Halloween 3 (part 2) (Patreon)

If there's any one "rule" of role playing that I enjoy thumbing my nose at it's "Don't spilt the party." It's actually not a bad rule for players, splitting the party weakens the group and needlessly complicates the process of playing together. But for me it's a relic of a more video-gamey approach to RPG's. In general I prefer stories where characters have complex and individual objectives, and who stay together only for as long as those objectives are served by collective action. Most of the movies we do, don't have a traditional "party" that can be expected to stay together. Now, it's a ton of fun when movies do, say like in Goonies, have a party that is a band of heroes united by friendship, but the fact is most movies don't work that way (and even in Goonies we managed to split the hell out of the party.)

But all this begs the question, how do you make it interesting when the party gets split and suddenly we're dealing with one person at a time. And in this campaign, you see the answer: tagalong characters. Sometimes I prep them intentionally, sometimes they just come out of the improv. In a semi-mundane campaign, one in which the population at large is at a somewhat similar power level to your PC's. There is an infinite pool of possible PC's everywhere you go. Not only does that make sure that every one of your players is always engaged, it helps flesh out the world and pull the story in unexpected directions. And unexpected directions is what I am always going for.