Welcome to another installment of The Gamemaster. You can read past columns in this series here.
In every book on gamemastering I’ve read, one seemingly universal piece of advice I’ve seen is to never, ever, under any circumstance, split your party up.
I understand that. I really do. You don’t want to split up your party doing different things because everyone is there to play and have fun and it isn’t any fun to get split off from the group and have to sit and watch everyone else play as you wait for your turn to come up. It also encourages meta-gaming, you have a whole group of people watching things happen and learning information and revelations their characters should have no concept of. Sure, good roleplayers will do their best to separate themselves from their character, but sometimes they just can’t help it, even on a subconscious level.
But… there’s a way to do it.
I’m in the midst of doing it now and it’s added an incredible dynamic to my game.
The last session we all played together as a group ended with the party getting split up into three groups, all heading in different directions after a different goal, all hell breaking loose, and then planning on meeting back at the same place.
As we were planning on our next session, it was getting difficult to get everyone’s free time to jive, so I suggested I GM each individual group on their own, through their minor adventure and piece of the investigation, and then back to the agreed upon rendezvous point.
I couldn’t be happier or more impressed by how this is working out. Each path of characters has been given bits of other information the others don’t have, and have all witnessed drastically different events. They’ve all drawn their own conclusions with their separate experiences and they all have a different piece of the puzzle.
They’re all dying to get into our next session and I’m confident they’re going to spend the first half hour, or even a full hour, discussing everything they’ve learned on their own and sharing information. And since we’ve been establishing mistrust amongst some of the player characters, there are certainly going to be shades of truth and information communicated.
The best part about the idea is that it forces a couple of my player who aren’t usually savvy with roleplaying into in-character interactions with other players because they can’t simply meta-game the knowledge or information. And after my last two mini-sessions, the enthusiasm to get together with the group to share the information their characters had learned was palpable.
It also helped me maintain a momentum with the game in the light of real-world scheduling issues. And even if I had organized their schedules to bring the group together at once, there would be two groups of people at any given time waiting around for the other group to get through their piece of the adventure.
Sitting there, watching them struggle with their attention spans, I can almost guarantee that I would have abridged their paths back to the rendezvous to almost nothing. Instead, I was given the time to pay one on one attention with a 1, 2, or 3 players in a group and give this leg of the game a much fuller experience. It’s a bonus for the players, it’s a bonus for the story, and it’s a bonus for me.
If you can manage to pace out a reason for your party to get separated in the midst of an investigation for unanswered questions and on the run, it sets the stage for incredibly engaging mini-sessions. Maybe I’m late to the party on this, maybe Gamemasters the world over have been using this trick for decades and I’m just out of the loop, but it seemed novel to me.
But that’s the beauty of this game, even old ideas can become new.
Be sure to check out other columns in the Gamemaster series!