>From: Light Castle <light_castle_at_...>
>I'm certainly a fan of split party play. But I do like keeping the players
>sufficiently close that they often interact with each other, since for me,
>RPing is a social activity.
Yep, I think we definitely have two issues here. First, Ian, you and I and some others have a style of play that lends itself to not doing "party play." So it's not really honest to say that it'll work for everyone. For lots of groups playing lots of ways, splitting the "party" does suck.
But for other styles it's superior to not have the "party" concept in play at all. It's somewhat a semantic point I'm making here, but splitting a party and not ever having a party are two very different things. If a player has an expectation of participation because of the assumption of party play, then he'll be dissapointed when it happens.
For those who want to not play with a party, I suggest seeing The Forge and looking it up there. Really not HQ specific enough to do all over again here.
The second issue is situation where characters will never run into each other at all. This is not the same thing as a split party, now we're talking about characters that are really off on their own stories. The problem with which is that it's just not as interesting to play without any PC interaction at all. So when playing without a party, I always personally strongly advocate replacing that structure with another "centralizing" structure of some sort.
There are many ways to do this, but an easy to grasp example is simply having all of the characters be from the same small village. This gives them plenty of opportunity to run into each other. There are even better structures, but, again, that's getting far from anything HQ specific.
Mike
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