"Don't Split the Party!" Actually, do.

“Don’t split the party” might be DnD adventuring rule number one. Splitting the party is, allegedly, the leading cause of death among adventurers. New players get this rule drilled into them by their more wizened, battle-hardened friends, who have seen what can happen when someone goes off alone and gets stomped by an encounter designed for the whole party.

Actually, I suspect that they haven’t seen this happen at all. I think most people just get told “don’t split the party” and run with it, partially because it stands to reason that one person going off to do what was meant for four people is likely to end in an unbalanced encounter, and partially because it sounds logistically difficult if you have different people in different places at the same time. There are going to be lulls when you’re not in the scene, and someone think of the poor DM who has to keep track of everything.

Not splitting the party is starting to sound pretty reasonable. We don’t want to overburden our already struggling DMs, and we certainly don’t want to see our friends’ characters dying.

But I want to argue that splitting the party is actually a perfectly fine idea. Let’s face it, when you and your friends go out adventuring (to the pub), do you always stay together at all times? Do the cast of most (any) TV shows or movies stay together the whole time? Does it actually make sense from a narrative point of view that a party will always do literally everything together?

No.

Sure, if you’re going through a dungeon that you suspect might be fraught with danger at every turn, then you’re likely to stick together. But if you’re exploring a city where you have no real reason to think that you’re in immediate danger, then I think not splitting the party can actually be detrimental to the story. It can curtail the storyline of individual characters, because they don’t want to drag their entire party along with them on a personal sidequest.

This is not unique to DnD, but for example in Monster of the Week, the GM is actively encouraged to split the party, usually as a consequence of a failed roll. I have run several games of MotW where the party was split for large portions of the game and it worked really well. It takes a different GMing style, but it is possible, and it is possible to do in DnD.

Splitting the party has a big advantage that I want to explore, then I’ll go on to talk about the drawback and how I run games with a split party.

The Advantage: Cinematic Cutting

As the DM, you decide when things move from one group to another. This is a powerful tool. You can have one player having a conversation with someone important in which a vital detail to the plot comes to light, then cut at that moment to another couple of players, who are trying to sneak into a secret meeting. They learn a few things, fail a roll, get spotted, then cut to the final player who is researching in the library for more information. They come across a critical passage in an old tomb, then cut back to the first player.

This allows you to keep the tension up and keep the pacing of a session moving. How often do sessions stall as players prevaricate over what to do next? When the party is split, you can move away from the players to give them time to think, and focus in on someone else.

This can make a session feel much more cinematic and exciting. The DM suddenly has a lot more control of the storytelling. It becomes a tool in your armoury to shift focus to different players at a choice moment. It also helps to give more spotlight to players who might otherwise get less airtime in a game, as the more dominant player can take over. While there will be times when players are doing nothing, I think splitting the party actually can increase the overall level of engagement with the game from the players, as they have scenes that they can take ownership of.

I’m not advocating always splitting the party. I think there are many reasons not to, the main one of which is that it makes combat much harder to do.

The Cost: Avoid Combat:

Combat is the core mechanic of DnD. It is, at its heart, a game about fighting monsters. 1/3rd of the core rules are given over to giving us monsters to kill. Most of the class abilities are directly related to things you do in combat. Combat is the most complex part of the game, and so it is the part of the game that takes the most time. A fight lasting 30 seconds of in-game time (5 rounds) can easily take an hour of play-time, whereas whole days can pass in-game in the same amount of play-time without combat. It’s also the hardest to adjust on the fly. Adjusting down an encounter to be balanced against 2 players, rather than 4 is not easy.

So, having a combat encounter with only half the party involved might be a recipe for disaster. It’s likely that you will end up with an unbalanced fight, which will take lots of time, while the other players at the table sit around waiting for something to do. The only exception to this might be if you just leave the encounter it was for the whole party, but have the enemies deal non-lethal damage to capture the players, leaving the others to rescue them. At low levels, this should be doable in a relatively short period of time, and will really raise the tension round the table (and make the next sessions easier to plan!).

This obviously means that splitting the party is not something you should do all the time, as you would have to have a largely combat-free campaign, at which point, you might as well play a different TTRPG. It also means that when you do it, you have to change the way you DM to make the game run more smoothly.

The Skill: Improvising

Chances are, when the party splits, it’s because one player says ‘I want to do this thing’ and another says ‘I want to do something else’, so they go and do those things. It’s very hard to plan for this, as those things have come from the players, not from you (although you can suggest them), so you might have to improvise a little.

I’ve written before about how to plan knowing things like this will happen , so I won’t repeat myself. I will however tell you what I think is the most important thing to keep in mind when you are running a session where the party is split - keep in mind what the players are trying to get out of the scene.

If there’s a clear end goal in mind, then working out what happens when a player tries to achieve that goal becomes easier, and putting up obstacles becomes easier too, as you know what you’re trying to make harder.

Whether the end goal is just to go shopping, or whether it is to sneak into a secret meeting of a mysterious cult, being clear in your mind about what that end goal is will help you to shape a scene that you have not planned for. You can (and should) ask the player or players in question about this, so that you’re all on the same page about what you want to get out of a scene.

And, if you want to make things interesting, you can always turn a solo encounter into a skill challenge, which is a mechanic from 4th edition that I have been having fun using recently. These are much easier to just make up on the fly, and are much quicker than combat encounters, so can work with a split party (or a whole one). In fact, I think I’ll talk more about how I’ve been using skill challenges next time.