Solo Stealth Mission
It has been a long damn time since we talked about splitting the party, and Thief has come a long way since that awkward bathtub in Comic #7. Clearly she hasn’t learned her lesson though. So for all you unhappy sneaks out there, here’s a quick refresher course on the perils of going it alone.
First and foremost, there’s the danger that the song warns us about. In a world full of encounters designed to challenge 4-5 adventurers of Xth level, splitting the party can be dangerous to your fictional alter ego. No one wants to catch a case of the dead for lack of a flanking partner. However, the real threat isn’t to imaginary life and limb, but to enjoyment around the gaming table.
When you’ve got one or two PCs cut off from the rest of the group, a GM is forced to alternate their attention between sets of players. That means that, for as long as the party is split, at least some players will not be able to participate. I will repeat that, because it bears repeating: Splitting the party prevents players from participating in the game. If three dudes want to head off on a dungeon crawl while the fourth dude (presumably wearing a pointy hat) wants to research spells in Ye Olde Library, you’ve got a choice to make. All things being equal, you’re probably going to try and entertain the most players possible. Sorry wizard bro. It’s all aboard and off the dungeon! We’ll send you a postcard.
We all know about lone wolf PCs. Depending on how he played it, the wizard in our example may very well be at fault for splitting off to do his own thing at the expense of the majority. However I also believe our hypothetical GM screwed up by participating in a false dilemma. You don’t have to ignore the minority group. You just have to 1) resolve their part of the story quickly and 2) make it entertaining. You go through a fast-paced scene with the research librarian. You ask for a few arcana rolls. You describe an amusing magical accident for the benefit of the other players. You keep a quick pace, and so keep your game humming along.
Here’s my take: When you’re dealing with a split party, a character moment between two PCs, or solo weirdness like dream sequences or stakeouts, the other players are no longer players. They’ve become an audience. And like any entertainer, it’s your job to entertain your audience. None of this 20 minutes of real time to resolve a simple interaction nonsense. Make it snappy! Bust out your best kooky NPC voice. Don’t allow your solo-player to belabor the moment. Because even though players are willing to take on the audience role for a little while, it’s no fair asking them to endure it for hours at a time.
What about the rest of you guys? When the party splits, do you find it entertaining or excruciating? Any tips for making solo moments more engaging for the rest of the group? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Laurel’s Edit: BEST DUGONG LIVES
Uhh, it does kinda slow down the pace.
Rather than that, I’m going to talk about how much i’ve come to love cell phones in D&D. While there is some fun to be had with communications issues within the party, there is also quite a bit of fun to be had with keeping communications over a distance. If the phones have cameras, they’re a feature that’s extremely difficult to replicate with spells and class features. Texting is also a useful form of communication, and one’s texting style becomes a fun character detail. I especially like how texts can be used for small in-character jokes and the like, the little details that cement the party as friends. Obviously there isn’t room in every campaign for fantasy smartphones, but I really enjoy it when there is.
I’ve softened somewhat on phone usage since this comic:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/scryingdevice
I admit to using them myself for spell look-ups and rules checks rather than lugging a laptop around. Still, it’s a little discouraging to look up and see everyone on their device when you’re… Wait a minute. You guys actually use scryPhones in-game!? That awesome! Do you have rules for them? How do you implement texting at the table?
I’ve played in a couple of modern campaigns lately, and the rules were pretty much “if a smartphone can do it, your smartphone can do it.” I think my friends would kick me if I wanted smartphones in a medieval fantasy setting. I’d enjoy it though.
*desire to play Cryptomancer increases*
Oh and “texting” is done through Discord usually. We all have our phones out for reference when we play anyway.
It’s all fun and games until Scrapple and Scrapebook sell your personal information to the Evil Overlord. Or you download a poorly made app and your phone gets mummy rot.
Boy have I got a game for you! http://cryptorpg.com
also Paranoia
My Pathfinder group on Roll20 also has these communication crystals that act like cell phones in game. While we’ve definitely had our fair share of shenanigans and tricks involving their use (from the party rouge using his to draw attention away from himself, to a crazy telephone game involving the druid trying to talk down the monster we were supposed to kill) my personal favorite is the time my Arcanist literally phoned in a combat.
Basically after my character completely botched a diplomatic encounter with a Mesmerist that was the leader of a local cult, several of the other party members had already begun investigating the the area where the cultists were doing something sketchy. Since I was decently far away at that point, I decided to send my familiar to go help them while I went back to our base of operations.
Lets just say with a couple buffs, a polymorph spell, and some clever usage of touch and self-targeted spells made for a very interesting encounter once we realized that these cultists were actually a threat.
I gather that your crystals have a speaker phone setting.
My groups have had this drilled into our head so hard that we all know not to. We even go to town in pairs at minimum.
We do however have brief scouting ops.
We had an incident where the Aaracockra Arcane Trickster I discussed last comic broke off to try and lure away a massive zombie horde. We were sitting up in a tree out of spells, so I told him: If you get caught out there, we can’t come get you.
He thankfully got away though.
Right on! “Never split the party” is good advice, but there are always exceptions. Sometimes you’ve got to go for tactics over strategy. 🙂
I think that it is vital to make the players themselves responsible in these situations. The GM can help trying to keep the session interesting for everyone, but ultimately the players need to play their characters so that they and the other players have fun.
In one of my most recent session, the two most stealthy guys went scouting in the night while the rest hid in a Rope Trick hut. It’s in an alternate dimension, so they can’t really be found. Thus the players had themselves made it impossible for me to have something engage the people waiting.
Thus the whole session went on with only two people playing and the rest watching what happened. They said it was an exiting session regardless, but in the next I asked them to metagame more to keep everyone involved, and it went better. The rogue had almost been killed by an owlbear and got a permanent joints injury, so that also helped to keep them together…
You know, I was re-reading today’s post in bed last night, and I thought to myself, “Geeze… I’m pinning this all on the GM. I should go back and add a paragraph or two about the players.” Then I decided to watch more Fortnite videos on YouTube and pass out.
In other words, thank you for bringing this up! Like clcman said on Monday’s comic:
I think that a major paradigm shift in the development of a good player is the moment where they move away from “what’s fun for me” and towards “what’s fun for the group.”
Yeah, and it’s not only the scouts. The waiters also need to tell the rest of the players if they become bored, so the rest can accomodate them. Or they need to find a reason for why their own character don’t want to wait any longer and go join/rescue the scouts.
So let’s try an exercise. If you were one of those bored players waiting inside the rope trick, how would you have reinserted yourself into the session?
Sure 🙂
“Alfrank, the half orc barbarian of action, is getting worried about the two goblin scouts. They should have returned by now, and must be in trouble. I leave the hut, and follow their tracks. What do I see?”
A bit metagamey, but better than boredom IMO.
“BEST DUGONG IN AGES” makes me laugh a lot more than it should.
By the power of goth boots, Sailor Moon slash fic, and Salsa Verde Doritos, I summon Laurel! For I have need of a BEST DUGONG sketch!
Edit: Accidentally summoned her in another chat window. She says she’ll post it tomorrow. 😀
BEST DUGONG has now arrived (see post above)!
It immediately stands out to me that the tedious one man recon mission where nothing exciting happens is a potential solution to last friday’s issue of player absence
Good call! I remain astonished as ever when continuity rears its head in this comic. 🙂
All you’d have to do is ask for a quick “gather rumors” check to make the person’s absence feel relevant.
Huh, I missed that that was the mayor. I figured she was spying on Bro Magus again…
I mean… Warlock could be mayor. He definitely has the charisma for public office. And also underwear modeling.
I have to say, at first I thought “ZOMG Hobgoblin cave” was a reaction to Thief sending Fighter a picture of naked Mayor. In fact, I think I’m going to choose to read the comic that way anyway. Though that makes the rest of that conversation really weird. Not that Fighter hasn’t had worse things to say about something. =P
Mr. Mayor seems more svelte than I’d envisioned. I blame Laurel.
Also, I think I might adopt “ZOMG hobgoblin cave” as code for “check out the hottie” in future.
Splitting the party is the bane of my existence… as a GM. I just constantly feel the responsibility to keep people entertained and to allocate the same amount of time to each group and to lead them all to their own conclusions so that they group up again…
But this particular comic reminds me of a recent time when I wanted to do some retraining for my character… It had been a long 2 weeks of being trapped in the dangerous dungeon, the party captured and been experimented on by a mad scientist/wizard/technologist. Meanwhile, in and out of character I’m thinking “wow, I really need to be stronger to deal with these dangers and protect my party”.
Then once we get out, we meet my character’s parents who are apparently travelling circus owners now. Then they get implicated in a murder and we spend a few days investigating that. Then my character gets addicted to shiver by tasting a few specks of shiver dust. Then my character meets a guy who she discovers is her estranged uncle who helps her investigate and then dies in her arms at the battle against the mastermind who was also fighting a CR-off-the-rails devil for some reason.
And after all that, I’m like “Okay, I think we all could use a break, especially my character, who’s feeling really bummed out and inadequate at this point. How about some downtime?”
Unsurprisingly, no one felt like fast forwarding a week or so for my character to finish mourning/training/crying/overcoming her addiction/spending time with her parents before they leave again. So they were like “kay you do that, we’ll just be off adventuring”. Incidentally, I ended up leaving that campaign, so I never got to see how that party splitting would have played out. I give them the benefit of the doubt.
I suppose that mood plays into this sort of thing. You felt burned out by all the action, and were in the mood for a bit of a lull. They were in the mood for ZOMG more adventure! Even if you happen to share a general aesthetic sense with your fellow party members (e.g. “I prefer lots of combat with the occasional talky scene.”) you may find a time when you’re just not in the mood for the same thing at the same time. I think that’s exactly where a little bit of play-by-post can come in handy.
My dad banned deckers from Shadowrun for that very reason…until we switched from his old 2e books to the modern edition, by which point the devs figured out a solution to that problem—just have the decker wirelessly hack things while running with the others!
We’ve had a few entertaining solo bits, like one time our ettin barbarian/warlock (two characters) ran through the forest for a couple of days to retrieve our wagon and plant-cohorts (long story) while the rest of us followed and guarded a caravan. The ettin ran directly through some kind of meeting between barbarian tribes, and since he didn’t bother them, none of them thought to bother him until he was out of reach.
But sometimes it’s annoying, like the time the problem player I’ve called Galaxy-Brain decided to run through the wilderness alone for a month to retrieve a questionably-useful magic item*. It took like two hours for him to die. The only good thing about that detour is that the two hill giants that killed him split his boots of flying, so we later saw a giant trying to fly with one boot.
*It’s a stone sphere that can change size from portable to multi-square or vise versa once per day, and when it’s big it controls the weather. Also it’s sacred to some barbarian tribe we kinda stole it from. My elvish noble wanted to give it to his family so they could keep their lands prosperous; Galaxy-Brain wanted to make it big while flying (he had boots of flying BTW) and drop it on people.
One day, a shaman from that tribe tried to retrieve the sacred culturally-and-probably-economically-significant artifact we stole. (We eventually saved the world. Unrelated, but still.) GB dropped the rock, but it missed and the shaman escaped. Galaxy-Brain wanted to wait right there for a full day so we could take his drop-rock again, but we were on a bit of a time limit and refused.
So GB wandered back, fighting some random encounters alone (including a couple where he got wrecked by ordinary birds), until he found the divot where the magic rock had been. Shockingly, it had been retrieved. He was pissed, but the rest of the table agreed that it was obvious, and some had voiced that opinion before he left.
Moral of the story: It’s okay if the whole table goes along with it.
Never forget to add the moral.