Playing to the audience when the party is split

My answer was long, and wasn’t specific either to the situation with a split party or to the practice of playing to the audience in RP, so I have moved it to a new thread:

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Yeah, I’ve learned to do that, after protests from a player when I blew it some years back. I do run a lot of campaigns with divided parties; I’ve run a couple where the whole cast only came together in the final episode or two. But everybody needs to get camera time.

To maintain interest, I find that it helps if when A and B are doing something, it’s going to have an impact on the fortunes of X and Y. The ideal form of this involves repeated crosscuts that show each subgroup doing something that affects the other subgroups, advancing in parallel.

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I used to play in a group where this was really difficult. I’m one of those players who will chew scenery and love just going for it and having fun but we had a player who was just totally the other end of the spectrum. And it was so hard as a player to try and get him equally involved. Sometimes I’d literally be miserable during sessions cos i kept trying to defer to him to get him involved a bit more but… nothing.

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One problem with “splitting the party” is the player who wants to be involved in every scene regardless - so when some the party go to talk to the bereaved widow, some go to the library to do research, and the rest try to break in to the villains office to search for clues, their character will (try to) participate in all of the scenes.

Also bear in mind that (particularly with research type activities) my actions may not be looking for “screen time” now, but setting up for getting it later - it might make sense to cross cut between the burglary and the conversation, but as the researcher I may not want to play out the library scene in detail - The payoff for that is when the research pays off, and and I can use the results to save the day. (sometimes the journey is as, or more important than the destination, but not always).

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Yes indeed! The complement to playing to the audience when your character is in the spotlight is taking audience stance — appreciating others’ play for a moment — when your character is off stage. It’s mutual consideration and mutual respect; we have to do it together.

(And, as others have pointed out above, that mutual consideration extends to giving others their share of time in author or actor stance, early and often.)

Good point about abstract actions setting up future scenes and not deserving equal time for its own sake.

One thing that I did for my adventure 9,401 was to write and print out a few solo research scenes, in the form of the autopsy report that Ashbless would write on completing her autopsy, and the narrative of the video that Lethe would edit together after reviewing the security-camera footage. The party split up upon leaving the crime scene, but Lethe’s and Ashbless’s players got something to read and think about if they weren’t interested in Thórrson and Ishikawa doing routine interviews of witnesses, and they were primed with material to use when the investigators got back together.

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