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This shouldn't be the GMs job btw, players, roleplaying and backstory are YOUR department, write a reason why your character would end up with the others. Work together.

DM: As you walk away, you feel a slight tingle in the air before a flash as bright as a thousand suns blinds you for an instant before... nothing. A bolt of lightning has vaporized your body. Miraculously, nobody else in the vicinity seems to have been harmed in any way nor even do they seem to have noticed what just happened, including the fact that you just disappeared. It's as if the Gods themselves, for no particular reason, have arbitrarily decided to smite you out of existence entirely.

Ready to roll a new character?

If you don’t have a reason to work with the group, accept that this is a one-shot for you, which may be retcon’d as needed.

Fun fact:

The Expanse books (and eventual TV show) were started as a unique role-playing campaign where the person running it (Ty Franks) would write a prompt, the players would explain their character's reactions. He'd then write a story section incorporating that and the players would say how they reacted and so on.

There was a core group of characters who were the "survivors" early on, but one of the players had to drop out early-ish, so in the next bit of story that character died.

That was carried into the books and TV show, which is why after the core group of characters is established, there's a sudden, shocking death.

Everybody plays RPGs differently, but it's funny how some people don't get the term "roleplaying" and are constantly, relentlessly playing their real selves in the game. So you get barbarians with the sensibilities of software developers.

"Oh, you encounter a desert. There's nothing around for miles"

Basically my only rules for character creation are 1) your stuff must be from an officially published 5e rulebook, and 2) it must make sense for your characters to party up. It's really hard to make an interesting campaign for a group of four lone wolves who are totally disinterested in The Quest

THANK. YOU.

Players who do this ARE BAD PLAYERS. I don't care what it takes, you WILL find a reason to cooperate. Call it metagaming if you have to. This is a team game, you will work as a team.

Players are expected to make characters that will, for whatever reason, will work together and, for whatever reason, will take plot hooks. Without those two things the game doesn't happen.

The guy who splits the party on session 1:

back around late 90's early 00's I was pretty lucky to have a group of friends that all just hung around together. Talking like 8 or more of us and it always wound up that 3 of us would have a place together out in the sticks (it changed locations/roommates from year to year but we had a good long 5+ years of everyone being consistently together). We ended up playing basically any tabletop we could get our hands on or pirate (napster/limewire back then) and print off (we still ended up spending 100's a piece though on dice and official releases), we even ended up starting to make our own games that I still think about doing something with to this day. (all just context for how we could pull off some of what I'm about to say)

Getting EVERYONE together was rather difficult at times, people would come into stories and be quickly rotated out if they had to work or weren't available when we were wanting to continue running a story-line (multiple different DM's and storylines from different games going on in concert, still can't fathom how that all worked out looking back). So we all got pretty used to being fluid about it and no one really had any FOMO unless their character was low-level versus everyone else.

At that point it became apparent on my storyline that I was going to have to catch some people up so we started doing 1-on-1 DMing where I would spend a few hours running someone basically on a solo mission that I could tie into the rest of the story and give them something to catch up to everyone else. Sometimes we would do it before a bigger session and people showing up early could sit in or do cameo appearances to help out/etc. People are a lot more comfortable to ask questions and be involved with the story that way and translates well to the group play.

It ended up being a huge success and had some of my favorite interactions. Sometimes we would have a bunch of people over and some wanted to play and some wanted to listen to music and party so it just always felt natural and those involved really wanted to be there for it.

You can get away with it while having some downtime in a village. The bard is making coin in the tavern and the barbarian is drinking in the same place, the priest visits the local chapel, the warlock looks to spend some coin on magic baubles, etc. This also increases the creativity in which you can give your players their next quest.

But once you're out adventuring on that quest, you're a goddamn party. If you don't want to be a party, then go home and play a single player game.

Edit: I have had good DMs separate the party themselves though, but we always spend it trying to find each other again.

If your character has no reason to stay either the plothook was insufficient or you made a bad character. Both should be adressed ooc.

I did this in the very first RPG I played. It was Star Wars and I was playing a smuggler (who thus had a ship). Obviously the GM intended my ship to be used to move the party around. Well, the jedi PC shows up wanting to board my ship as I'm getting ready to leave. I don't know this guy so obviously the first thing my character would do would be to say that and then turn the turrets on when this strange jedi tried to insist on joining me, followed by promptly flying off so he ended up needing to find another way to our adventure.

No idea why I was like that. The player was pretty much my best friend at the school, too, so it wasn't anything personal against him. I think I was just trying to hard to do what "my character would realistically do" instead of just playing a game.

My rule on this is very simple; if your character isn't a part of the group, they're not part of the story. That goes for lone wolves, people who betray the party, "evil" characters who work against the party's interests, etc. You make the choices you want to make, you do what seems right for your character, but the moment that means you're not a part of the group, you either figure out a good story for how we're going to fix that, or you hand me your character sheet. It's really that easy.

"But thats just what my character would do!"

OK, let's unpack that. If that's truly, genuinely the case, if there's no way your character could no work against the group or leave them at this point, then this is how your characters story ends. If that comes twenty sessions into a game, well, waking away rather than betray your morals is a pretty good story if you ask me. If it comes two sessions in then we need to figure out why you're not on the same page as everyone else.

But more often, the player simply thinks its the only possible way their character can act in this situation because they're not thinking creatively. People are complicated. Consistency is actually the bane of interesting characters. A good character is inconsistent for interesting reasons. "My character would never trust someone in this situation!" OK, but what if they did? Now we're left with the question of why, and figuring that out is surely going to be interesting.

There's also the other side of this coin, which is the responsibility on the GM's shoulders. Yes, your players owe it to each other to try to keep the story moving forward, but you also owe it to them to respect the reality their story takes place in. Don't run a gritty crime game and then expect your players to just automatically trust some NPC that turns up with no bona fides. You actually have to put the work into crafting scenarios where the players can have their characters react naturally and still drive the story. It's a bad GM who pisses their pants and cries because they created something that looks like an obvious trap (whether it is or not) and their players refused to walk into it.

That's why it's pretty common in Shadowrun to just have everyone be kidnapped and fitted with a bomb in their skull.

If their character doesn't want to cooperate, you activate the player's brain bomb.