DISCUSSING
In the Shadow of the Spire – Session 26A: Tor’s Training
After several mournful minutes in which little was said, they quickly decided that someone needed to return to the surface and notify House Erthuo of the death of Faeliel and the others.
Dominic and Ranthir took that heavy task on themselves. Tor left with them, needing to keep an appointment later in the morning.
The walk back to the surface took a little more than twenty minutes. Then they took carriages in opposite directions: Tor back towards Midtown; Ranthir and Dominic towards the Nobles’ Quarter.
In The Art of Pacing, I explain running an RPG for a split party is basically the easy mode for handling pacing as a GM: Because you no longer need to wait for the end of a scene before cutting back and forth between the groups, you not only have a whole bunch of new pacing techniques you can use, you’re also freed up from needing to honor the structure of the current scene (since you’ll be cutting back to it later).
In Random GM Tip: Splitting the Party, I delve a bit deeper into the practical side of splitting the party and share some basic best practices.
But if splitting the party is the easy mode for pacing, then splitting the party in an urban environment is the easy mode for splitting the party.
First, in my experience it’s much easier to convince groups to split up in the first place in an urban environment. Even groups that adamantly profess, “Never split the party!” will often still be comfortable doing it in an urban environment where (a) the risk seems minimal and (b) typical tasks so readily lend themselves to multitasking. (“You sell those mage-touched swords we took from the bandits and I’ll arrange for our rooms while the wizard gets his reagents. We can meet at the Onyx Spider afterwards.”)
WHO FIRST?
When the group splits up, whose scene should you frame first?
In general, what you’re looking for is the group whose scene is most likely to be interrupted the fastest. This might be:
- A complicated decision.
- A skill check.
- Some sort of logistical calculation.
- A dramatically appropriate moment.
- An unexpected rules look-up.
And so forth. Basically, any of the reasons you’d normally cut from one scene to another.
The reason for this is pretty straightforward: You’re dipping your toes in the first scene, and then as quickly as possible cutting away to another group. Not only does this keep everyone engaged, but you’re getting to the time-saving advantage of multitasking as quickly possible (with Group 1 continuing to resolve stuff in their scene while you’ve turned your attention to Group 2).
The slightly more advanced technique here is to first check for effective crossovers (those moments when elements or outcomes from one scene have an impact on another scene) and make sure you line them up.
For example, in this session I knew that the House Erthuo guards were likely going to stumble onto Tee, Agnarr, and Elestra with the corpses of the Erthuo researchers. This suggested a natural sequence in which:
- Ranthir and Dominic arrived at House Erthuo.
- Tee, Agnarr, and Elestra are discovered by the House Erthuo guards, resulting in a cliffhanger.
- Cut away from the cliffhanger back to House Erthuo, where Cordelia arrives and explains what the guards are doing there.
- Cut back to Ghul’s Labyrinth, to finish resolving the confrontation.
HOW LONG?
As you start juggling multiple scenes playing out across a city, you’ll need to answer the question of how all these scenes relate to each other in terms of time.
First, remember that you don’t have to keep time perfectly synced between the groups. In fact, you’ll almost always want to NOT do that.
For example, maybe the Erthuo guards showed up 30 minutes before Ranthir and Dominic arrived at House Erthuo and the whole interaction between the guards and the dungeon group “actually” played out before anything of interest happened with Ranthir and Dominic. But that would have been dramatically far less interesting. And, even more importantly, you want to scale time to balance table time.
The key thing is not to push this so far that PCs can’t respond to things they reasonably should be able to respond to. (For example, if Ranthir and Dominic would have been able to warn the other PCs that the Erthuo guards were coming, it wouldn’t have been fair to frame things in a sequence that would prevent them from doing that.) But, generally speaking, you’ve got a fairly large fudge factor and the players will generally support you by not deliberately doing anything that violates established causality.
(And if something does go askew, a minor retcon is rarely going to hurt anything.)
Speaking of the fudge factor, you’re usually going to find it easier to juggle multiple groups doing stuff at the same time if you “chunk” time. You can kinda think of this as establishing ad hoc turns, with each discrete group usually being able to do one thing per “turn.”
I usually think in terms of:
- the hour,
- the watch (4 hours), or
- the half day (morning/afternoon)
Which mental construct I find most useful depends on how “meaty” the PCs’ planned actions are. If someone is planning to gather information down at the Docks, I might think to myself, “That’ll take about half a day.” And so the active question becomes: What is everyone else doing with that half day?
Once you’ve collected those declarations, it’s not hard to become sequencing how things should resolve.
Here’s my final tip: If the group has fractured into three or four or more groups (often in the form of individuals scattering to the winds), write down their declarations. Just jot them down in your notebook. You don’t have to get fancy or specific with this, just a quick one or two word reminder:
- Tee/Agnarr/Elestra: packing
- Tor: training
- R/D: Erthuo
Just enough that you can re-orient yourself with a glance at he end of each scene.
NEXT:
Campaign Journal: Session 26B – Running the Campaign: Treasure Logistics
In the Shadow of the Spire: Index
