very good reason.
One thing that could be fun is if you had alot of people you dm for, so they're all in the same adventure. So people keep splitting up and running into eachother. You can have small and large parties, and sometimes the parties can even antagonize eachother.
I've been enjoying your videos and finding them very helpful, but had also been hoping this would go over more in-game ways, like potentially plot devices to keep a party together. Say, in the event you made an oopsie as a DM and half the party (group A) has a important matter they have been tasked see to on a timeline, but the other half (group B) has no buy-in to that task yet (and in fact don't know it exists). But the party has discovered something that is more fascinating to group B, and investigating it thoroughly will interrupt the timeline for Group A. I either need to find a way to convince Group A to find another solution for their timeline for something they feel is less important, or find a way for group B to discover group A's timeline and also feel it's important enough to delay their investigation and come back to it later. Retrospectively, I shouldn't have created that scenario for myself. But I was wondering if any of your videos had suggestions for in-game things that encourage a party to stay together outside combat, or if maybe you'd create something like that in the future (as having too many important things to attend to seems to come up a lot in this group throughout different campaigns and DMs).
I just had a session yesterday where the party Got split. It allowed for some really important scouting. They had to Kill a noble and while the rest of the party were busy going to the blacksmith, buying herbalist gear, and trading with the magic academy, the last player decided to scout ahead inside the targets mansion as a mosquito. So a Great example on when it is a Great time to split the party. If my party decides to split up and runs into an encounter which was meant for the party. Well that happened to my current group in about 2 years ago. What happened? The guy who went off alone was killed.
I have a player that wants to be involved in every situation or interaction. Almost to the point where I have to tell said player you are not there more often then engaging with him as the NPC.
My 1st game I ran C.O.S and split the party to show them I could, it was fun for me and the party, two went to a town while the other's stop an werewolf attack on Vallaki. Later they meet up no one died. I feel it is somewhat lazy to force the party to stay to gather (To fix this I ran two different games that week.) however you are the d.m of your game and the first thing you should ensure in your game is fun for everyone I also ran a chase encounter with a Zombie dragon, 6 gargoyles and 4 red dragon Wyrmling's (level 6 party) it was also a ton of fun, the party was not able to move durring the fight and had to fight with ranged attacks only. (Except the Bar-bar he had a glider and rope said "I tie it around my waist and jumped off the wagon into the air what happens?" I fell trust is important to establish with your players and if the d.m does not want to give him or her self more work then players should respect that and not try and split the part. BTW I aloud the tabaxi bar-bar to become the worlds 1st cat-kite and said he could fly using the feet of the rope '50ft' he also had the shield master feat so picture how that fight may have gone. :)
Which place in town? We know your favorite coffee but not your favorite pizza place. Are they any of the following: -Old Tavern Pizza -Pizza Hag -Little Goblin's (pizza-pizza) -Round Table Mimic Pizza -Dice and Gnomes Pizza Until Next Time... Let's Eat D&D!
I had a split party last session. I ping ponged between players. It helped me instigate action for each side. If I hadn't, the sorcerer would have been trapped with 3 cultists bosses that thought he was on their side for a dark ritual.
I recently had a party split that turned out well. The rogue had been drawn away and eventually was forced into single combat with an enemy assassin. Meanwhile, the other 3 party members were fighting off some thugs. Everyone acted in a single initiative order, but after the rogues ended their turn, there was a scene cut to the other characters...nobody could affect the other combat.
How do you encourage your players to stick together?
The DM Lair on Twitch ▶▶ www.twitch.tv/thedmlair
Free D&D Adventures and DM Resources ▶▶ www.thedmlair.com/
Join my Newsletter for free D&D adventures and resources ▶▶ thedmlair.getresponsepages.com/
Become a Patron ▶▶ www.patreon.com/thedmlair
As a GM< I do NOT actively encourage players to mindlessly stay together. I find it better to teach players when - and when not - to split up. This teaches choice and consequences.
My group has come to understand that as a DM I'm a bit of a nasty soul. So they know when and when not is an ok Time to split.
For example a ran a session where I had a cleric, rogue, 2 fighters and a wizard. There were two quests/missions/objectives that needed accomplishing. The wizard and cleric chose to make peace with 3 lizarsfolk tribes while the 2 fighters and rogue went to a town to collect a specific item.
Cleric now missing a hand and both tusks (elephant man) and the wizard is now dead.
So short version, if they make a poor choice they go splat but they have some fair warning before they go splat.
I like to split my party and run mini games at different times
Good idea.
You’re a madman! How do you handle that?!
So seperate games right?
Every once in awhile we have "downtime sessions" to allow the party to do less story heavy stuff, and those often involve everyone doing different things. Thankfully there's only 3 of us, but it was a lot of fun when one guy went to a strip club to sell red sand to random people while the others started a gang war across the district.
If you can handle that.
"im not that bad of a dm i just lie about it" we all do, its a DM instinct to go "MUHAHAHA I WILL KILL YOU ALL" but realistically you try to avoid it.
Dming is just professional lieing.
@@an8strengthkobold360 that's a damn dirty lie. Most of us don't get paid, so we cannot be professionals.
@@unshackledjester true. We are just liars.
honestly in my group one of my favorite jokes is to threaten someone's character in an overly dramatic way, especially if its right before a big session or after they crack a good joke at my expense.
@@an8strengthkobold360 i prefer the term verbal masseuse, myself.
Sometimes it's necessary to split the party. If this is the case, no more than 2 groups, and alternate between which group plays every 5 minutes or so
you'd be lucky to have anything happen in that time frame, in my experience thus far
5 minutes for each group? No chance my dude
(I know I had a dungeon master screen here somewhere)
(Who has my glow-in-the-dark twenty-sided?)
(Hey, I can't find my character sheet, where's my character-- Oh, there it is)
(That's my beer, you're going to have to roll a saving throw)
(It's here with the cheetos)
(If I catch somebody looking at my dungeon master screen, more than dice are going to roll)
(I know I gave it to somebody over here and I didn't get it back)
(You, roll for initiative)
(I can't roll)
(Eugh, now it's got yellow on it)
We were skulking through this dungeon, a mighty sorry lot
Old Galliard the fighter had been actin' like a sot
Our cleric had colitis; our torches all were wet (Uh oh)
But we had to find some treasure soon to get us out of debt (Alright, who had the damn lobster bisque?)
So Galliard and Sonja were itchin' for a fight (C'mere)
They both took the left fork, while we went to the right
And that is when we heard it: the sound of rollin' dice
We wondered why we had ignored these words of sage advice (Two words: diversified portfolio)
Don't you know you never split the party?
Clerics in the back keep those fighters hale and hearty
The wizard in the middle, where he can shed some light
And you never let that damn thief out of sight
Your comment needs way more love!
one of the few times I was involved in a split party was when the GM split the party into the party members who didn't synergize well together just to shake up the party from just doing an all out resources burn. The other time one of the players was fighting in an arena and the rest of the party had money riding on the fight so the players where invested in roleplaying in the crowd in hopes of collecting some winnings.
Words of wisdom. I'll admit, my party a lot of the time have their own character driven machinations. Sometimes theres a session of micro splits happen. i need to improve myself in this regaurd heavily. One time the party split and it turned out okay. They went to an auditorium. And they split up at a fork in the hallway. Two went one waya and one went the other. At the end of the halls, the two ended up at the bleechers overseeing a fighting tournament. While the one that went alone (an archer. UA:ranger/fighter mix) was on the floor and became a suprise combatant. The literal spectating part of the party took up gambling and placed bets while the archer did all his traps, and fought well. It had a beer and pretzles sort of session by the end of it.
If a character feels like they would not go on a quest don't force them, we do that in the game I run I simply let the player make a temp npc as a higherling. I find this happens a lot with paladins. Sometimes you can not simply come up with a plausible motivation. When done correctly this can make the world feel bigger and more alive with more than one story going on at a time.
One game I was in, the party ended up getting split for almost 6 sessions, but we couldn't get the DM to agree on an alternative day for the split party. So we found a solution:
Normally, we'd have a break half-way through the game to go to the nearby shops and buy dinner. This would normally take an hour or so with the whole group.
The DM, since he didn't work on the day he ran games, would eat dinner before the group shows up. We'd do our recap and catch-ups, and then if the session was going to start with sub-party A, sub-party B would go out and get food, then come back and eat in the kitchen to avoid overhearing sub-party A's side of the story. Then we'd plan what our characters were doing and have RP interactions. Sub-party A would then go and get food and eat it while sub-party B would have their part of the game.
Some of the characters from A kind of travelled between A and B sometimes to pass messages, so the later part of the session usually involved RP messages being traded between the groups with the "messengers" relaying information/misinformation. So we always felt included.
The downfall of this system happened when the two parties (A and "messengers, then B) ended up being at odds and fighting for different political factions. It was great before that point, and we were already aiming to gather the party together, but party B had changed allegiences due to the situation the DM put to us. (For context, the whole party was being coerced into helping Faction A by force, but nearing the end of the split, Faction B ended up intervening and removing the magical compulsions forcing sub-party B to work for Faction A, so we ended up working for Faction B). If the DM hadn't introduced that, the split would've been temporary, but it ended up in a party civil war that party B won. Party A rolled up new characters and the game continued on (with thankfully no actual out of character resentment occurring: myself and another guy from party B were the best men at a member from party A's wedding).
When you have classes such as rogue and scouts which rely heavily on recon and information gathering that happens when you go off by yourself, not spitting the party takes away the point of playing out these type of characters. I had a scout character and my DM was such a stickler about not spitting up the party that no matter what my rolls for hide and sneak were, I would get caught just to teach me a lesson on not to go ahead of the party. Needless to say, I intentionally killed off my own character so I could start a new one.
That just sounds like a bad DM.
When we were just dinking around in town, my rogue went off sneaking around for a bit on his own. Turned out to be a fantastic move because the local king was evil and had the party arrested in my absence, so it was up to my character to rescue them.
And as luck would have it, my character was the one best equipped to do so, both with high sneaking, ability to disguise himself, and lock picking to get through multiple doors, and undoing all their manicals lol.
respect to the mans wheel of time collection in the background
What!? Dont you know,you never split the party,clerics in the back keep those fighters hail and hearty,the wizard in the middle,so they can shed some light,and you never let that damn thief out of sight.
I'm super looking forward to your video next week about when to split the party! My current group of players splits up quite often when they're exploring or gathering information - which makes sense because they have some questlines that are time-sensitive. One time, though, they decided to split the party and only have two out of four characters go into an _obviously_ dangerous encounter (one of the characters even warned the two who insisted on going alone about it)... long story short, they got their butts handed to them, almost died, and hightailed back to regroup and take down the enemy together. Lesson learned, I hope.
Oh, no! I needed your, “right way to split a party” video this week. I wrote a party split/village siege for this upcoming weekend. Though, it’ll be fun measuring up to that video once it’s out. Just to see if I‘ve watched enough of your videos to be on the right track. Thanks for the content you make! It’s been tremendously helpful, and has lead me to the longest running DnD group I’ve ever been included in.
I was just about to yell in the comments about how it's possible to split the party and keep everyone engaged. Glad to know that the next video is about that.
At the begging of my older characters campaign, my character wasn’t introduced until a few hours in, but I was okay with it because it’s how I wanted my character introduced. And in the meantime, he was an oracle divination wizard, so he let me watch the party and use my portant rolls to aid the party.
I managed to split the party completely for our Halloween game, as all three players were thrown into their own personal type of nightmare. It was super fun! And played out more like a cut scene rather than them having to solve puzzles or anything. Because of the way I played it out, all my players had fun and felt like I did something that was for each and every one of them so none of them felt left out.
We're pretty tough on meta gaming, so if we have to split up the party, and once everyone is back together, I say "my character describes, in full detail, everything that happened to the group I was in. What happened to you guys while you were gone?" That way all important details are shared
A key word of wisdom I will share.
Always split the party. Because you can cover more ground, and ultimatly its sometimes better to just leave the stealth and infiltration to the rogue, and him alone.
Great video! Absolutely agree with all of your points. I once had a party split up during a heist and almost every encounter was deadly!
Thanks! Deadly, as they should be for a split party (usually).
You know its gonna be Good when the 6th word is literally Dank
My group splits the party a lot, but mostly during social/exploration instances. If we know we're headed into a combat-rich area, we do our absolute best to keep the group together. Now sometimes social/exploration encounters can _become_ combat encounters, but even that has led to a lot of fun.
On several occasions, things have gone sideways with one group without the other having any idea, and we've basically developed a running joke where the DM will occasionally cut briefly to the group not busy desperately fending for their lives and we'll have some incredibly mundane dialogue, a game of cards, or a couple of jokes at the expense of the absent party members before cutting back to the combat encounter.
I think the main thing that makes this work is that we all understand and accept what splitting the party means. It's our choice, and it's a fine one, but the consequence is that you're not going to be in focus for a bit- whether that's now, or later.
On a semi-related note, I spent the vast majority of my all-time favorite session doing basically nothing. Long story short, there were giants with some pet basilisk, and we'd already had a very rough day, so my Warlock stayed back to help cover the rest of the party's very desperate retreat. They successfully escaped, but you can imagine how that went for him.
Group reactions were mixed between "we've got to get him back," "thank the gods he's finally gone," and "well I suppose it would be wrong to leave him after he covered our escape."
And then came the line I was waiting for:
"Wait, who has the bag of holding?"
The only person who didn't groan in realization was one very happy Warlock player (me) who practically yelled "He's got life insurance b*tches!"
As my character is normally the voice of reason and sound ideas, it was very entertaining to watch them track the giants and basilisks back home (one of them apparently thought my character made for decent decoration, and so removed him from the battlefield) and retrieve their bag of holding (and attached comrade) from his resting place about halfway into the giants' lair.
And you'd better believe that Warlock was smug as hell that his insurance policy had worked.
I play a rogue kobold in one of my games and I love pulling a fred and telling the gang we should split up. Its great! No one ever takes me up on my offer. Instead they send me ahead to scout and see if the coast is clear... like its my job or something ;)
The best things happen when you split up!
I really appreciate that you put subtitles on your videos because I have audio processing issues(have a hard time understanding words) so I appreciate it a ton thank you
You are very welcome! Happy to help. 😀
Our group rather frequently split up, but usually it is just because we are currently in downtime and the characters are heading of to do various things. One is studying for our next expedition into the Underdark, one is picking up the custom armor he ordered last time we were in town, two are following up on a wounded NPC we helped earlier, that sort of thing. We just cut between the various events rapidly.
The few times we have had actual party splits it was usually handled with standalone sessions with the paticular character. In paticular our Ranger has done it twice. First time was after we managed to figure out a magical artifact that had been in our possession for some time. It gave us a clue to the location of a friendly NPC we had been searching for, but we were not sure if we had interpreted it correctly so the Ranger headed of on her own to investigate and see if we got the clues right.
The other time the Ranger tracked a Silver Dragon on her own after a paticularly brutal encounter that only really the Ranger had come out of unscathed. Resting then and there would mean losing the Silver Dragon's trail, so the Ranger opted to head off alone while the rest of the party recovered.
Both of these cases were at the tail end of a session so it did not disrupt play, was handled in a solo sessions before the next big session and the Ranger in general roleplayed as a bit of a loner who is only slowly opening up after a tragic past, so it was perfectly in character that she would volunteer to go check it out alone. She also has access to things like Pass Without A Trace, Nondetection and a hefty Stealth bonus so she can realistically investigate without being seen and the promise is always to turn back if danger is sighted.
All this being said in my experience splitting up can be a great thing for role playing. It’s not so necessary for under 4 people games but sometimes it’s hard to get genuine character interactions with several people vying for attention at the same time.
Also sometimes solo characters can be a breath of fresh air as long as they advance the story and stick with the party from time to time. We had a caster that basically did the Gandalf strategy of advancing the main story and interacting with the politics of the world while the others did side quests. Made it really easy to reboot the main story quest after finishing the side ones. Also lead to some great exciting last minute reinforcements moments
Hail Torm! My recent campaign had a bit of a problem with this. As our resident warforge would often go off on his own. Mind you he was an artificer so not as chunky. He ran into a horde of ghouls who literally jumped over each other to claw and bite him. Thankfully the Paladin came to his aid. He was lucky to be alive after that session.
Once Our party accidentally crashed an airship into a giant inter-planar portal and were scattered across the multiverse in groups of 2. It was a bit slow at times, but I really appreciated the opportunity for each character to shine at what they did best for a bit. For instance, my character, who was a wizard who focused on mobility spells, had to make a jailbreak from the underworld, assisted by the divine warlock who could stave off most of the evil poisons we discovered. Our divine sorcerer went to the plane of air with our hippogriph cavalier where he found out more about his backstory and used his charisma to outsmart a spectator. Our minatoar barbarian who built our airship in the first place and sailor ranger fought monsters on an island and had to fix an airship to navigate a cosmic storm. Our dragonborn champion and Halfling bard were sucked into the ethereal plane where they met folks from our other campaign who were reality-jumping.
Anyway, the point is that, yes. I agree. splitting the party is not a generally good strategy, but used sparingly, it can be epic.
The one time we split the party the half of us who were watching our captive got ambushed and knocked out and the rest of us got blown up by dynamite in an underground tunnel. Everyone was fine but my poor dragonborn sorcerer was not doing too hot, she had like 6 hp left
One thing that works really well in terms of time management is to give the players some crunch. For example, I do like to play characters who do their own side thing for the party. This can be the alchemist who uses travel to gather herbs and who then makes potions out of them or the social character who builds an organization with a growing reach that will one day become relevant. The problem with many of those things is: actually playing through all of it would be a huge time sink in which other players don't necessarily participate. Things like research, gathering information or building contacts are similar in that regard.
Because frankly, there are many situations in which not splitting up the party would be downright silly and erase the individuality of the characters. So I say: split up the party, but don't be stupid about it.
I learned this myself the other day...
Basically, the party wanted to scout out the vampire's castle by letting the druid sneak in as a moth and explore. It was a great plan, but it resulted in the first two-thirds of the session consisting of me revealing more and more dungeon, and letting the druid talk me through where he wanted to go. The other players got to see the map unfold, but they basically had to sit there and be quiet, and when I asked them if they were doing anything, they basically just said they were waiting for the druid to come out, which was fair enough.
Then, about two-thirds of the way through the session, I ask them if they want to do something, and I get an answer. They want to go off and capture a yochlol they left running around. So, instead of working out some way to flip back and forth, I just cut to them, and they spend the last third of the session capturing a yochlol and killing the minions it's been summoning. It was great, but now the druid doesn't get to do anything. And the players who showed up late or had to leave early? Yeah, they got to say about one line apiece the entire game. So, moral of the story: Don't split the party.
This has happened a few times to me. It sucks.
This easily could’ve been OK if the DM had just given the druid a simple map of the dungeon instead of play-by-playing the initial exploration.
@@thejawgz6719 I probably should have, though I admit I didn't know how much of the dungeon they could and couldn't access (i. e. opening doors, seeing through doors, etc.)
My group decided to split the party once, and I think I handled it pretty well. It was a short period though, so that's probably why. There was a drow siege on waterdeep and the group was sent to try and break the siege. So, as it was day time, the drow were sleeping, one of our party members is a changeling and so decided to disguise himself as a drow slaver, and try and distract the leaders of the siege force by working with them. We focused on them for about 10 minutes, then I switched to the other half of the group before he had the chance to sell the party members.
The other half of the party were the stealthy ones, and they were sneaking around the camp just trying to sow chaos. Dismantle siege weapons, set fire to tents, destroy rations, steal weapons and armor, etc. The whole thing only took about 20-30 minutes, and it focused on both sides pretty equally.
I gotta share some of my experience being the exception to the rule on this one, but my desire is for my words to agree with Luke here.
My first campaign was in my college dorm and continued as our group moved out into renting houses in town. At our peak, we had 9 players at the table, not including the DM. There is no way to keep that many people in a single group through the whole session.
That was when I discovered I had a knack for Improv DMing and my favorite tool for the groups of 2 or 3 players was the handy phrase: "Meanwhile..."
Meanwhile can be just as powerful in an Improvisation Toolkit as the infamous, "yes and."
The positives? The frequent downtime players experienced gave them time to eat their dinner between turns, socialize and catch up with their friends from the week of school work, but most relevant to RPing, sometimes either myself or one of my players would have a creative block that made us feel indecisive about our next step. Choosing that moment to switch to another part member gave myself and that player a bit of time to consider their character's scenario and think through exactly what they wanted to do.
But later, as I continued running games, I started to find not all my improvised encounters turned out as fun as they seemed in my head. Most of the time, they were fine, but I started to see that there was definite room for improvement. That's when I started getting more serious about prepping game content outside of the session.
So what does my experience say in relation to the topic at hand?
If your game is more Beer and Pretzels style gameplay, where the game is more of a construct to facilitate a social event, the downtime created by switching between players can actually be advantageous. On the other hand, players who come for more serious gameplay will definitely feel bored. I could tell when the players who came for the game more than for the social event were the ones who went straight to their phones or their rulebooks when it wasn't their turn.
And yes, running a split party is definitely more work for the DM, but there are tricks to managing your pacing that can take full advantage of the downtime. While one group of the party is running straight combat, which requires almost none of your creative problem solving most of the time, just adjudicating the rules and resolving the combat effects, you can let the other player's more unique problems that require time to think about simmer on the back burner of your brain, giving you time to have that eureka moment where you get an idea of how to handle their unusual situation.
Overall, if you find yourself considering running a split party encounter at any point in your campaign, follow Luke's advise and carefully consider if it's really helpful or necessary first. in most cases, it will be best to avoid it if at all possible. But if it comes up naturally at the table or really is unavoidable, keep in mind the common pitfalls so you can mitigate the damage and capitalize on the playstyle's advantages.
Looking forward to your video on how to do the split party thing. Well know why not to split, but the problem is when you have to do it, how to do right.
This just happened in my last session, the party split in two to look through the city for clues on a series of murders and two of the members (the ones who suggested it) left when the other group started their part to play 2K20😂
I remember one time me and the party were trying to get into a lords estate. We basically had a massive plan laid out. I as the rouge would sneak in, and the Wizard followed with me. The Bard and Fighter had an audience with him to distract and keep him in 1 area. And the Sorcerer was sitting outside ready for his cue. I think we needed an artifact or some evidence against him, its been 4 years so I forget.
Me and the wizard got past the guards through stealth, the distractions were negotiating a deal under a guise (its been 4 years so I don't remember what it was), and finally the sorcerer came in with the assist at the end when it turned out the lord was the bad guy. The instant he saw we were in combat he used fireball in order to bust down the walls on 10+ guards, killing them instantly. Then knocked down the ceiling on even more, which made the entire ceiling start collapsing. The party got out, and the encounter went smoothly... Until the lord turned into a monster. The rest of the guard fled. Then the real battle began.
You uploaded this ar 5 IN THE MORNING
He uploaded it at 10 am for me
I uploaded it a week ago and scheduled it for 5 am. 😀
I once had a session in which the party which sonsisted of 5 people needed to get into a castle. They decided to have the rogue and the ranger climb the doors while the bard and the wizard would pose as travelling merchands who want to sell rare ancient artefacts to the lord in oder to gain entry and also in order to distract the guards. The 5th party mamber who was a druid wildshaped into a white dove and the plan was that the wizard would cast sending and message him to do a figure 8 in the sky when the distraction starts so the others would know when to start climbing. Of course the big issues with that plan are that sending involves speaking the message which is pretty awkward while being in front of a bunch of guards and doing a figure 8 is not exactly common behavior for a white dove. So one group then had a pretty awkward conversation explaining to the guards why one of them said "let's go! No1 do the figure 8!" and the dove then was suddenly part of some target practice by 2 bored recruits whose attention it caught by doing areal acrobatics. The rogue and the ranger climbed up no issue, but then decided to save the dove / druid and attacked the recruits which then lead to the guards running back in order tostep in which then lead the the remaining party also stepping in which then lead to a pretty huge fight for the control of the castle taking place - which was what intended to happen in the first place and which was exactly what the paty wanted to avoid by splitting up and sneaking in in different groups.
I had a pretty notable experience with a split party as a player. The DM had my character kidnapped, which was cool. But then he had the rest of the party investigate for an hour while I played a game on my other computer, which was not cool
Exactly! Lol
my cure for this was to have a guest DM to run the split parties portion. it takes a good guest DM that understands your playstyle and is not afraid to consult you if the players do something that can be world changing😎👍
20 Years ago I run a game where they had to go to the same location in the past, the present and the future at the exact same moment. They could communicate trough some stones or something (can’t remember). They still talk about that adventure. What I mean...if the adventure is meant to split the party, it can be really fun.
Setting the tone before the game starts works for me.
The world is a dangerous place and people wandering off alone tend to not return. I also have a habit of saying if the character is not with the party the player is not in the room. So if the party splits into 2 groups neither group will have any clue whats going on with the other. People dont want to split away if they physically have to get up and wait outside.
And if you need to use the bathroom you can just come up with an excuse why your character is outside earshot for 10 mins while the game keeps going.
And I like dropping hints when some player is away to give players a sense of missing out when they split.
Had this happen with one of my groups back in June. I was a Ranger and was exploring a mine with the group. The fighter was Edge Edgeington and went off on his own since he didn't trust the group. He came across 3 Orcs and got cut off in a room. The party fought some goblins and killed them pretty quickly. I had to come up with a pretty good RP reason for why my ranger would know to go find the fighter. I came up with some excuse that I used my ranger's tracking abilities to figure out which way he want. I manage to arrive and save him just as he went down. It created a pretty cool RP moment where my ranger and his fighter bonded a bit for saving his life. Needless to say, the party didn't learn its lesson and we lost a player after the gang went all scooby doo in a spooky mansion 2 sessions later.
On a side note; I was asked a couple of months ago by one of my groups to create a homebrew campaign with custom lore and some custom rules while using D&D races. I accepted the challenge and have spent a decent bit of time creating lore for the different races and gods to help players with back story creation. The end result is a world I am pretty happy with. The actual campaign is supposed to start in 2.5 weeks but we have a one-shot planned out that was designed to introduce the players to my world, get a feel for any small rule changes, and to give me an idea about how they play together. I am supposed to host this next Monday. 4 of my 6 players have created joke characters that either have silly, real world backstories or nothing at all. The response I get from them is "Who cares, we are never going to see these characters again anyways and it's just random one shot" despite me telling them the opposite a good 12 times already. On top of that, only 2 of my players have given me any sort of backstory or have spoken to me about their campaign characters.
I haven't even started the campaign and I already feel really dejected about the whole thing. Only 2 players out of 6 have shown interest despite all 6 pressuring me into making this world to begin with. I don't mind silly joke characters, but I would have just gone with a campaign module rather than wasting my time if I knew this was going to be the response. Anyone who can give advice: Do you think I should just save myself the trouble and run a module or do you have any advice on how I might be able to run my campaign based on what I know now? I just want people to have fun, but I also want to enjoy DMing myself.
Ask for a decent bg to start the game. You can like prepare 8-10 key questions and says it's mandatory to have them answered to start playing. You can start with only your 2 willing players, the other might get the hint.
Hot take: splitting the party can be an excellent source of tension and drama.
Less hot take: this does take a good bit of skill from the DM
Frozen take: Hail Torm!
so far I think the only 'splitting up' my crew has done was like wandering around scouting, talking to merchants/locals, no real dungeon or combat splits they seemed to focus in really well. I think the only combat split is the rogues finding a 'safer' vantage point for sneak attacks and staying as far back from flying spells swords and arrows as they can. I think if you wanted to railroad them from splitting up you could always wing your dungeons to have glyphs or pitfalls that drop them back at the entrance of the area, or just get really really good at split party interactions
Oxventure OutsideXbox is my favorite D&D entertainers and Johnny the DM Spits the party all the time to often completely funny moments if have not watched you should It is D&D Light but that's what makes so good !
I support splitting the party in towns for shopping and selling. I try to equalize time between each player/subgroup during this activity, and while I may throw hints or plot hooks, I generally avoid anything resembling combat until the party can gather back together at the inn where they will share their information and sort out coin. That is when I will drop heavy plot or combat encounters on them - when they are all (or most of them) together.
-
I disincentivize separation while adventuring, other than battlefield tactics like "the fighter and the ranger set up an archery ambush while the cleric and the bard draw in the monster." or "let the rogue go check the next room and give us a count of the orcs." by slapping the "I want my own map!" player(s) with a party-sized challenge.
Yeah I don't consider shopping and downtime to be activities where splitting the party really counts. I mostly mean in dungeons and on adventures.
I'm glad you will do a video on when to split the party. I've seen it work well with tactical advantage. I will highly suggest to keep all players in initiative order.
I ran a masquerade ball session this past weekend. The party split up to gather rumors and come back together. I tired to keep going between characters quickly. Everyone enjoyed the session, even when they were just watching. I guess the story was interesting enough.
My group is a pro party splitter. Okay were 6 plus dm but its kinda fun to see what happens when some usual group ''leaders" are not there to influence others. Also were playing Vampire the masquerade which is prone to schemes and politics which sometimes favors smaller groups or flat out solo scenes . My Dm handles it much like Discworld's meanwhiles. He builds a cliffhanger than switches to the other group for a small while then switches back. So far, no phones got out. Granted, weve been on a cliffhanger end for 5 months due to recent events (we agreed it was better irl for our dynamics so we switched to dredsden file on roll20). Most of the party knows we are building a narrative and understand that splitting is highly beneficial to the trouble factor which ramps interesting to 20. (Youd be amazed how good we are at trouble. Just ask our first time player Tremere or our golconda seeking malkavian with a child personality switch). But I agree that it shouldnt be used constantly for many reasons. One being combat and the other being player coordination. But talkie walkies over short distances can do wonders for the latter, haha.
I played a 2 group game with one dungeonmaster, the idea was that things that happened in one game would affect the other.
It was actually really nice because he'd do 2 hours with one group then switch and we'd get a nice 2 hour break to do things.
What kind of things would you do for 2 hours?
@@theDMLair Well in the game we decided to try and be assassins for hire, so we would plan our hit during those 2 hours.
The game we played was about a dangerous sketchy type town that was run by mobs and had a corrupt guard force.
The kind of place a couple assassins could make some nice coin!
The other group (the girl group) decided they wanted to start a clean up crew for things like murders.
We ended up getting them in a lot of trouble when we murdered two clerics in a church while dressed up as women.
Fun times.
Last time I split that party I was playing a gunslinger in Pathfinder. Shortly after I left the group to explore on my own, the barbarian decided to follow. Out of all the paths we could pick, turns out we ended up at the boss fight. Three turns apart we each walked in and got hit with a ray reducing our intelligence scores to like5. We were told we basically have the fight or flight response.
Thankfully I had magic gloves that let me naturally understand how something works so I could still operate my gun. Problem being when the rest of the party showed up and we finished the fight we had the two dps party members unable to recognize friend from foe and the party had to subdue us. Good times.
Cool. 😀
A solution I have to a split party is partly based on the setting which is modern with time travel as part of the game, they have special phones to text each other in game so they can chat box respond to events even if they aren't there.
The only time my group has split the party is when in town, when we take turns doing various things. We also have a time limit, if you're not done doing whatever you were doing, you put it on pause and the next person gets their turn, almost like doing an initiative order. Though it's not EVERY time we're in town.
That feel when Dungeon of the Mad Mage has a specific level with purely undetectable, completely unavoidable teleporting traps intentionally designed to split the party .-.
So i plan on running death house, my plan is to have the upstairs bedroom be locked and the only way of getting to it by using the service lift that can fit only one person.
I also plan on having the suit of armor in the room rather than on the balcony on the third floor.
In the dresser will be the item they need.
A temporary party split, but seems like a good one based on the spooky nature of the house.
I also plan on having the secret entrance in the library bring the player who pulled it into the room sort of like one of those scooby doo bookshelves.
I have a group of 6 Hags(Sea, Green, Night, Annis, Bheur, and Dusk) who have taken an interest in the technology of an ancient empire. They form a Coven together with double the spell slots, and occasionally show up and cast a special Green Fog. It seperates the party every time and puts them into solo battles, usually with the Simulacrum of one of the Hags. Nobody's died yet but the Hags do better every time. Initiative happens at the same time, the different groups just can't interact with eachother or eachother's enemies.
I think they'll be using Quicklings and Displacer Beasts in the next Fog...
I really Like the Concept of Splitting. It brings more flavor into it
Good points. Splitting the party isn't always bad but most of the times it is. It can create amazing sessions as you said but more times than not it just turns Dnd into a spectator sport while taxing the DM.
It is worth emphasizing that you shouldn't rebalance encounters. If you originally created an encounter to be 6 goblins but drop it down to 2 when the party split and the rogue sneaks off ahead only to get caught, then you are enabling party splitting by removing the consequences of solo play. If a PC dies then so be it. You aren't a bad DM for running your encounters as written. If a player gets pissy just tell them that the encounter was designed for the party not an individual.
Real curious about the split party system, its something that tends to happen more when I encourage particularly new players to role play more
Party splits are a strategic option, and like all strategic options, there's a time and place for them. The situation may call for it when the skill that the team wants to lean on will clash with others (Primarily Stealth), when multiple situations need to be resolved simultaneously, or as a strategic option when in-game time is an important consideration. If the group feels that any of these scenarios apply, a split party is not out of the question.
Split parties are, in my own opinion, a natural complement to the built setting, in that the group doesn't find itself on a railroad. All values are strategic, however, and this very statement implies that there are times to put parties on railroads.
I remember one night, we were playing in a Cyberpunk campaign. Someone found out there was evil afoot, and the calls went out. Only they forgot to call my character. I read a book and has a great chuckle when the new player set off a thermite grenade on top of a container of ammo which the rest of the party was going through.
The GM and I had a great laugh.
I tend to run small game, usually around two or three players. As such they usually don't feel the need the need to split up in a dungeon. While they are in town I let them take doing their own things, and they don't metagame from it. That said during the last dungeon crawl they got caught on opposite ends of a death trap with a split party of hag elves. They were able to reconvene in a adjacent room to fight the elves in.
We need the follow up video of "Why To Say YES To Splitting The Party"
I HATE that players refuse to split a party (even so far as meta refuse), even when it would be SOOOO much fun to do so, as well as present so many new story opportunities, and allows players to feel their own character out without comparison etc etc.
Soooooooooooo many great reasons to split the party, and it SHOULD happen FAR more often than it does.
THIS! This a million times
One thing I want to try is making some smaller encounters and intentionally splitting the party. The trick is, I print out or copy the sheets of the monsters and hand them to the inactive players from group B.
Repeat for when Group B is the active half of the party.
Never split the party, and never let that damn thief out of sight.
wizard in the middle
@davekachel So he can cast some Light?
And Cleric’s in the back, keeping those fighters hale and hearty.
@A Real Lobster With An Internet Connection, most clerics have heavy armor proficiency and the spell spirit guardians which make them very good frontlines.
Never trust a troll. Or a rogue. ESPECIALLY a troll rogue.
I once had a case where only one party member (say A) could speak the language of the NPCs they met on the road. He road forward to speak with them, so I moved him to my side voice channel on discord for the conversation. IRL and in character, this player SHOULD NOT be the face of the party (no diss on him, he would admit to the same), so when he realized he would be soloing without input from the other party members, he felt dread.
I had the other party members roll two d20s without telling them what they were for. The first one was an insight/perception roll whichever each person was better at, the other was initiative.
The solo player and I roleplayed the interaction, he ended up insulting the leader. I had him role initiative, told him to remain quiet while I briefed the others. Once in the main party, I explained that members B and C saw something bad happen and were ready. D and E, did not see anything happen, so they are considered surprised. A, the speaker, was not surprised either.
After the combat, all players loved the temporary split. Not knowing what was going on for that five minutes, combined with two unexplained "naked" d20 rolls made the interaction feel very real.
--
As for scouts, I had a person enter a cave with potential enemies inside. They wanted to see if the entrance area was safe, and got attacked (not surprised). Everyone rolled initiative, but since the agreement was they would wait outside until the scout returned, I did not allow them to do ANYTHING until the scout did something that would allow them to know he was in trouble. Scout had an initiative of 3. On his turn, he asked if he could "scream like a little girl" as a free action. I said yes. At that point the rest of the party could act.
About number 2. I mostly agree HOWEVER, there is a very small group of DMs(I only know myself) that can handle a split party and NOT slow Down the game. I can handle a split party ad my experience dictates and not slow down the game at all. I’ve ran areas of my campaigns both with split and non split parties and the parties were split in up to 3 groups and It was nearly just as fast with each party; but I do have a fairly good memory and don’t have to rethink where each sub party was stuck at and can just track on without any recap. I also tend to try and swap sub parties after each action. It gets confusing for the players but not for me at all.. but I am a very rare exception in this particular thing.
There was this time my players went to Neverwinter during the Goddess of winter's festival. They splitted to play carnival/festival like games and eat strange food. It took about an hour, and it was fun. Tough I'd never split in a dungeon.
I've been the DM in a party that LOVES to split for about half a year, in this time I learned some things:
1) Don't panic.
2) Give everyone something to do, if a character gets in a fight also make the others roll dice, I usually make my players roll more often when we're split.
3) It's the perfect time to create suspence! Player A opens the chest and... back to players B and C. See? Much stronger than "you open the chest and find X and Y, back to players B and C". You just created a moment of suspence that wouldn't have been there with a non-split party!
4) DON'T PANIC!
Splitting the party in a detective session is a must, imo. One half to question witnesses/suspects, the other half to investigate on site.
I had such a session just this sunday. And it's not that split, just like 1-2 hours of ingame time separate from eachother. up to an hour and a half of irl time spent by dm going back and forth between the two halves.
The validity of this varies by game. For instance in Call of Cuthulu I often find it nessicary, as one PC needs to check town records and another hits up criminal contacts, for example.
Another reason to not metagame information your character wast there for is a more interesting scene as well. This one game i was in right before 2020 struck we had a pseudo split party. It was a tavern with a second story where we met the npc we needed info from and a group we were trying to avoid entered the tavern. Some of the party went down stairs pretty early and some of us were kind of stuck upstairs (including my character). One of the tavern patrons who we had spoken with was bought by the leader of our enemies and near the end of the while fight one of my party members dropped that npc. Next round I get down stairs and see this guy we were talking with and were somewhat friendly with so I used a spell to cure him. The guys who were part of the downstairs fight were kind of annoyed with me until I explained what my character saw. I think minor internal conflicts like that are a very good and healthy thing for the rp aspect of the game but I have seen way more instances where it just leads to frustration and annoyance from everyone else especially if something doesn't go their way after they split off
DM: "And before you, rises up, a terrifying tentacle monster"
Combat: *Is muted and we watch the barbarian begin to stick his tongue out
Me: "There's no hiding it, we all know what anime you've been watching."
Lol... But I don't watch anime... 😌
@@theDMLair you don't have to watch anime XD
In my campaign the players tried to split up once (they were lvl 9) so I told them that I would run the next two sessions separate for the 2 groups. And than on the session after that (third one) they came back together. I have a very lazy player in terms of roleplay but I made him tell everything in character or the other players could not know what happened to him.
It's not a good example of how not to split the party. But it's a good example of how to take the "Split-party opportunity" and use it to engage your players even more in a game
Wow...I didn't realize it was such a problem for most DM's to multi-task different occurences at the same time...I should value my multi-tasking abilities more. Great video tho!
I actually split the party all the time. Both as a player, and I encourage it as a GM if the players feel it makes sense to split the party. (though occasionally the party gets split up via traps. Ahhh Falling portcullises.)
whenever party's switch I divide time based entirely on how I feel it should be divided. Either 50/50, or if we have a case where the party wants to send the rogue forward to... Well one time they sent the rogue in to steal a map from the fortress they were planning to assault. During that party split everyone was watching the rogue trying to sneak through the castle. The players were on the edge of their seats and the rogue was sweating bullets. Knowing a couple of bad rolls. (I use multiple fail states) could end in his doom. The rogue returned Triumphant, and the cleric player finally took a breath they had been holding.
Now if the player wants to go and do something completely different from the rest of the party. for instance follow up on a bounty they saw in town, or go try to steal a specific item from the mages collage. I will usually just do that as its own session with the player. I have recently been experimenting with alternating between the adventure with everyone present, and Westmarchs style side quests where players pursue their own ambitions.
Seriously though I have never in 5 years (might be 6 actually) of playing D&D. I have never actually had a bad experience with splitting the party. That stemmed from splitting the party. Oh sure their have been moments we have gotten into trouble, and even a few times that a character has died (or kidnapped by drow). You shouldn't be afraid of splitting the party. It creates drama and tension sure, but that's a good thing, and just as often you can find splitting the party allows you to do things you never would have expected, and can lead to an amazing night.
So next time you feel it would make sense. Think about splitting the party.
Having backstory motivation to be in the group is really important. We're level 6 and trying to retcon that component because surprise! Two of our party members are selfish "just in it for themselves" types.
I managed to lip read,
'And you dead'
At the end of the mini montage and i just started laughing so hard 🤣
I was frowning because the wizard wasn't there, then he came in for the "Hail Torm" part and my frown instantly turned 180
The wizard saves the day. 😀
@@theDMLair Hooray!
I'm glad the wizard is back
Have you seen the Spy's Murmur magic item from Guidmaster's Guide to Ravnica? I had my artificer craft 5 of these so we could metagame peacefully everytime we had to split, like when someone goes scouting first, or that one time we had time pressure to save different people in different places. It's a life saver.
Oh man I had a "split the party"-scare during today's session. The players were approaching a young green dragon's lair in the woods, having dodged kobold traps and patrols. Just outside the lair were several openings to the kobolds' tunnels, as well as a kobold patrol. The party began to discuss how to deal with it as quietly as possible, and the NPC who was accompanying them gave the suggestion that she could lure the kobolds away with her, leaving the lair unguarded. I figured that could be a way for this NPC to be taken out of commission for the big dragon fight while also giving the party more inspiration and ideas for their plan. Not only did they not want to send her away, the warlock(who has the lowest AC and HP of the group) started going on about how he could be the distraction instead. Thankfully the others shot that idea down, but man oh man was I panicking behind that screen.
My method of stopping players from splitting up ties into my 'I will not give you blatant advice, aside from offering options your character would know that you might not, in the middle of a game, but I will warn you of stupid' agreement. I will ask my players 'Are you sure you want to do that' if they are doing something dumb. If they say yes or continue, I will ask again 'Are you really sure that you want to do that'. If they continue or say yes, I will ask them 'Are you sure you want to (fill in what is stupid about what they're doing)?'. So in this case it would be something along the lines of 'Are you sure you want to split the group into smaller groups, thus weakening each groups combat potential, and go exploring an unknown area presumed filled with hostile creatures?'. If they say yes.... then any party members dead is on them.
"Placed conveniently below!" Even the link didn't listen to you...
In my Mass Effect 5e game I'm running, one of our best sessions was with a split party. So they just escaped a Shrek planet, where one of the party members was too slow to run away and got one of his eyes pulled out by Shrek.
When they get back to Omega, I let them go to the black market to get some new stuff with a lot of money they collected doing a job for their merc leader. So the one eyed guy decides he wants a new eye, wandering to a residential area, where he kills someone in an alley. He screws up getting the first eye, and realizes he doesn't like the colour anyway so he finds a child, gets kicked in the nuts, but eventually catches up, and gets his new eye. However, bystanders were not happy with this, and tried to stop him. He shoots an incinerate, but hits a guard, proceeding to have them start shooting civilians because they're an occupying merc gang.
The others hear gunfire and go to check it out, as they know that the other guy went that way, and they proceed to have this moment where they have to rescue their party member from a war zone he started over an eye.
Our party has kind-of split more than once, most memorably when the rogue and cleric teamed up to dig up a buried treasure while some of the party stood guard at one end of the corridor and two others (myself - wizard and the party ranger/bard multiclass) fought off a dozen or so goblins at the other end (fortunately, not all of them at once, but I nearly died anyway).
It worked okay because the DM treated it as though everyone was in combat so they all had to take turns, and the players managed to resist the urge to meta-game. My character had to run back to the cleric for some healing.
That seems to be the way our DM handles a split party. It's treated as though everything is combat rounds until the party is together again. It both makes it fair since everyone gets to do something and discourages splitting the party since it's a pain for the players to have to stay in "combat rounds mode" constantly.
Mister dungeon master sir.........that barbarian!! i love him so much!!!!!
The only time i was in a split party, we just did different sessions for my character going off to Krezk to glean more information about Strahd. The other side of the party was checking out a tower because of alchemical shenaningans in Vallaki.
I design encounters for the world. I don't design encounters specific for the party or take into account people missing/split and I reward personal xp. You don't want split parties? Don't hold back on lone wolves and don't award xp to people who were not in a fight. My groups learn pretty quick to stay together, negotiate and flee if necessary.
I have a dungeon where you actually have to split the party. it's a puzzle maze, but if they are thorough in the last few rooms before they get to it, they'll have sending stones before they get there so they all know what's going on with each other.
Splitting of the party happens really frequently in call of cthulhu and delta green and stuff. Which is an even worse idea most of the time but sometimes time is of the essence and investigating multiple places at once is best
I’d say the simplest way to keep a party of adventurers together is to have the “don’t split the party” wisdom be common advice in-universe. I mean, it makes sense, it is actually a bad for reasons that are perfectly diegetic. Running around a spooky area you know to be filled with dangerous predators of people all by yourself is very contrary to normal human instincts, and very good reason.
One thing that could be fun is if you had alot of people you dm for, so they're all in the same adventure. So people keep splitting up and running into eachother. You can have small and large parties, and sometimes the parties can even antagonize eachother.
I've been enjoying your videos and finding them very helpful, but had also been hoping this would go over more in-game ways, like potentially plot devices to keep a party together. Say, in the event you made an oopsie as a DM and half the party (group A) has a important matter they have been tasked see to on a timeline, but the other half (group B) has no buy-in to that task yet (and in fact don't know it exists). But the party has discovered something that is more fascinating to group B, and investigating it thoroughly will interrupt the timeline for Group A. I either need to find a way to convince Group A to find another solution for their timeline for something they feel is less important, or find a way for group B to discover group A's timeline and also feel it's important enough to delay their investigation and come back to it later. Retrospectively, I shouldn't have created that scenario for myself. But I was wondering if any of your videos had suggestions for in-game things that encourage a party to stay together outside combat, or if maybe you'd create something like that in the future (as having too many important things to attend to seems to come up a lot in this group throughout different campaigns and DMs).
I just had a session yesterday where the party Got split. It allowed for some really important scouting. They had to Kill a noble and while the rest of the party were busy going to the blacksmith, buying herbalist gear, and trading with the magic academy, the last player decided to scout ahead inside the targets mansion as a mosquito. So a Great example on when it is a Great time to split the party.
If my party decides to split up and runs into an encounter which was meant for the party. Well that happened to my current group in about 2 years ago. What happened? The guy who went off alone was killed.
I have a player that wants to be involved in every situation or interaction. Almost to the point where I have to tell said player you are not there more often then engaging with him as the NPC.
My 1st game I ran C.O.S and split the party to show them I could, it was fun for me and the party, two went to a town while the other's stop an werewolf attack on Vallaki. Later they meet up no one died. I feel it is somewhat lazy to force the party to stay to gather (To fix this I ran two different games that week.) however you are the d.m of your game and the first thing you should ensure in your game is fun for everyone I also ran a chase encounter with a Zombie dragon, 6 gargoyles and 4 red dragon Wyrmling's (level 6 party) it was also a ton of fun, the party was not able to move durring the fight and had to fight with ranged attacks only. (Except the Bar-bar he had a glider and rope said "I tie it around my waist and jumped off the wagon into the air what happens?" I fell trust is important to establish with your players and if the d.m does not want to give him or her self more work then players should respect that and not try and split the part. BTW I aloud the tabaxi bar-bar to become the worlds 1st cat-kite and said he could fly using the feet of the rope '50ft' he also had the shield master feat so picture how that fight may have gone. :)
Don't split the party.
Split the pizza.
By the way, where did you get the pizza?
From the fridge.
The pizza place in town. 😉
Which place in town?
We know your favorite coffee but not your favorite pizza place. Are they any of the following:
-Old Tavern Pizza
-Pizza Hag
-Little Goblin's (pizza-pizza)
-Round Table Mimic Pizza
-Dice and Gnomes Pizza
Until Next Time...
Let's Eat D&D!
I had a split party last session. I ping ponged between players. It helped me instigate action for each side. If I hadn't, the sorcerer would have been trapped with 3 cultists bosses that thought he was on their side for a dark ritual.
I recently had a party split that turned out well. The rogue had been drawn away and eventually was forced into single combat with an enemy assassin. Meanwhile, the other 3 party members were fighting off some thugs. Everyone acted in a single initiative order, but after the rogues ended their turn, there was a scene cut to the other characters...nobody could affect the other combat.