Tag: never split the party

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Friday Favourites

Friday Favourite: Splitting the Party Successfully

On Friday we comb through our extensive archives to find an older article that we feel deserves another look. From April 23, 2012, Dungeon’s Master once again presents: Splitting the Party Successfully.

Experience teaches player to never split the party. However, there are times when it doesn’t make sense for the party to remain together. This might be because there are many tasks to complete in a limited amount of time or it might be because some party members have skills or powers that make them uniquely qualified to handle a task alone. Yet when presented with any opportunity to split the party, no matter how logical it might seem to do so, a lot of players insist on staying together. It’s a knee-jerk reaction that is not founded in any rational assessment of the situation. It’s an instinctual response based on a previous disaster and a slogan ingrained into them by the Wizards marketing department. Players need to take a deep breath and repeat after me: Sometimes it’s a good idea to split the party.

My gaming group has actually had a lot of success when splitting the party. It’s not something we do very often, but we are certainly open to the possibility when it makes sense. Most often when we split up each group or individual ends up with their own mini skill challenge, but every so often the DM has something else in mind and combat occurs while the party is separated from each other. We’ve found that there are ways to make combat with a split party work. It’s definitely challenging, but our approach to these situations are always fun and rarely result in anyone being left out while their character is off screen.

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DM Resources Editorial

Splitting the Party Successfully

Experience teaches player to never split the party. However, there are times when it doesn’t make sense for the party to remain together. This might be because there are many tasks to complete in a limited amount of time or it might be because some party members have skills or powers that make them uniquely qualified to handle a task alone. Yet when presented with any opportunity to split the party, no matter how logical it might seem to do so, a lot of players insist on staying together. It’s a knee-jerk reaction that is not founded in any rational assessment of the situation. It’s an instinctual response based on a previous disaster and a slogan ingrained into them by the Wizards marketing department. Players need to take a deep breath and repeat after me: Sometimes it’s a good idea to split the party.

My gaming group has actually had a lot of success when splitting the party. It’s not something we do very often, but we are certainly open to the possibility when it makes sense. Most often when we split up each group or individual ends up with their own mini skill challenge, but every so often the DM has something else in mind and combat occurs while the party is separated from each other. We’ve found that there are ways to make combat with a split party work. It’s definitely challenging, but our approach to these situations are always fun and rarely result in anyone being left out while their character is off screen.

Continue reading “Splitting the Party Successfully”
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Editorial

Individuality vs. Group Dynamics

Never split the party. It’s one of the 4e mantras. Experienced players know that splitting the party often leads to disastrous consequences. D&D is a team game and as such the objectives almost always require a team to accomplish them. But just because the game is designed to be inclusive and keep everyone equally engaged, does that mean that there shouldn’t be opportunities for some players to split from the party and play to their strengths?

Sometimes circumstances will slightly favour one or two characters in the party. The most common example is to use monsters with vulnerabilities to energy attacks that the party has in its repertoire or have monsters attack using an energy types the party has resistance to. This may seem like a little thing but when it’s your character wielding the cold empowered bastard sword against the fire-based, cold vulnerable creatures it feels pretty great to have an advantage no one else in the party has. Likewise when your poison resistance lets you all but ignore the ongoing poison damage and shrug off a good portion of each hit from the poisonous serpents.

These kind of individual heroics are easy for DMs to place into encounters without throwing things out of balance and without excluding anyone (unless of course the entire party has fire resistance except for one poor soul). More importantly it doesn’t take any play-time away from other players. Everyone still gets their full normal turn, but in this kind of circumstance one PC may find that his turn is a little bit more exciting than his companion’s turns.

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