Why splitting the party is a natural development, learning to handle it, and techniques that it opens up for the GM. Plus a writing tip or 2! That’s today’s prescription.

I composited 5 images to create what you see above. The background is nature-6517866 by Karl Egger, foreground extended by me. The four figures are (1) man-2484478 by Mohamed Hassan, (2) man-2683842 by Mohamed Hassan, (3) businessman-8925552, also by Mohamed Hassan, and (4) man-2642261, a third image by Mohamed Hassan, all from Pixabay.

I made the time-out logo from two images in combination: The relaxing man photo is by Frauke Riether and the clock face (which was used as inspiration for the text rendering) Image was provided by OpenClipart-Vectors, both sourced from Pixabay.

This is the latest in my series of time-out posts in between the Trade In Fantasy series.

Phases Of Experience

“Don’t Split The Party” is advice that is still offered to RPG players on a regular basis. For a group of new players, it’s sound advice, and for a new GM as well, because it simplifies the narrative structure and makes the tales of adventures more coherent – and when you’re new to all this, those are things you still need to learn to achieve.

Level 2

There’s a second stage when you have a bit more experience under your belt, in either capacity, in which players feel confident enough to have their characters go off alone to do things that logically don’t require the whole party, like attending worship services or shopping. These low-key activities help teach the GM how to handle richer, more complex narratives with multiple threads running simultaneously.

There can also be a sub-stage in which the players feel ready but the GM does not, in which excuses to keep the party together are contrived by the GM. That can last until a player complains.

Level 3

But eventually, the GM learns how to handle this and everything that takes place gets split into group action and individual action. The key to success in this is to pay extra attention to making sure that everyone gets their own fair share of the spotlight, so you spend a bit of time with one player and then move on to the player next to them at the table.

Because the ‘action’ is overlapping, possibly even simultaneous, these solo narratives consume far more table time relative to game time than when everyone is in a group. This introduces a counter-force that can lead to GMs trying to push the ‘buddy system’ where PCs go around in pairs. I’ve even heard of cases where GMs added an extra player (or worse yet, ejected an existing player) just so that they had even numbers with which to make this work. I think most will agree that’s going too far.

Level 4

Once they start to get used to it – and it generally doesn’t take too long – most GMs learn how to handle split parties when there’s nothing major going on. As soon as that happens, they start finding ways to use it to their advantage. After all, if one character buys into the plot on offer and then pulls in the rest of the group, that can be a far easier ‘sell’ than getting everyone on board for that adventure.

You can start using events in a solo encounter to preload players with critical briefing notes. You can use solo encounters as preludes and prologues and plot hook delivery systems. It’s only a matter of time before an NPC that the PCs don’t like or trust saunters up to one of them in a crowded marketplace and warns them not to stick their noses into X – where X is exactly what the GM wants the party to stick their collective noses into. Hook, baited, cast, and swallowed.

Level 5

After a while, GMs realize that there’s no more problem doing theater-of-the-mind combat sequences for each PC on their own at the same time than there is running a larger combat sequence for the whole group. Combat Time is a whole other issue – think about how long a typical battle takes, as a ratio of real time to game time, and it’s usually a very different ratio to what happens in roleplay, where large swathes of time can be hand-waved to keep things moving along.

Instead of simply warning off the PCs, an enemy now targets each of them as a preemptive strike to prevent them interfering (presuming that the PCs are growing famous enough to justify such action).

Level 6

At about the same time – and it can even swap with the ‘Level 5’ described above – GMs start coming up with solo plot threads for each PC in addition to the main plotline that affects the whole group (the metaphor starts getting a little blurry around at this point).

And, after a while, as the players grow still more adept at treating their characters like real people that they are ‘inhabiting’ within the game world, these plotlines will start interacting, and richer and more complex constructions enter the picture.

Level 7

The natural outgrowth of Level 5 is a streamlined combat system in which, for the sake of gameplay, the GM simplifies game mechanics so that a combat sequence involving one PC can proceed at the same time as non-combat sequences occupy the others. This, at least partially, addresses the problem of Combat Time.

They soon learn that it’s incumbent upon them to make these combat sequences less consequential than whole-group battles, because the player will have a justifiable complaint if they perceive that they lost an important battle because of the streamlining. If the only consequences are plot oriented, there are no such causes of complaint.

Level 8

The last barrier having fallen, once the GM and players get good enough at their respective crafts, it becomes natural to have two or three or even more plot threads running per character in addition to the main group plot. Entire game sessions can consist of solo activities that advance some of these plots, and the ‘quiet spots’ in one plot thread can be distracted from with the greater heat in another.

The GM is now weaving complex tapestries of stories, and even crafting narratives in which a story flows from one solo PC to another, or represents two sides of the same coin, or solo tales explore side-issues tangential to, but stemming from, the main plot. It’s no biggie to have the whole group (minus one PC) engaged in the main plot while the absent PC is dealing with a plot thread that’s related to it, or foreshadows a future group plotline, or is a complete side-issue that’s no less important to them than the main plot.

Level 9

It doesn’t take too long for GMs to realize that of-camera side-plot engagement is a great way of handling player absences, at least some of the time – if you ended on a cliffhanger with Character Y present, it’s harder to write that character out of the ongoing group narrative .if the player has to miss the next session. But, at the start of adventures, it’s a lot easier, because the action starts in down-time for the group, and it’s sometimes possible even in the middle of a plotline.

If he hasn’t already, the GM starts curating a list of plot seeds that can justify a PCs sudden absence and the adventures that he writes start evolving – different end-of-play points getting chosen in a multi-session plot to facilitate PCs coming and going, should it be necessary.

This was actually forced on me prematurely, when one of my players – completely without warning – announced that he’d signed up for a stint in the army and his appearances would be sporadic for a while. But any job that occasionally forces players to work during your normal game time can have the same effect.

Level 10

Congratulations – when you get here, you have achieved mastery over the fine art of splitting the party. Group Unity of action is now purely plot-driven; if a plot requires engagement by a particular PC at a particular point, they are advancing that plot, and if not, they can be advancing a narrative in which they alone hold the spotlight. The players have reached the point where they see nothing strange about this, and view it as making sure that each of them gets a more complete adventuring experience from a session’s play.

There are teething problems from time to time – you never stop getting better at this – but it’s all nuance and recovering from the occasional fumble.

Previous posts on this topic:

• Ask The GMs: “Let’s Split Up.” – “Good Idea, we can do more damage that way!”
• Ensemble or Star Vehicle – Which is Your RPG Campaign?
• The Wandering Spotlight Part One of Two: Plot Prologues
• The Wandering Spotlight Part Two of Two: Shared Stories
• Engagement vs Involvement: The forgotten balance (a sequel to Ensemble or Star Vehicle)

Writing for an RPG is different

Why am I bringing all this up? Because I wanted to show how splitting the party is a natural progression of skill on the part of GMs and players. This sequence of development can be stopped at any point by a collective decision, but the results are deliberately artificial.

I’ve mentioned in a recent post (The Momentum Of Breadcrumbs) about the Dr Who books that I’ve been reading lately. One of them had, towards the end, a complete breakdown of an individual episode, and as I read it, I realized that it would never work in this structure within the confines of an RPG.

Why? Because critical scenes were shown to the audience, as a way to build tension, excitement, and interest, and there was not a single protagonist of the series in any of those scenes. Instead, the antagonists were having their own narrative thread in which context for the main action to follow was explored and displayed for the entertainment of the audience.

Yes, there are ways in which such sequences can occasionally be presented to the players – warnings from deities, dream sequences, prophecies, and what-have-you – but these often fall flat and don’t have the desired impact, and they are really easy to over-use.

Get your fingers burned in this way once too often, and it’s normal and natural to restrict yourself to slightly more linear plots.

RPGs are the only medium in which non-protagonist scenes can be dropped in as required. TV, Movies, Books, Short Stories, Comics, Plays, Radio Plays – they get to do it whenever they want. RPGs, not so much.

That’s what today’s article is really all about – I have a way in which these scenes can be dropped into an RPG from time to time to offer a little later, but first, and for the heart of the article, I want to explore the ramifications, and why they mean that GMs and players should actively pursue the split-the-party line of self-development described.

Splitting The Party as a Tool For Complex Narratives

So, most of the time (it would be all of the time except for the technique I’ll describe later, which can’t be used all the time), you have to keep the focus on the protagonists at all times. That means that you need some alternative methods for getting backstory developments to the attention of the ‘audience’.

The thing is that playing an RPG is a participative act, not a passive one. So you need a way to get the PCs to participate in that backstory, most of the time.

Two options immediately spring to mind: Active roles and Inactive roles.

Active Roles

An active role means that PCs are present to witness the development, but not forced to actually intervene immediately – they can go away, think about their options, and make plans before throwing their hat into the ring.

This is a lot easier to arrange, and a lot more likely to result, when it’s one lone PC becoming aware through happenstance of a problem too big for one PC to handle. Especially if your narrative feeds those cues to the player in question.

And if they don’t take the hint, make sure to capture them, not kill them – rescuing a friend and ally is a great motivator. Of course, the other PCs are starting a bit behind the eight-ball; not only are they missing the expertise and contacts of the captured player, but all they know is that he or she went somewhere and didn’t come back. It will take time for the seriousness of the situation to become apparent, and all the while, the enemy’s plots are maturing and becoming that much harder to counter.

The question naturally arises, what to do with the player whose character has been captured? Well, there are three possibilities: A substitute or an active engagement, or a combination of both.

A Substitute

Give the player an NPC to run in the interim. One that is a lot weaker than the PC that he usually plays. A great choice is often a turncoat or spy from within the enemy’s organization, one not privy to everything that’s going on, but one who knows that the PC has been captured. But this isn’t something that can be done all the time.

You want the player to have something to do, but at the same time, you want to teach that player a lesson – not to bite off more than they can chew when you’ve explicitly warned the player this was what they were doing.

Another option is a character with a short-term story arc that will occupy the player until the other PCs decide to investigate the disappearance of their missing ally.

In this circumstance, I once had a mage accidentally disconnect from his body and become a disembodied spirit, and able to ‘escape’ in that form; not only was he able to sound the warning about what the bad guys were up to, and participate somewhat vicariously in his own rescue, he then brought in a whole other plotline about how to get his spirit back into the body from whence it came.

There’s a lot you can do in this line with a little creativity.

One word of warning, though; this worked out so well that the player in question then concocted a hair-brained scheme to let himself get captured by an enemy as a way to gather intelligence. Suffice it to say that things did not work out for him so well the second time around; his released Spirit was captured in a phylactery and tortured, watching the Cannibalistic bad guy literally eat his body in front of him. The other PCs eventually rescued him and got him stuffed in a Golem body – one about 4′ tall….

Active Engagement

This is trickier to arrange, it needs just the right kind of villain. Someone with the arrogance – or the legitimacy – to think that he can turn the PC to “the dark side” (or his side, whichever works). Or who is so arrogant that he considers the PC to be helpless, and decides to show off, James-Bond-Villain-style.

This can’t be done at the game table where all the other players can hear what’s going on. In fact, it’s better handled in a completely separate solo game session, if that can be arranged – and the PC then spends as long as it takes waiting for the plot (and his friends) to catch up with him.

And what if the villain has not miscalculated and the PC really does turn coat? Have a plan ready for this eventuality!

A Combination

Perhaps the best answer is to blend the two. Most of the time, the player runs a temporary PC – one with a definite in-game shelf life – but, every now and then, take the player aside for a brief contact with what his real PC’s situation is.

Inactive Roles

An inactive role doesn’t put the PC’s head in a noose. Someone comes to the PC and tells him a story. It may be incomplete, it may be full of holes, it may be legitimate or it may be a plant – but the goal is to have the NPC offer up the backstory development as news to the PC, who then decides what to do about it.

There’s a lot you can do with this.

The warning may be legitimate.

The NPC may be the villain looking to use the PCs as cat’s paws to do his dirty work for him – with fake scenes being enacted by minions for the PC’s benefit. The more convincing he can be, the bigger the eventual payoff.

The NPC may be a villain, out to have the PCs take down a rival who is just as bad.

Or, the NPC may be a villain who simply wants the PCs out of the way so that he can get on with “business”.

Unfortunately, you can rarely use all of these options in the one campaign. But if you mix them up to avoid getting predictable, you can have great fun.

The Players as Audience

Okay, so what’s this big technique, then?

I call it the Retroactive Flashback.

It works best at the start of the second session in a multi-session adventure, or in the session after the PCs become aware of the menace posed by the villain at the center of the plot, and his identity.

At the start of that session, you describe the flashback sequence to the PCs without explanation until the very end. You conclude with, “over the last [in-game time-period elapsed since the last session], you’ve all imagined something like this taking place. Whether or not it’s what actually happened, you don’t know.”

You can willfully distort this flashback to hide planned plot twists. You can leave plot holes, and introduce errors of logic. You can put this “imaginary sequence” into the head of one PC or all of them. Or an NPC who has just related it to a PC.

To construct it, you need to make sure that it doesn’t contain anything the PCs don’t know and cant infer as a reasonable supposition. So it’s inherently going to be incomplete – plug most of the gaps with stuff you’ve invented out of whole cloth.

Use it to get the players into the proper mindset for carrying the adventure forward.

Look, it’s a technique that could easily be overused or abused. It’s not a justification for weak storytelling. But it’s a way to insert the antagonist-focused scene without the PC scrying it, or dreaming it, or learning of it through a deus-ex-machina.

You can actively guard against abuse by ensuring that each time you sue it, you have some opportunity for the story to be ‘corrected’ further down the track. If you can’t come up with a good way of doing that, don’t use the technique. But that’s up to you.

And, Speaking Of Writing…. (Bonus Content)

I got taken in by a piece of spam the other day – it doesn’t happen often, but I’m human and have my lapses just like everyone else.

I got an email from a seemingly-legitimate source through the Campaign Mastery feedback page. It read,

First off I want to say awesome blog! I had a quick question which I’d
like to ask if you don’t mind.

I was curious to know how you center yourself and clear your head prior to writing.

I have had a tough time clearing my mind in getting my ideas out there. I truly do take pleasure in writing however it just seems like the first 10 to 15 minutes tend to be wasted simply just trying to figure out how to begin.

Any ideas or hints? Cheers!

————————-
Time: May 26, 2025 at 3:16 pm

I dashed off a quickish reply a few days later when I had a spare moment and thought nothing more of it – until the email came back as “undeliverable – no such address”.

Well, I think that my advice is sound, and deserves to be out there. And it might just be beneficial to other GMs. So I’ve decided to toss it in as some extra content to this (relatively short) article:

I find that the notion that you need to center yourself before writing is actually a myth. Instead, you need to direct yourself so that the thoughts crowding into your head are productive and beneficial to the end product.

Writing starts with a moment of inspiration, an idea, something to say or discuss.

I immediately create a file with an appropriate name in which the development of the written piece will take place, and summarize as briefly and succinctly as possible that idea at the start of it.

I then break down the discussion plan as a bullet-point outline of what the content of the piece will be, from an introduction through to the logical conclusion of the original thought or idea. This -road map’ is not fixed; I will add, subtract, and amend it as I write, but it’s a foundation. Enthusiasm for the idea is usually enough to carry me this far, no matter what the distractions, and it takes little enough time that I can interrupt other tasks long enough to carry it out. I will often also include a single sentence summarizing the intended content or point of each section, because there’s nothing worse than coming to a bullet point and not remembering what you meant by it.

Save the document and set it aside for when you have time to develop it.

Writing session 1: I start with the introduction, which is usually about what has inspired the article or recent events in life. These require little or no pre-planning, it’s just stream-of-consciousness, but it clears the mind. I then turn to the first of my bullet points, and start writing. When I’ve finished with that one, I move on to the next, and so on.

If it’s a short piece, or the words flow especially well, and there’s little or no research required, I may finish the item in one sitting. More commonly, though, I’ll get just a fraction of the way there.

Writing session 2+: I re-read the introduction. This helps connect me back to the original inspiration. I’ll then skim the last completed section, which helps me get back into the flow of writing the article. That brings me to the next of my bullet points, which gives my writing and thoughts direction. The first two steps clear out the cobwebs and get you ready to focus.

If I’m dealing with a larger work, a multipart post or book chapter, there may be subdivisions within each bullet point – the top level ones become chapters and the subordinate ones sections within the chapter.

I know this approach doesn’t work for everyone, but I find it works for me.

Have fun out there, and I’ll see you all next time!