Okay the whole splitting up thing is causing a lot of discussions now that we realized it will take 40 days to get to the dire forest.
Here's the problem, 6 players is 2 too many. It's making the game battles very lopsided based on who has initiative.
Battles should last 3-5 rounds and ours last 1-2. There are ways to fix that with enemy design and Joy is looking into that for your team, but for us, one big fix would be to trim our team down.
We want to have fun, but there are just too many. Even 5 was too many.
So now we're thinking about splitting 3-3. Something like someone's in trouble but we can't take Freya for x reason and we need someone else to stay behind to help her out.
So right now it's Bear, Gwen and I go on a 80+ day mission and Freya, Ashley and Ulla stay in Neverwinter.
We're re-writing some of the documentation to make the split easier, but as of this morning, without that, we wrote ourselves into a corner.
We need to remember our goal, get everyone to 20 with a fun, compelling story.
A few issues need addressing: the enemy design, travel mechanics, and we're working out the EXP calculation.
We have solutions for all these, so hopefully they'll be transparent fun additions on your end too, for us, it will hopefully make encounters more engaging and meaningful, as in 3-5 rounds without just upping the CR of enemies which cause too much EXP and too reliant on luck.
Ulla, Freya and Ashley don't mind staying behind, they're working on Freya's main Arc which is good.