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View Full Version : DM Help The Scooby Doo Problem



InheritedRole
2016-05-22, 01:25 AM
When not ankle deep in the fetid waters of a dungeon together, my players seem to be obsessed with splitting up. Everything from teleporting to different locations, trying to break into the secret third floor of their headquarters instead of actually adventuring, to wandering out to a dragon cave to scout it solo.

I only get three hours per week with this group, how can I keep them together? Starting to feel guilty that large parts of the party have an hour without any significant contribution.

BiblioRook
2016-05-22, 02:55 AM
Well first thing I would have to ask is when the party is split and half the party is sitting on their hands, are those players dissatisfied with the way things are at all? If yes then taking time to talk to the group might be necessary.
In any case an obvious option would be to make them aware of the dangers of splitting the party, throwing encounters meant for the group as a whole (and possibly nearly (or not so nearly) killing them) would be one way (if maybe a bit heavy-handed).

Yora
2016-05-22, 04:53 AM
The people who split off are the ones whose actions will be played out last. That's a good incentive to get players thinking if they really need need to separate.

PersonMan
2016-05-22, 06:13 AM
Going to repeat Biblio's suggestion about talking to the players who aren't active. I'm in a Roll20 game in which I spend up to two thirds of each session without my character being on-screen at all, and I'm perfectly happy with how things are going there - if the GM tried to keep the party together, it'd be pointless working to solve a non-problem at best and create issues at worst.

veti
2016-05-22, 06:30 AM
From the PC's perspective, splitting up makes sense. It's just silly for a group of six people to spend every minute together. Makes much more sense for the scout to go scouting while the mystic meditates and the detective interrogates prisoners. Seriously, can you imagine if people in real life insisted on sticking together the whole time? We'd never get anydamnthing done.

You need to give them reasons not to split up. The simplest reason is an overwhelmingly hostile environment. "Wandering off" is a sign of not enough insecurity. If you make the PCs think that wandering off on your own creates a very real chance of immediate and pointless death - for both halves of the party - they'll stick together all right. Try surrounding them with level-appropriate undead, or assassins lurking in the drains, or unseen enemies of just about any description, and sacrifice one or two significant NPCs to demonstrate the danger. And be prepared to follow through and scare the jeebies out of anyone who still insists on doing it.

(There are lots of ways to do this without actually killing anyone. The mage who teleports away - finds himself trapped in an anti-magic field and can't teleport back. The idiot who goes to scout a dragon cave meets a dragon, who casts a Geas on him. The "secret third floor" of their headquarters was sealed with a curse, and now whoever picked the lock suffers from malarial shakes (-4 each to STR, DEX and CON) for 4 hours of every day. Use your imagination.)

JAL_1138
2016-05-22, 12:05 PM
Agreed with the posts saying the dungeon's not lethal enough. If the players feel like they can survive splitting the party, they have no incentive not to. EDIT: You may end up killing a few characters; that's the most expedient way to hammer it in, though. Don't set out to kill them; let them run if they can. Just gear encounters toward the whole party (rather than one or a couple of PCs) and let that take care of it.

ALSO EDIT: Then again, I tend to think the dungeon's not lethal enough unless players aren't willing to take a single step or touch any object without a 10ft pole, so take my advice with a half-pound of salt.

Kid Jake
2016-05-22, 12:23 PM
A significant chunk of my games seem like they're played with the party doing its own thing; only meeting back up when they run into a problem they can't solve solo. I've found two different ways of dealing with it.

If you're on Roll20 or a similar site, then run the solo character's actions through tells/messages/whispers. Let them have their fun but don't let it become the focus. It can get confusing and/or hectic, especially when EVERYONE has ran off; but I think it pays off in the end.

If you aren't, then do cut aways. Every 10-15 minutes switch perspectives, if nothing interesting is happening then switch back. It slows down gameplay a little, but it's more tolerable for the people who didn't run off down a rabbit trail.

JoeJ
2016-05-22, 12:24 PM
If the players can be trusted not to metagame with information their characters don't have, try alternating between the groups at roughly 5 minute intervals, or whenever there's a moment of tension.

For example, group 1 enters a chamber and disturbs a troll. The troll bellows a challenge, and before the PCs act, you switch to group 2. Because they cutaways are short, the players aren't likely to get either frustrated or bored.

The Creative Campaigning (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16940/DMGR5-Creative-Campaigning-2e?it=1) supplement for AD&D described this method in more detail.

DJroboninja
2016-05-22, 01:00 PM
Going along with what others have said, don't spend too much time in one area - set a timer and keep it the same for everyone. "Oh snap, your three minutes are up, so we're gonna pause your conversations with the city council and see how the rogues heist is going..."

Think of it this way - on Game of Thrones, do they spend an entire episode on what Tyrion is doing, and then spend the whole next episode just following Danaerys? No, they constantly cut between all the different, disparate stories to keep the audiences attention going.

And in your scenario, the audience is all the players not currently involved in a given situation.

Plus, it gives players time to think about their next move while someone else has the floor, reducing instances of "ummm, I think I'll cast... Wait, no, I uhhhh"

The players wanting to split up and do things means they are role playing - they are looking at the world as their characters, not as players, and IMO that should always be encouraged.

Thrudd
2016-05-22, 10:25 PM
Down time activities like meditating, researching, looking for rumors, buying stuff - none of these things need to or should be played out in detail. When no adventure is in progress, go around the table and ask everyone what they want to do, and rule on how long it will take them to do it and ask for any relevant rolls. Briefly narrate the results of each of their days/weeks, everyone marks down the new stuff they bought and the new spells they added. Then assume everyone comes back together to plan the next part of the expedition, and take off. It should be maybe ten minutes at most to get through everyone's downtime activities.

If a player asks to go on a solo adventure while everyone else is doing downtime stuff in town, I would just say no. If your character is going to leave the group for an extended period of time, you need to roll up a new character to join the party or take control of a henchman or something, while your other character is gone, because we aren't going to spend an hour just on your solo adventure. We can play out what happens to the first character later, if there's time.

Alternatively, let them go on their solo mission, but treat it like the other downtime activities just with more danger. So, for the character scouting out a dragon's lair on their own, have them roll a couple relevant skills. Roll to see if there are any encounters on their trip. Basically, boil their success and survival down to a couple rolls. This is the risk they are taking for going off alone while everyone else is busy with other stuff. Bob the thief thought he'd go off alone to scout the dragon's lair, which was a week's journey away. On the fifth day out, he encountered a large pack of gnolls and was not able to evade them. He did not survive their attack. The rest of the party waits an extra week for him to return, and then decide to proceed without him. Or, Bob the thief traveled for a week, evading the notice of a pack of gnolls on the fifth day. He found the dragon's lair, it is a large cave in the side of the mountain, surrounded by burnt tree stumps. He wisely decided not to go any further, and made the trip back without incident. He was able to draw a rough map of the path he took to reach the lair, with notable landmarks (scratch a quick map and hand it to the player).

It shouldn't be much more than five minutes or so, before you go back to see what everyone else is doing.

When players split up in the dungeon or during a mission, that is harder, but you just need to roll with it. I agree with the sentiment that going off alone should not be something anyone can do for long in a dangerous area like a dungeon. The danger should limit their ability to spend solo time. When it does happen, just go around the table and make sure everyone gets a chance to declare what they are doing for every turn or unit of time, even if they are waiting somewhere while someone else scouts ahead. Rolling for wandering monsters, the people left behind could possibly have to deal with something while the scout is gone, as well as the scout running into something on their own.

Quertus
2016-05-24, 12:02 PM
When not ankle deep in the fetid waters of a dungeon together, my players seem to be obsessed with splitting up. Everything from teleporting to different locations, trying to break into the secret third floor of their headquarters instead of actually adventuring, to wandering out to a dragon cave to scout it solo.

I only get three hours per week with this group, how can I keep them together? Starting to feel guilty that large parts of the party have an hour without any significant contribution.

There is no point to having - or being - a scout when they/you are saddled with less-stealthy characters. In many play styles, charging in without scouting first is suicidally stupid. Thus, keeping the party together is suicidally stupid.

However, unless you have a dishonest scout, and a party which can't keep IC and OOC knowledge separate, descriptions of rooms and creatures are things you'd have to give anyway, and therefore aren't wasting the rest of the party's time.*

For most everything other than scouting a dungeon, minimize the impact of solo actions on your sessions.

One technique is to "table the discussion" - move it out of precious session time, and into something you handle between sessions.

Another is to minimize the time spent on solo quests: yes / no / make a roll; moving on. Yet another technique (albeit one I personally have no skill with) is to continuously rotate focus between the PCs.

Of course, all this assumes it is actually a problem. If people are having fun with things as they are, why rock the boat? So make sure there actually is a problem before you start trying to fix things.

* even if the other PCs are a week's journey away. If, however, they won't see said encounters until next week IRL, then you have some diminishing returns - and it's best to handle the scouting between sessions at that point.

Knaight
2016-05-24, 02:03 PM
Bounce between the PCs, and don't worry about player metagaming - things like secret note passing just slows everything down dramatically, so do everything in the open, and trust in the p layers not to abuse information their characters don't have.

For all that "don't split the party" is emphasized it really isn't important. Yes, dealing with a split group involves some different GM skills, but you pick them up and it works just fine.

Honest Tiefling
2016-05-24, 04:01 PM
I tell my groups that splitting up makes things harder for me, and makes it very hard to get everyone equal time and results in people being bored. I've played with groups where the rule was not to split up unless it made absolutely no sense to not to do it. And even then, it was strongly encouraged to split up in two groups, so there was still player interaction and easier to bounce back to the inactive people.

Jay R
2016-05-25, 10:39 AM
Whenever it happens, when you wind up the session, say, "Well, that's it for this week. Sorry most of you didn't get much play time, but when you split up, I can only handle one set at a time."

Then let them make their own choices, and accept the consequences.

kyoryu
2016-05-25, 11:25 AM
Also, a lot depends on how quick the system is, and how you handle things.

It can be useful to think about things being done in "scenes", where each scene needs to answer a question (often 'do the PCs get what they want?'). Figure out what the question is, figure out what's needed to do to resolve that, and get back to the other groups.

If your game has multiple 'resolutions' for playing out scenes, stick with the lower resolution ones when possible - don't roll twenty dice where one will do.

Darth Ultron
2016-05-25, 05:37 PM
You could explain the problem to the players. It's worth a try, but most often players are jerks and don't care.

I have always been very harsh to jerk solo gamers that try to ruin the game for everyone. I for example will automatically just kill off any jerk solo scout. As soon as a jerk player says ''I demand to have a solo adventure and force everyone else to do nothing but watch'', I'll just kill the character and get back to gaming with the group.

If players really want solo games, you might offer them some...ether face to face or online.