Ahdok @ ahdok @ttrpg.network

I make comics sometimes: https://linktr.ee/ahdok

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She's even making a list.

There are a number of issues with splitting the party in DnD.

The most serious problem, and the main reason to avoid it, is the potential for a frustrating session for some of the players. DnD as a game is heavily geared towards dungeoneering and combat, most of the mechanics deal with this, and a lot of adventure designs are intended to funnel characters into dangerous situations or fights.

So... if you're adventuring, and you split up, there's a high chance that one or both groups end up in a fight where some characters aren't present. Problem here is, combats in DnD take a long time, often over an hour, to resolve - so you end up stuck in a situation where some of your players are sitting around with nothing to do for half a session or longer.

Very good DMs can design or improvise around this problem in a variety of ways. For example, you could move a couple of NPCs the party are supposed to meet, so they're also present at the fight, then hand off control of them to the inactive players - you could give those players monsters to control, you could try to arrange your combat to happen nearby enough that the missing characters can "catch up" and join after a round etc etc etc.

In general, it's less "bad" to split the party for investigations, downtime, city/town scenes, shopping, research, or narrative sections - although newer groups can struggle even here. It's important for the DM to go back and forth between players to make sure everyone is engaged and having a good time, and to make sure everyone gets to play about the same amount of the time. This can be difficult for inexperienced groups to juggle correctly.

Some players struggle heavily with "stonewalling". Stonewalling is the process of disregarding information your character doesn't know when making decisions (but information that YOU do know.). Splitting the party often results in players hearing information that their characters don't know, and needing to compartmentalize that so as not to use it when making decisions or roleplaying. This is difficult for some players.

DnD is also a game that's generally viewed as being "high risk" especially with more adversarial DMs. You should discuss with your players in session 0 the style of campaign you're running and how "lethal" it will be, whether you will be ruthless and play monsters to the best of their abilities as a test of the player's mechanical skills, or if you'll be more relaxed and aim for a more "narrative-focused" story. Many groups play the game as a mechanical combat game, where they try to balance fights to be close calls, because that tension is exciting - and "splitting the party" can often result in having a lot of characters die when they reach a fight unprepared for the challenge.

The main issue though is, there's a high chance if you split the party, that some players will end up in a combat, and some players will be left out, and that can last for over an hour.

Thanks for reminding me about this, My T-shirt has worn out and I need to replace it.

Whenever someone says they miss Konsi's adventures, it summons another one, like some kind of weird reverse-curse.

In this case, not deliberately - although I do love Buffy a lot.

I do intend to follow up in a later comic.

It's probably my art not doing this justice, but Razira is 6'4" and 200 pounds of muscle, Konsi is 4' tall and weighs 40 pounds when wet. Toron himself is physically very weak (he rolled a 6 for strength, and avoids all physical activity whenever he can).

In Toron's mind, it's a miracle that she survived the experience.

Now that the crew is all caught up, we can get back to making jokes about ridiculous use of spells. Mechanics jokes coming soon :)

Here's the last October Konsi.

Okay. I have another one :)

Here's one of the Konsis from October that I didn't post here.

Ah! It wasn't broken for me, because the browser version takes the post number and manages to navigate to it.

Fixed now :)

I fully encourage this :)

There's always been a bit of a tug-of-war between making a good mechanical game, and making a good storytelling environment.

If your aim is to tell stories, having consistent, intuitive worldbuilding helps a lot - it's easier to immerse yourself in a world and tell better stories in a world if the internal rules of that world make consistent sense. The further you stray from this, the more barriers you erect to storytelling.

When you get heavily into storytelling/roleplaying within a fictional world, there's always an element that involves exploring the aspects of that world and expanding its boundaries, asking questions like "what if?" - a poorly constructed world that doesn't have consistent worldbuilding will collapse if you push too hard at the edges, whereas a world with consistent rules and systems will yield new ground to explore new narratives.

If your aim is to provide a balanced mechanical gaming experience, then it's important to focus on game mechanics and balance a lot, in order to make everything fair, and to build a game that's interesting to explore from a mechanical perspective. You want your rules to exist in a state where every element has a purpose, and they work together. You want anything that costs resources or investment to yield rewards that are in proportion to the cost you put into them, so mechanical choices are interesting and result in many different approaches.

For a game like DnD, it's often the case that these two design goals are in conflict. Making an economy that's balanced around the mechanical power of different magic items results in an economy where adventurers are earning tens of thousands of gold pieces for an adventure, and regular artisans are earning one gold piece per day. If the blacksmith has an income of one gold piece per day, how can it afford to buy an unneeded item from the party for hundreds, or even thousands of gold? where did that money come from?

So the question in your design is... where is that balance point? at what point does narrative consistency have to yield to mechanical balance, and at what point does mechanical balance yield to narrative consistency? - for most designers and for most tables, this is going to be personal preference, and the answers are different. You might find if one of these two principles "feels wrong" for you, it's worth tweaking the world, or the systems or the economy to make a game that works better for your group.

I think 5e is unfortunate in that the specific systems of DnD bring these two halves of roleplaying into conflict shockingly often. A huge amount of DnD exists as vestiges and inhereted setting from older editions - to the extent where large portions of the game mechanics exist as they do because as a result of historical technical debt - there are aspects of 5e's mechanical design and worldbuilding that fail to satisfy either design principle, doing both badly because they felt they had to... (e.g. why is "Fireball" just so much mechanically stronger than all comparably levelled damage spells? That's not serving any mechanical or narrative design principle, it's just inherited from older versions.)

For something like... "the cost of plate armour" I really think WotC dropped the ball though - the reason the "mechanical design goal" and the "narrative design goal" are at odds is purely a result of the values they assigned to some items in the PHB, and those numbers propagating through the rest of the design, because mechanical purchases and treasure values have to make comparative sense.

Original core doesn't define gold values for magic items, and it doesn't provide recommended treasure packages or income curves (older editions provided these things to help DMs figure out how much treasure to give.) - the only real things that have defined gold costs are "starting gold", "living expenses" and "mundane adventuring gear"

So you could, for example, simply divide the value of every item in the "adventuring gear" table by 10, and keep the costs of living, and the incomes of NPCs the same. This wouldn't make any significant difference to gameplay - you'd just give out 10% of the money... but it'd bring the economy of adventuring more in line with the economy of the rest of the world, and allow players to operate with numbers that'd "make sense" when contextualized against the rest of the setting. In essence, it'd be a net zero mechanical change, but a significant narrative improvement.

That's what I said. It's a game balance consideration.

oh just... this is why full plate is so expensive in 5e - it's for game balance rather than for the realistic fidelity of the setting.

Another example of the economics here are the rules governing how much income an artisan (such as a blacksmith) makes per day, compared against how long it takes to make a suit of full plate, and how much it costs. Even with the updated guidelines that an artisan "makes" 1gp per day, that means a suit of full plate is about five years worth of income, and many stores in big cities have sets just on the shelf.

These rules are a little complex, because the "take home pay" of labourers and artisans in the rules is after living expenses, and a blacksmith has to maintain rent on their forge, as well as purchase raw materials, but even factoring all that stuff in, the cost of full plate just doesn't make economic sense in the context of the world, the high price is there because it increases one of your stats permanently - and to boot, it's a stat that comes up constantly in play. A single point of AC is more powerful than a single point of almost any other stat in the game, with the exception of your class' primary stat or your proficiency bonus.

I spent quite a lot of time at university doing improv, and what I learned has come in useful in all walks of life, but also for roleplaying games. It doesn't matter whether your improvisation and storytelling skills are good or bad, everyone improves with practice and experience.

When I ran Rime of the Frostmaiden I managed to One-Shot a character three times over the campaign (once at low level, once at level ~5, and once at high level)

All three times it was the party Paladin.

This varies hugely from DM to DM.

When you're at the table, the most important thing is to keep the game running. Keeping the game moving and everyone playing is more important than "getting the rule right" - so there's a number of ways to do this - and different tables have different feelings, but here are some options.

1. If your table cares heavily about "getting the rules correct" you can look it up. Some players place a lot of value on "getting the rules right", they want to know for certain what the rules of the game they're playing are, and it's important to them to have a consistent ruleset to play within. For tables with this mindset it can be worth taking a moment to look up the rule, so long as people are happy with the flow of play being interrupted. This is an exception to the general "Keep the game running" priority.

   1a) 5th edition doesn't have hard and fast defined rules for *everything" (in this case you could use "improvised weapon" rules and treat the halfling as an improvised club)

1b) A lot of DMs are much more happy to "let something slide" if the player isn't gaining any significant mechanical advantage from doing it... So interesting note: in 5e, ghosts are only resistant to damage from non-magical weapons, not immune, so "swinging an improvised halfling" is less good as an attack than just using your weapons. Lower expected damage, lower chance to hit, might damage the halfling. Since the player isn't even getting an advantage from doing this, many DMs would be happy to just let it happen.

Assuming you want to keep the game going, here are some other options.

2. If the game doesn't have a rule, you can use a rule you know from another game. 5e often doesn't have strictly defined rules for niche situations, but 4e and 3e often did have rules for those things. I often use an older rule I remember if 5e doesn't have a rule for it.
3. Go with your gut. Just decide what you think should happen given your understanding of the game world and metaphysics, then go with that.
4. If your table likes it, use the "rule of cool" and just allow anything that is funny or interesting or cool.
5. If you're convinced a rule exists, but you can't remember it, a really good practice that I recommend is as follows:
   \ a) In the moment, let the player do the thing in the fashion that's most favourable to them.
   \ b) Let the table know, this is a one-time ruling for the current session, not a house rule that's permanently in play
   \ c) Make a note of the situation in your DM notes
   \ d) After the session, do the research to look up the rule, and take the time to figure out how you think it should work. (If you have mechanically minded players, they might be interested in helping with this kind of thing.)
   \ e) Let the players know what the rule will be going forward. \

Fundamentally, what's most important here is NOT what method you use, but that your players know how you run the game and are happy with it. Any approach can work if the table likes that approach, and different approaches work better for different groups. There's no "right" or "wrong" answer other than "what works best for your group."