It's a classic conundrum: some of your party is motivated to do one thing, and the rest of your party is motivated to do something else. The party is at odds. Player agendas threaten to cancel each other out. It's the end of many campaigns, but it doesn't have to be. You can salvage a party split with the right story moves, and your campaign may even end up better for the split. Let me begin with an example of a time that a party split made a campaign better than it was before.
I was just getting my feet under me as an intermediate GM, and I designed a campaign that revolved around killing off 20 members of the royal staff of a town. The players completed the first 2 contracts and then turned on the questgiver; the party was divided over the questgiver's goals, and about half the party went in either direction. The more rebellious characters decided to destroy the kingdom, and the more stalwart characters decided to defend the kingdom. At least 75% of the campaign's story became the struggle between player factions. The final battle was a showdown between anarchist forces and the palace guard, and the story resolved on the formation of a new future for the city.
When the party split initially occurred, I was at a loss. How would I recover from losing my main quest and seeing the party divided? I wasn't sure, so I just kept running the game and hoping for the best. The players soon aligned themselves along ideological lines, which meant that disagreements about how to proceed could derail the whole campaign. But it didn't play out that way. The palace guards set to doubling down on defenses while the anarchist players worked on plans to assassinate the king. The story didn't so much disappear as reform; now I had a group of players committed to preserving a kingdom and a group of players committed to destroying it. In other words, I had two parallel campaigns that unfolded at once. This is how we should view split parties; they are two conjoined stories with one outcome.
More recently, when I ran the Eastweald campaign, one of the three players used the final battle to reveal that he, a part-paladin named Carric, had formed a bond with Vecna, the evil god of secrets, and he turned on the other two players. The final battle became Vecna and Carric versus the other player characters. This party split is different from the one described above because it doesn't mean a reformation of the story so much as a twist. But the principle is the same. Carric turned against his compatriots, meaning that his conditions for success were mutually exclusive with the rest of the party's. Isn't this a problem?
In both cases I've described, no one was truly bothered by the story's outcome. One player in the first campaign was troubled by the lack of consequences for the lead anarchist character in the story's denouement, but his character was in part responsible for that decision. Neither case saw the players involved feeling cheated or opposed to each other; they viewed their experiences in the story as evolving naturally from player actions and the other events in the story. Not every player will feel that way, but there are things you can do to resolve that.
Before you begin adjusting your game for a party split, it's a good idea to check in with your players. Is everyone prepared for a party split game? Some players may find the idea unappealing, or even in opposition to what they find fun. If that's the case, you might try salvaging your campaign with an out-of-game appeal to your players: set aside your roleplaying differences and make the game work for the sake of everyone's enjoyment. It may even be possible that the campaign is simply over; sometimes players are neither willing to change their decision-making nor to face off against their friends. It may be better in that case to start a new campaign with better parameters than plunge into a game that will be unenjoyable for your players. But if your players are game for a little opposition, you have options for making a party split work.
Perhaps the most common cause for party splits is alignment disagreement. I address this briefly in my guide to building a cohesive party; a lawful good character and a chaotic evil character in one party is usually a recipe for a party split. You can counteract this issue before it starts by building your party around a range of alignments. All good and all neutral alignments generally work together; all neutral and all evil alignments can be a good combination as well. Law and chaos are less divisive issues than morality (most of the time, at least), but divided moral alignments usually cause issues. (That campaign I described with the palace guards versus the anarchists? When I mapped the alignments of each of our nine characters, we had one character assigned to each alignment. No wonder it erupted in a party split.) So be careful at the beginning of the game and suggest the party agree on a range of alignments to prevent unnecessary party splits later. But you can work with party splits when they arise.
The first thing to do when the party splits is to reorganize your story's stakes. Where once the party strove to solve problems together, now you have the party working against each other to further their agendas. So you need to move the conditions for success. Let's say you have a campaign where an evil god is promising lots of power in return for pushing their agenda--harming the innocent. Where initially the party was working to protect the innocent from this god, now you have a party split. Some characters insist on continuing to protect the innocent, but others find the god's promises of power too enticing to ignore. Now it's time to adjust the story. Instead of a blanket "protect the innocent," you develop a series of important communities. Each of those communities is both a population to protect and a group to target for the evil god. Now it's up to your players to square off and accomplish one or the other goal.
Balance is very important in situations like these. If one group has a real advantage over the other, it should be for the sake of serious storytelling. For example, it would be a mistake to have the evil god offer magical help to the players supporting them; that gives them a big advantage over the defending players. You might offer this change to the story if the defending players are running away with the game and the evil god-aligned characters need a boost. Similarly, if it proves too easy for the evil god-aligned characters to target innocent communities, perhaps a good-aligned god steps in to help the defending players. Generally, though, you want your split parties to have equal shots at success, or else you will be dealing with players with sore feelings.
The second big step to take is to become a more reactive GM. I talk a lot here about how you need improvisation skills to be a strong GM, and it's never truer than with party splits. The thing about a party split is that your story is no longer a path from point A to point B; it becomes an ideological issue for each character to address themselves. Developing your story still involves providing details and new events, but the meat of the story is now in how the players feel about the issues involved. For instance, in the palace guard scenario, the stepping up of guard activity would once have been a way to get the player characters to be working when something important happens. But after the party split, the palace guards respond to the increased patrols with vigilance and duty, while the anarchists respond to them with frustration and a greater need for creatively addressing their goals. As a result of this, your job as GM becomes less to advance a narrative (since your players will be doing that) and more to introduce ideas for the players to contemplate.
An example of this in action: during the palace guard campaign, a common question was how harsh to be with the anarchists. Some players, like my younger brother, who played a sneaky orc named York, felt it their moral obligation to stop violence, but could not contemplate using violence to stop other violence. This put those characters in a position of moral quandary when dealing with the anarchists. But other players, like my best friend, who played an awkward dwarf named Barryn, were more conflicted in his beliefs. Barryn wanted to decisively strike against the anarchists, but was concerned about the moral impact of harming or imprisoning people who technically hadn't yet committed a crime. Many issues that law enforcers face in real life became the matter of the game's story, and it was a richer and more complex story for it.
But it's not enough to react to the players and let them guide the story. You also need to let go of your ending. The stakes used to be the players versus the story, but now it's the players versus the players. I had envisioned the tragic fall of a kingdom and the players' shock at their involvement in it, but the players made the story about a struggle between powers and ideas. Similarly, you'll need to completely re-envision your story's conditions for ending. Let's return to that example about the players siding with or against an evil god. Where you once held the fate of a particular group of people to be the final stroke in the story, that ending will no longer work. The stakes have changed. Now your story is about the ultimate success of failure of that god's agenda as enforced by the players. As you may have noticed, a party split's effect on the story is often to magnify it and push the ending conditions into bigger territory. In this example, we go from the fate of a town to the fate of the whole world inasmuch as the god can change things. And that's fine! It's good to make your campaign about something bigger when party splits are involved.
A word of warning, though: if your players said they're up for a party split, but you've noticed there's a negative change in the game afterward, you need to do something to address it. The most important thing in gaming is creating fun, and if the party split removes the fun, it's time to rethink things. I generally recommend letting a party split play out if your players are onboard with it, and I recommend using story forces rather than rules to solve the problem, but every situation is different. It may help to have some willing players create new characters who are onboard with the rest of the party's plans, and it may be a good idea to tweak the story so that everyone is closer to agreement. But the holistic way to solve it is to create story reasons to keep the player characters on the path they would naturally take. Think about how much fun you would lose if you had to roll a new character because the other characters were too different from yours. Is that fun? Probably not. I think most players would have more fun standing by their character's personality and finding new ways to engage with the story. So give a split party a chance if the conditions are right--your campaign may actually benefit from it.
A final note on party splits: when I ran the palace guard campaign, even after the party split, I kept all my players together. I have heard of people running games where only the sub-parties play together, and I think that's a very interesting format. It really highlights the opposition of the parties and it eliminates the capacity of meta-gaming, which can be an issue in split parties. But with a group of well-meaning roleplayers, it actually helps to have everyone together. Watching another player take their turn and stymying your players is exciting and spawns one-upsmanship in a fun way. And in the case of the palace guards, it kept the social element of the game alive. Best friends sided against each other, romantic partners sided against each other, siblings sided against each other; losing these connections over the party split didn't make sense. By keeping everyone together, the joint story they all told became the central focus of the campaign rather than the many disconnected actions of the players on a grand story that was bigger than any one individual. Make this call based on your gut and player opinion; your players will have a preference for together or apart, or at least they will have an opinion after a session or two.
So the bottom line is this: a party split isn't the end of anything but your campaign as you knew it. You can and should encourage your players to keep at the story they're all telling together with some adjustments for their new roles. Rewrite your story's win conditions so that they allow the players more agency. And be ready to address smaller changes as you go, just as you would with any situation in TRPGs. With all that work, you'll be able to turn most party splits into interesting experiments in storytelling and roleplaying.
That's all for now. Coming soon: how to include music in your campaign, how to use mirrors of your party to shake up the game, and what you can do with campaign continuity. Until next time, happy gaming!
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