Splitting the Party - A Day Late

I want to sincerely apologize for missing yesterday. Apparently the 3 day weekend screwed with my internal get stuff done calendar and the post fell through the cracks. Here it is a day late, but hopefully with exact change.

A lot of things can be learned from our childhood heroes. Some good (Goonies never say die!) some less so. One of the worst examples comes from Scooby Doo, where they split the party at every opportunity, to cover more ground, to search for clues, to do whatever is possible to keep the party from being in the same room at the same time.

Why is this a bad idea? There are two main reasons why, the metagame and the mechanics of a system.

For the metagame, splitting the party means that some people will be sitting around bored. I've been in games where one person and I went off to investigate someone in a town and it took nearly two hours to resolve; so everyone else had to sit around doing nothing. I lost track of time otherwise I would have made a comment that we should perhaps take a break. However, we got involved and lost track of time and not many people had fun that day. I commend the DM for allowing us to follow through on things like that, but it is an excellent example of what can go wrong with it.

Another metagame reason is that it puts a lot of strain on the DM to maintain two separate plots while the party is split. If the split persists for more than part of a session then the DM will need to do twice as much prep work than before.

The other reason I mentioned has to do with systems. In the mechanics of D&D are designed with a minimum party size in mind. If the party splits they may not be able to handle encounters that would be appropriate to their level.

However, if you are in a game with multiple DMs then splitting the party is entirely acceptable and expected. There are multiple DMs to handle the strain and also handle the split. The only concern at that point is to make sure that you are still capable of handling combat encounters (if they are a mechanic or concern in your game)