Splitting the party

I'm listening to a podcast about splitting the party, and it brings up a few thoughts for me. These aren't new thoughts, but this particular issue is one that brings them into focus.

First, do I actually play D&D? Well, that depends on the context. I tend to think all fantasy RPGs are "D&D" as shorthand just as all facial tissues are Kleenex, even if they're actually Wal-Mart brand facial tissue. In that sense, yes, of course, I play D&D. In light of something Professor DungeonMaster has often said; do you have broad compatibility with D&D material? Yeah, sure, my game is a radical reinvention of the 3e SRD, and is ~95% compatible as written with 3e material as well as OSR material equally. In that sense also, yes, I'm playing D&D. Do I play games that are pseudo-wargame dungeon exploration with wandering monsters, traps, puzzles, etc.? No, absolutely not. In that sense, I don't play D&D at all. With regards to this specific question, i.e., splitting the party, that third one is the one that's relevant. If I'm not playing D&D, i.e., the story of D&D with dungeon-crawling as the main activity, then any commentary on splitting the part is mostly completely irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter in any other form of play.

Second, this gets back to much of what I've said before about the vector by which many people came into D&D, especially the people who created the big trad mainstream approach to the game in the early to mid 80s. If, like me, these people started gaming because they were already fans of reading fantasy fiction or watching fantasy movies, or whatever, then the classic wargamey dungeon-crawl was kind of strange. Most gamers, I'd suggest, did eventually adapt to it to some degree, but the whole trad gameplay style emerged because they did so reluctantly and only partially. I'm maybe a bit more radical than most; I didn't adapt to it at all, and in fact openly reject that style of play. I simply don't enjoy it very much, and I'm absolutely never going to run a game like that. 

I was amazed in the podcast, which has two guys, where one talked about the other guy running a game where he cutting back and forth between two groups of a split party, and the first guy says that he had never thought of doing things that way, found the whole idea remarkably innovative, and wondered where he got the idea. I was in turn mystified by his confusion; isn't that a common practice in all kinds of stories? I've seen it all over the place. One notable example from my childhood is the Battle of Endor sequence in Return of the Jedi, where we cut back and forth between Luke and Vader on the Death Star with the Emperor to Han and Leia and the ewoks in the forest to Lando and "It's a trap!" Ackbar in space. You're telling me that you couldn't think of a procedure from one of the most prominent movies of your childhood (I don't know the age of these podcasters, but they look like Gen-Xers roughly my age, and they talk about playing old versions of the game from back in the day. I looked him up; he lists The Empire Strikes Back as among his three favorite movies.) C'mon, what do you mean you never would have thought of that?!

The reasons to do this are obvious, not from gaming discussion, but from writing discussion; the back and forth cuts create tension. You don't spend a lot of time with any one group in a split scenario, and you have the capability of leaving each of them on a minor cliff-hanger of sorts. Everyone is engaged with what everyone else is doing, because it's interesting and potentially tense for everyone. (If it's not, that's kind of on you as GM.) To me, the process was intuitive, because I approach the game from an attitude of wanting the game to resemble what's best of fantasy stories; but interactive and improvisational based on PC input, and not just in a minor way. 

Someone asked me in an online discussion what that means if it doesn't mean plot, and this is a good example. You take a technique from good storytelling and apply it to the game, even if you don't have a plot. Because ultimately, whether you're doing the game improv or working from a pseudo-script (which I don't recommend, but lots of people do) either way the techniques of telling a good story apply. You can also manage pacing during the session, you can do lots of things to manage tension, you can use techniques like foreshadowing of dangers, etc. In other words, you can use storytelling techniques even if you're not running a story-game—sometimes people get a little too hung up on the terminology and don't recognize that context matters when you're using the word "story" in an RPG context. These techniques make even a strict sandbox game more enjoyable at the actual table. 

In conclusion, I absolutely reject the "don't split the party" narrative. I never have any problem splitting the party. As a GM, I enjoy split parties. As a player, I think it works well. The other guy, in the podcast, mostly articulated some of why this works, because he's done it, especially in "harrer" games, as these weird Brooklyn folks pronounce it. One of the best ways to engineer tension, which was heavily used and promoted in John Carpenter's Halloween from the late 70s, was the audience knowing things that the characters didn't, like seeing Michael Myers in the background behind the players. This always works. And it's not just horror games, because any game needs tension. Action, adventure, mystery; the same techniques apply just as much as they do in horror. And that's exactly what the intercutting does; players know stuff that their characters don't, much makes them anxious, but the fun kind of anxious

UPDATE: This is a WanderingDM podcast. I said earlier that I was a bit skeptical about the podcast, but I decided to give it a bit more of a go and downloaded all of the episodes that I think I might be interested in listening to at once. They also run the Ten Dead Rates WH FRPG game as part of their podcast, so I'm going to try that out too. Like I need another actual play podcast, but... I'll try. Both Red Moon Roleplaying and Hideous Laughter have elements that disappoint me a lot and make me question my ongoing support for hearing their stuff. It may be, simply, as I've said before, actual plays just isn't a good spectator sport.