The evil fighter, the neutral wizard and the good paladin had a total fight last session and they actually split up in three different directions, distrusting each other!!! After having prevented a war between the Submerged Kingdom and the surface populations, the wizard was attacked by a triton assassin paid by an evil noble triton who actually wanted the war to happen. The paladin and the fighter came in time to save him, but the wizard demanded to let the assassin live to force him to testify against the evil noble; the paladin (who had to honor his Valor vow) hesitated because he wanted the triton to pay for his crimes and didn’t trust the submerged kingdom to believe them, you know, them being despised surface people against their own nobility. That’s when the evil fighter ended all arguments by slaying the assassin uncaring of the other characters. It’s the first time it happens something so extreme since when I’m playing DW, it was tense but I’m super excited. Next time, I had ideas to continue the game where it ended, with all three pursuing different goals (the paladin investigating for whoever killed the triton king’s daughter, enraging him and almost causing a war; the wizard looking for ingredients for a ritual; and the fighter looking for magical weapons to melt in his signature weapon), however mixing and matching so that everyone finds what another is searching, and going hard with the moves to let the characters (not the players, they already know it!) realize that they are lost without their allies.
Do you have similar stories to share? Did your party ever actually split up?
Good luck with this man! If there is any system that can handle a split party it’s Dungeon World. But man is it difficult.
I wonder if it would work to have a failed roll from one characters story produce adverse effects in another characters story. It’d be cool if they were connected, but I don’t think they would need to be.
Example:
Wizard throws a fireball at some triton scum and the player rolls a 7. Player chooses the -1 to spell casting.
Last time we saw the fighter he was trying to sneak through a Lich Lords Temple. At this point you turn to his player and say “Everything is going fine until a group of 5-10 cult members begin exiting a room, they are talking with each other and haven’t seen you yet, but they are moving in your direction. What do you do?
I think it could work. The difficulty would be in maintaining three stories in your head at once and coming up with interesting twists and challenges for each.
Again, good luck!
thanks! I’m very used to split characters as a general concept. I come from games where it’s actually quite rare to have all the characters on screen at the same time, like the solar system or primetime adventures. My fears are: will dungeon world help me or hinder me in this effort? Will I be able to equally split my attentions among all the characters? What if the characters stay split for more than one session?
I haven’t tried PTA (yet) but looking over the structure of the game one of the things that seems to make it so easy to have split parties in that game is that the players help set the scene, and those who aren’t in the scene play npc’s and offer suggestions. Is that right?
If so, DW does not have a “system” for determining who’s suggestions go through and who’s don’t but the failure, partial success, and total success scale should still be a help to you.
I could see it working so long as you can get all players involved in each others scenes. No matter how quick you cut scenes, if you have time where a player disconnects from the game, that is time lost.
Thank you for posting this. I’ve been mulling over the split party difficulty for some time and this discussion has been incredibly helpful.