There Is Only the Adventurer Class

[PhoneLobster]

LotR is a really awful example.

Also an awful series in general, but more importantly we know how reference material fights play out and it's best to just ignore that shit and talk about relevant goals and methodology instead because reference material fights are a worthless shitfest.

[Mechalich]

No. I am saying that splitting the party is shit and that if your design calls for the party to be split on a regular basis that your design is shit.

Okay, fine, that's a much weaker claim than 'you do not split the party ever.'

Yes, splitting the party sucks. Yes, you should design to minimize party splitting.

Despite this, splitting the party happens. It just does, there's too much storytelling pressure to avoid it. It is not possible to prevent all circumstances wherein splitting up becomes the most obvious, best, and practically irresistible solution. So it becomes a matter of prioritization as to what capabilities you need to preserve in order to minimize splitting the party, and, concurrently, to preserve the ability of characters to actually function when the party gets split. Those abilities are going to vary from game to game.

And I agree that stealth is one of the abilities that you need to consider when designing this sort of thing, problem one of the most common along with basic social capabilities, and the ability to fight. Games in different settings may have different barriers. In modern setting games, for example, it is often important that every character be able to drive, and high tech settings may demand a minimal level of computer use capability.

[PhoneLobster]

So it becomes a matter of prioritization

The primary cost of splitting the party is effectively organizational. If one guy goes off on their own and takes 30 minutes or 2 hours to resolve something before anyone else gets to play the game you have a problem.

But physical proximity of PCs is not in fact the sole root cause of the issue. As long as players still get to take turns to take actions in a reasonable time frame then it matters not one shit if the characters involved are in the same room, the same castle or the same continent. With the right mechanics and the right GMing technique there is just short of no reason why a party split isn't entirely manageable on any sort of "dungeon" scale.

The real danger is when a long term PLUS long distance split occurs, when one or two guys splitting and "going way over there" is them traveling to the far off realm of Someotheria for three months of game time and having an entire solo adventure there. Worse if they go over there to do that thing but for whatever reason that big thing they are doing needs to (or for no reason just is) fully resolved before the guys who stayed home or went somewhere else can do their thing.

With the right tools and techniques however even then the issues could be minimized. With a better formalized long term time management system the three months they spend could at least still be three months of "down time" turns or whatever that the other players DO still get to take. With some appropriate slight of hand even elaborate time costly encounters occurring during the adventure could be timed at the table if not in actual in game time to resolve simultaneously so that the players can take turns playing in separate unrelated events. And fuck it for all the whining cry baby "its not D&D... for no reason" IF you are planning to split the party for an extended period of game play of fucking course you consider the option of adding additional characters for players to play at both locations, why the fuck not?

The big thing is though that when you consider the potential big issue of party splitting, players spending time twiddling thumbs waiting for the other guy to resolve his bullshit, it sounds sort of fucking familiar doesn't it? Because we know it all too well from somewhere else. Separate Minigames with Role Protection. That's where. The issue of everyone taking reasonable turns to do reasonable stuff and experience the rewards of game play is not an issue of character proximity, but it sure as hell can be an issue of game mechanical design if you aren't careful.

[Username17]

As long as players still get to take turns to take actions in a reasonable time frame then it matters not one shit if the characters involved are in the same room, the same castle or the same continent.

It still does actually. Even if you manage to get screen time shared roughly equally and rotated between the players quickly enough to keep players from being bored, it's still advantageous for the characters to be in the same place because you are playing a fucking role playing game, and having the characters interact with each other is 90% of the reason you're doing that rather than playing a board game or other group activity.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

And the only possible way they can interact with each other as players or characters is to all stab the same object with swords, stop being such a transparent idiot.

[Grek]

It'd be nice if, whatever they were doing, they were in the same room at the same time when they did it.

[PhoneLobster]

It'd be nice if, whatever they were doing, they were in the same room at the same time when they did it.

Why?

And also one room really? THAT'S the hill to die on?

Are you failing at making some joke about mixing up the difference between players in the same room in the real world and characters in the game?

I've seen some wildly limited rules sets and GMs around, but one room seems like a caricature.

[Omegonthesane]

Having the PCs all in a room means you don't have to make up justifications for how they can all contribute to whatever the situation that they are trying to resolve in their favour is. Because they're all sodding there.

(Literally if you're playing Chuck Tingle Adventures.)

[Grek]

And also one room really? THAT'S the hill to die on?.

My requirements are basically that every member of the party remain in communication with all of the other members of the party as often as can be contrived. That doesn't necessarily mean being physically in the same room - nothing particularly bad happens if two shadowrunners go in the front door wearing business suits while two shadowrunners sneak in the back door dressed as ninjas as long as everyone has headsets - for a fantasy setting I really do want the entire party to remain within shouting of each other at all times and within whispering distance if the party aspires to be remotely stealthy.

[Jason]

There is nothing inherently bad about splitting the party.

You are dead wrong. About as wrong as wrong can be.

Why, you ask? Because a split party, where one part of the party enters combat means the rest now has a 50 to 300 minute break (depending on system) from the game and can go order pizza for all it's worth. They are pretty much done for the evening. And that is shit design!

It's not just combat, though, it's any prolongued and opposed action. If actions require more than three rolls, they can not be done with a split group, without wasting the time of some.

Splitting the party is an extreme move and should be done as rarely as possible, and never by DM fiat. If the grous wants to split on their own, by all means let them, their decisions, their consequences, but never do it by DM fiat and most certainly don't design your system around it. Especially the latter is plain retarded!

[hogarth]

There is nothing inherently bad about splitting the party.

You are dead wrong. About as wrong as wrong can be.

Why, you ask? Because a split party, where one part of the party enters combat means the rest now has a 50 to 300 minute break (depending on system) from the game and can go order pizza for all it's worth. They are pretty much done for the evening. And that is shit design!

If one guy goes off on their own and takes 30 minutes or 2 hours to resolve something before anyone else gets to play the game you have a problem.

So...he's wrong because he agrees with you?

[Jason]

So...he's wrong because he agrees with you?

No, he's wrong because he claims there is nothing inherently bad about splitting the party. The entire concept of splitting the party is a terrible idea to start with, however. It is indeed inherently bad.

[hogarth]

No, he's wrong because he claims there is nothing inherently bad about splitting the party. The entire concept of splitting the party is a terrible idea to start with, however. It is indeed inherently bad.

It's possible to imagine a computer RPG where four players have their PCs in four different places at once, keeping in contact via cellphone or radio or telepathy or whatever, with no "50 to 300 minute break" involved. That doesn't seem like an inherently bad idea to me.

The main problem trying to translate that idea to a tabletop game is that it would be at least four times as much work for one GM to run four mostly-separate stories more or less simultaneously. Maybe you could solve th problem with a clever system, though.

[Mechalich]

It's possible to imagine a computer RPG where four players have their PCs in four different places at once, keeping in contact via cellphone or radio or telepathy or whatever, with no "50 to 300 minute break" involved. That doesn't seem like an inherently bad idea to me.

The main problem trying to translate that idea to a tabletop game is that it would be at least four times as much work for one GM to run four mostly-separate stories more or less simultaneously. Maybe you could solve th problem with a clever system, though.

If the various PCs can still take actions and make rolls to support each other even if they aren't physically in the same place, then the party isn't necessarily split.

There are various ways this can take shape. First, you can just have communication methods that allow for one character to make knowledge-type rolls on another's behalf and relay information, or conduct an audio-only conversation using the physically present player primarily as a relay. Second, you can have a character or character who always acts through intermediaries but can switch from one to another at all times. This is common with characters who never actually leave their bunker but function through telepresence using robots or something, meaning their physical presence is actually 'Drone B' during one scene and 'Loader Bot X' in the next. Third, you can have a mechanism where despite location barriers characters can act on each others behalf for essentially all actions as if the distance wasn't even there. You could do this in MtA and Technocracy games using a Correspondence effect, which effectively allowed everyone in the group to be in every place in the group at the same time for all non-physical actions (this got a little weird sometimes, but it was convenient as fuck when it came to management). In general technology makes all of these things much easier, the simple fact of everyone having cell phones all the time is an unbelievable boost to coordination. High speed transit also helps, the separation of a twenty-minute drive is so much less than the equivalent whole day's march.

The trick in these split-but-not-split scenarios is actually to make sure all the PCs are working towards the same story goal, just taking different avenues of investigation, or driving different pursuit vehicles, or interrogating different witnesses, or whatever. That way all the players are invested in knowing the outcome of all the different threads.

[PhoneLobster]

The main problem trying to translate that idea to a tabletop game is that it would be at least four times as much work for one GM to run four mostly-separate stories

Having actually run various small split party simultaneous events fairly regularly in a range of systems, many not specifically designed not to accommodate, I can tell you now, there is a small bump in complexity and load on the GM when you are running multiple separate encounters and the next players turn means switching over to the combat over there instead of the combat over here.

But it's by no means four times as much work when the PCs are split to four separate combat encounters. Mostly because a rather large portion, if not the majority of the workload for resolving things like combat encounters is the time spent dealing with the players and their actions and the number of players and player actions has not actually changed. There may be some risk that the number of enemies, NPCs or the number of notable map features or something might increase, but even that is only a risk and not something that is routinely or inherently part of having the PCs start their fights at four separate corners of the castle instead of all in the one room, and having more non-PC elements in a combat to track isn't even a risk that keeping the party together eliminates as it CAN happen anyway.

You need to realize and remember that combat/encounter resolution in TTRPGs is made up of discrete(that means separate) components such as characters and turns. The exact arrangement of those components has less bearing on the complexity of resolution than the sheer number of those components.

Try this over simplified demonstration

Four PCs fight some guards, a dragon and a wizard. In one room.
Things you need to track and resolve : Actions of 4 PCs, Actions of Some Guards, Actions of A Dragon, Actions of a wizard, an appropriately sized map to accommodate the large encounter.

One PC fights some guards, one PC fights a wizard, two PCs fight a dragon, at the same time in different places
Things you need to track and resolve : Actions of 4 PCs, Actions of Some Guards, Actions of A Dragon, Actions of a wizard, three maps each of appropriate size to accommodate their respective smaller encounters.

Splitting your larger map up into somewhat smaller ones potentially adds a small amount of additional complexity, sort of, over all it's probably the same net size at least conceptually if not also literally, but whatever. But aside from that almost none of the actual load of resolving the encounter has significantly changed.

You can of course expect some variation and could produce any number of edge case examples to wring hands over, but at a simple like for like comparison splitting the party does not inherently cause a giant blow out in resolution costs.

[phlapjackage]

Having actually run various small split party simultaneous events fairly regularly in a range of systems, many not specifically designed not to accommodate, I can tell you now, there is a small bump in complexity and load on the GM when you are running multiple separate encounters and the next players turn means switching over to the combat over there instead of the combat over here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_multitasking

It's going to be a much, much larger cost when the party is split. It's not just a load on the MC, but a load on the players as well.

As has been said earlier, it's not that you CAN'T run a split-party adventure, it's that it's bad design to encourage it.

[Jason]

It's possible to imagine a computer RPG where four players have their PCs in four different places at once, keeping in contact via cellphone or radio or telepathy or whatever, with no "50 to 300 minute break" involved. That doesn't seem like an inherently bad idea to me.

The main problem trying to translate that idea to a tabletop game is that it would be at least four times as much work for one GM to run four mostly-separate stories more or less simultaneously. Maybe you could solve th problem with a clever system, though.

We're not talking about computer games, though. Especially considering the "party" is the player in such games, unless you are talking about co-op. And in the case of the latter, you will run into exactly the same problems unless you play without a live GM.

To avoid semantic wordplays, however we should be clear about what a "split party" actually is:

A situation in which several characters of the party act independantly of and on seperate tasks from the rest of the group.

If the characters are still able to communicate with each other, act in conjunction with each other and towards the same Goal, they are still in the same game space, even if their characters are in different fictional space. Shadowrun Teams and telepresence come to mind here. I can use the very same System (shadowrun), however, to showase a split party as well, though: a decker on a run:

Even if the decker is working alongside the team, opening doors and unlocking vaults, the party is still split, as the individual actions of the decker require her to engage in an entirely different Subsystem, taking a considerable amount of time, without the ability of other characters to interact meaningfully, unless they are deckers as well.
Shadowrun matrix rules are basically a split party syndrome at ist worst. Long wait times for non-deckers or the decker, depending on whose turn it is. That is neither fun, not engaging. It frustrates the party unable to act and sours the mood. It is a terrible design decision.

It's not just shadowrun matrix rules, however, it's the idea of independantly acting Groups in a tabletop rpg. Yes, great stories often times involve a split party every now and then, but what works in books doesn't nescessarily work in TTRPGs. Films, TV Shows and books share more in common, as far as storytelling is concerned, than either of them does with TTRPGs and you need to consider these differences when designing your system or you set yourself up for failure.
In TTRPGs, the group is a narrative unit, they Need to be inseperable due to the mechanical restraints of any such system (task resolution). If you could create a system that auto-resolves tasks immideately, then yes, you could probably split the party, but would such a system still be fun?

But it's by no means four times as much work when the PCs are split to four separate combat encounters.

There is a massive difference between having multiple parallel combat encounters and having multiple parallel combat- and non-combat encounters, though. Citing an edge case isn't really lending any more credence to your argument.
The requirements for combat and social encounters for example are drastically different. While combat Encounters can easily bne broken down into individual turns and shared across the board, social Encounters are narrative driven. That forces you to either break up the social narrative into "combat time" chunks, basicaly ruining the mood of it or scrambling the conveyed Information or you Need to enlargen the time Frames for each acting party (now you get a 5 minute conversation, and now you get 5 minutes worth of combat turns). It's a desaster waiting to happen.

Now if you can come up with a credible solution to that problem, I am all ears. I am fairly confident you can't, though.

[Blade]

That's some impressive goalpost moving from "All characters need to be able to sneak" to "you shouldn't have a RPG where you split the party".

[Jason]

That's some impressive goalpost moving from "All characters need to be able to sneak" to "you shouldn't have a RPG where you split the party".

Both Points are still valid.

[phlapjackage]

That's some impressive goalpost moving from "All characters need to be able to sneak" to "you shouldn't have a RPG where you split the party".

It doesn't look like goalpost-shifting to me, it looks more like an ongoing discussion with the same basic premise.
A: "All characters should be able to sneak"
B: "Why is that?"
A: "Because if not, then that causes the need to split the party, which is bad"
B: "Why is that bad?"
C: "That's not bad, in my game we do it all the time!"
A: "Well..."

[PhoneLobster]

Human_multitasking

It isn't multitasking. You are resolving effectively the same series of linear discrete events with effectively the same components. And at any given point you are not doing two things at once, the nature of the rules of TTRPGs means you effectively can't resolve two things at once, you are processing discrete inputs and outputs one at a god damn time regardless of specific details of character positioning.

The requirements for combat and social encounters for example are drastically different.
...
Now if you can come up with a credible solution to that problem, I am all ears. I am fairly confident you can't, though.

Wow you fuckin' idiot. You haven't read a fucking word I have written on this have you?

So. Protip. I have suggested that exactly this is a problem and you know, for relevance to the topic, suggested this is WHY you don't write separate incompatible minigames like a moron would then give people role protection of things like "I win separate minigame number 4!".

Your response "AHAHA! But what you DIDN'T account for is you MUST write separate needlessly incompatible minigames like an idiot!" is... wildly underwhelming to say the least.

[phlapjackage]

It isn't multitasking. You are resolving effectively the same series of linear discrete events with effectively the same components. And at any given point you are not doing two things at once, the nature of the rules of TTRPGs means you effectively can't resolve two things at once, you are processing discrete inputs and outputs one at a god damn time regardless of specific details of character positioning.

Well, we'll just have to agree to disagr.....just kidding!

I do agree that the game design should try to use the same resolution systems for the different minigames, but I also think that you're cherry-picking the most convenient example for your purposes. Different encounters, even if they used the same/similar resolution systems, would be different enough to cause context switching. And that's even assuming that the split party are ALL doing things that require resolution systems at the same time, instead of one group doing combat, one group talking to the bartender, one group healing up at the temple, etc..

[Jason]

Wow you fuckin' idiot. You haven't read a fucking word I have written on this have you?

So. Protip. I have suggested that exactly this is a problem and you know, for relevance to the topic, suggested this is WHY you don't write separate incompatible minigames like a moron would then give people role protection of things like "I win separate minigame number 4!".

Your response "AHAHA! But what you DIDN'T account for is you MUST write separate needlessly incompatible minigames like an idiot!" is... wildly underwhelming to say the least.

The clear cut case of projection aside, your satement, that splitting a party is not inherently a bad idea is still wrong, regardless of whether you agreed with me on that somwhere along your incoherent ramblings or not.

You also haven't grasped the concept of role protection through social contract at all. You still ramble on about role protection through design like a broken record.

As far as "minigames" are concerned, I am the one that explicity said that mechanics need to be interwoven and not seperate, so to throw that against me, makes you look like an utter fool.
The problem with party splitting is not merely mechanical, but functional. You can not handle combat the same way you handle social interaction in TTRPGs, that leads to different pacing between the encounters and that makes them virtually incompatible, regardless of your mechanical solution.

[phlapjackage]

You also haven't grasped the concept of role protection through social contract at all. You still ramble on about role protection through design like a broken record.

And, for the record, I'm on the side of "role protection is stupid in a TTRPG".

[Kaelik]

Different encounters, even if they used the same/similar resolution systems, would be different enough to cause context switching.

If you read Mousetrap, the One True Game that is the only game anyone should ever play, you would see that in fact, different encounters would not cause context switching because all encounters are literally identical, and no one ever makes any meaningful choice ever.

So hey, as long as you remove all the fun from a game, splitting the party won't reduce anyone's fun.