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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mneme" data-source="post: 5871342" data-attributes="member: 59248">[MENTION=91252]Smoke Jaguar[/MENTION] I wouldn't go that far, but yes, splitting the party is an advanced technique.  It's also a necessary one to learn, particularly with large groups, but there are a lot of mistakes you can make.Looking at my entire packed set of ideas:Tricking the party into fighting itself: Is a very dangerous idea.  Cool if you can pull it off, but also really easy to make it backfire and have everyone hate you.  This idea is very much a double edged sword with extra poison edges just to be sure, and should be treated with caution -- but is still amusing and -might- be cool.  The problem is that it's combat wrapped around an old school puzzle, and can very easily result in a half TPK if the players aren't clever and you don't build in a fallback method of resolving the problem than figuring it out.Split the party and send them off in different directions: Very useful, not hugely dangerous.  The usual mistake here is to either switch back and forth too often (making everyone confused about what's going on) or to infrequently (nobody should be waiting more than 10 minutes or half an hour at most to get a turn; you should switch whenever the situation changes in any noticable way, and should try to set things up such that you're running two combats simultaneously or a combat and a skill challenge, so can go around the table for one group, than the other).  This one is well worth the effort, as pacing variations really benefit from split party techniques, but you might very well have some tripfalls while you're learning it (and deciding which sub-techniques work for you).In both cases, I don't think isolating groups/players is a good idea.  It might -seem- a good idea as it enforces lines of communication, but the result is nigh universally less fun than just letting players keep character knowledge and player knowledge separate.  Also, in the VDI (Very Dangerous Idea), the meta-knowledge players get from seeing both sides is a key technique for helping them figure it out before pain and suffering results.</blockquote>

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