(no subject)

[seekingferret]

There's a D&D mantra "Never split the party." It's partially about in-game logic- If there are dangerous things all around, it's generally a good idea to not separate yourself from your allies, especially if they complement you in ways that make your own abilities more fearsome. But it's mostly a D&D metagaming mantra, developed from hard experience with the awkwardness of trying to fairly deal with two or more groups of players that are separated from each other. How does the DM split time between the two groups adventures? How does he scale encounters that were designed for the whole party to not be crushingly unfair when only half the party sees them, or does he just let the half-party die because of their stupidity? All of this is complicated and difficult to deal with, so from a metagaming perspective it's generally held that it's better to keep all the characters together if at all possible.


In last night's session, I spent a good amount of time agitating for us to split the party. Because of course the thing is, in an rpg sometimes your character wants to do things that don't make sense from a metagaming perspective.

Alys, our halfling rogue, was kidnapped by worshippers of a dark and perverted deity who we believe seek to use her in a powerful ritual associated with a religious festival. Dorfin, my character, has deep trust issues because of a brutal childhood in a corrupt military academy he has recently escaped from. But Alys is one of the members of the group he's formed the deepest bond with, and the combination of his indoctrinated sense of duty, the friendship he's developed with Alys, and his fear that if someone he's trusted gets out of his sight she might betray his secrets means that Dorfin will stop at nothing to get her back.

Our party, though, has more complicated relationships with each other. I think I mentioned before that sometimes with this group the DM can just sit back and not throw any challenges at us at all and we'll keep the plot moving completely on pc vs. pc interactions, because there's so much in-group tension. Our cleric has been trying to exorcise our warlock against his will. Our wizard doesn't really give a shit about anybody. And Dorfin kept huge potentially party-endangering secrets from the rest of the party. So when Alys was kidnapped in late afternoon, after a difficult day in which the spellcasters exhausted many of their best spells, a lot of the party wanted to make camp, get some rest, and then go after Alys. From a tactical point of view, it probably made sense. We had little idea where she'd gone and evidence that she'd been teleported untraceably.

But Dorfin wasn't going to let that happen. Even if the rest of the party made camp, he was determined to spend the whole night searching for tracks if he had to, to prevent their headstart from becoming too vast. And so I pushed to split the party. It didn't end up happening, because they ended up following me (which is interesting in its own right, and we'll see what comes of it), but I think it would have been interesting if it had happened.



As birthday presents to myself, I have finally bought myself Harry Keeler's The Riddle of the Traveling Skull and shall report back on it, along with the CD anthology "DNA on DNA", as part of my attempt to learn more about the music of the amazing musicians I saw at the Masada Marathon. In other news, the Mycale album is unbelievable, but I'll have more on that soon- I'm working on a playlist of Jewish a cappella music to post because the Omer is coming up. I was thinking about it and I have quite a few different styles of Jewish a cappella music that don't suck.

But I mentioned the Keeler novel because if you're any kind of writer at all, I think you'll be fascinated by Keeler's guide to plotting: The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction. It is strange and full of surprising and useful insights, put together by a truly distorted brain.

Comments

[kindness_says]

When was your birthday?

[seekingferret]

This past Thursday. There was cake. :)

[kindness_says]

:D

Happy birthday!

How old did you turn? Or is that a sekrit?

[seekingferret]

I'm in a weird limbo between two ages until 15 Nisan when my Hebrew birthday falls.

(If you're a mathy Jewish nerd, that's enough information to calculate how old I am. Well, plus or minus 19 years.)

[kindness_says]

...Well, I'm not Jewish, but I was able to figure it out, I think. Apparently the repeating 19 years thing is a myth. =P Your birthdays don't appear to coincide exactly again until next year, and not till 2050 after that. Close, though.

[zandperl]

I don't actually know my birth date according to the Chinese calendar (let alone the Jewish calendar), but I do know that my birthday according to the Western calendar usually falls before Chinese New Year's, which makes for interesting times every decade or two.

One of my HS friends gives her birthday as the ides of March, but in reality her birthday is according to the Chinese calendar and it only fell on the ides of March in the year that she immigrated to the US.

[zandperl]

One of my DMs does a really good job with us splitting the party (in the In Nomine RPG system). I think part of what helps is that we're a relatively large party (6 people) and our characters love to argue and debate things forever without actually doing anything. So for example, if we have a choice whether to go to the strip club to see if our contact there has anything new to add, or to go back to Harry's Occult shop to see if our missing apprentice wizard has shown up yet, we will sit around for up to an hour of real time arguing which we should do first. We all know perfectly well that we will do both in the end, so often what we end up deciding to do is to split the party. The DM will pick one group at random and start with that group's story until we come to a decision point, leave that group to think, and go back to the other group until they come to a decision point. When we have only three of us on each half, that smaller group can come to decisions more quickly too. It works very well except for one fact: since we can all hear what the other group is doing, there's a lot of metagaming/information sharing that probably shouldn't be going on.

[bookherd]

"Our cleric has been trying to exorcise our warlock against his will."
Oh, this made me laugh and laugh.

[seekingferret]

Trust me, it's pretty hilarious in person, too.