Two Parties

[the Jester]

Hmm, just thinking about a sequence of games I ran years ago and got to wondering- has anyone else ever run two parallel parties in the same game? Whether because the group doesn't hit it off right and splits into two groups of three instead of a party of six or whatever... anyone ever have this odd configuration happen to them?

 

[Crothian]

I did it once and it was tough. I had too many people that wanted to play in college so I divided the group in two and ran then in the same world, but let them do what they wanted. For the most part they went in different directions, but there were some times when one was like a day ahead of the other, and we had some cross over near the end.

 

[painandgreed]

Several different times and ways. In D&D we ended up forming a second adventuring party formed of some new characters and our previous characters offspring in a long campaign. We'd still switch to our old party every now and then, but all the players were the same and met together. When I started running Vampire, lots of people wanted to play. All my gamer friends as well as all my goth and punk rock friends, plus my roommates who had nothing better to do. All in all I think I had about 30 players in the same campaign. Some were regular games while others were just whoever showed up and wanted to play at odd times. I kept detailed notes on who did what where and when. It was funny the way everything meshed together without even trying. Different PCs would end up in the same place at the same time by happenstance just as they'd end up ready to play at the same session in RL. Several times they'd run across eachother and the multiple party interaction with NPCs was pretty interesting. It was a good deal of record keeping but I think it was worth it and I didn't have to flub interaction between them as much as I thought I might.

 

[RichCsigs]

I've done it twice. My brother did 3 groups in one world at the same time (this was before 2 kids obviously). The three groups ended up merging for the last storyline, the wedding of 2 NPCs and an attack by a devil one of the groups had angered.

The other one had two groups who didn't know the other existed (though our group eventually figured it out). The two groups met up once and learned that each group had information the other needed. The DM had planned to keep it going with the 2 groups meeting everynow & then to exchange information but he ended up getting fed up with most of the people in the second group, so he took the players he liked in group 2 and put them in our group and just played with one group until the end.