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

Basically my only rules for character creation are 1) your stiff 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.

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.

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

make checks until you fail. take 40d8 damage from a mysterious source. no one's around you to help unfortunately because you were dumb enough to separate from the party.

now make a better character or go home, your choice.

Your character purchased and ate bad fish the night before, and you have uncontrollable gas, which quickly turns to greasy, putrid diarrhea. As the pub bouncer tosses you out the door for smelling like raw sewage, a micrometeorite hits you in the eye and lodges itself into your brain, disrupting your medula. As you lay there struggling to breate, you shake yourself awake. It would seem you fell asleep at the table and had an awful dream.

Sorry, what were you saying about not wanting to stick around?

Biggest pet peeve with players. This is why, during session 0, I make players pre-establish a reason that they not only go along with the party and the planned campaign but also a reason why they trust at least two other characters.

There's a few ways I have approached this as a GM. I'll go from least to most effective (and, I feel, mature).

The first is to put a shared enemy in front of the party, so that even if the characters do split up, they're working towards the same goal. The character who has "no reason" to trust the party also has reason to recognize the effectiveness of sticking with allies in a world full of enemies. If the player wants them to go off on their own, fine, but as GM, the game stays with the party - oh, and have the player who left roll on a random injury table because they were outnumbered.

Second is to invoke the "Wolverine Approach". Wolverine in Marvel Comics always goes on and on about not being a team player, being a bad person, being a loner, etc. - and he certainly has had his fair share of solo adventures. At the same time, there was at least one month where nearly every major Marvel title had Wolverine in it - Avengers, West Coast Avengers, X-Men, the Defenders, Spider-Man, Marvel Team-Up, Alpha Flight, etc.. And because it was in the era where She-Hulk was part of the F4, he had a cameo there because of the WCA. Wolverine might claim to not be a team player, and he might be a pain in the rear end, but he's always there if there's a villain to be thwarted or a fight to be had. You have a right to have your character complain. Just stick in or near the party. I don't care if you sleep in a different hotel or a separate camp. Be there in the important scenes.

Third, "Take it or leave it". I'm not ashamed of myself for this one - I have told people, this is the game we're playing. if you want to play this game, I want to have you. If you don't want to play what we're playing under the terms we're all in agreement on, there's the door, don't let it hit you on the way out. It's effective, but I don't think it's the most mature method in my arsenal because of the all-or-nothing nature.

Fourth is an open and frank discussion. Explain that the concept of the game is cooperative. Make sure you get buyin from everyone, not just the loner. Express the expectation I have of both players and characters for the game in play. Paranoia, for instance, has a very different set of expectations and goals than Shadowrun or Spirit of the Century / Dresden / Fate. I have GMed for a loner character in a Fate game who never showed up with the other players, but because the system is so narratively driven, they were helpful by setting up Aspects with free tags because the character could realistically be "doing his own thing" and still contribute. So I've learned to be open and clear with my goals and intentions. I don't care if your character is going to be a pain - I care whether or not you as a player will contribute positively to everyone's experience in a fair way.

The more we are clear about goals and intentions, and the more we can apply nuance and understanding to the situation, the better our games will be.

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.

Lots of other good points already made, but I'll add my own two cents.

When I run a game, I always require players to make characters together. No "go off and make a character in isolation". That's just a recipe for disaster. You can have some ideas already in mind, but nothing is canon until the whole group agrees.

Second, everyone needs to have buy-in to whatever the hook is. If the scenario is "you're starting a courier business at the edge of civilization", there are lots of good options. Guy on the run from the law. Lady studying local wild life. Intelligent, local, wildlife. Don't play "guy who doesn't want to be here and is a total killjoy"

Third, it's better when characters have connections to each other. You can play the "we just met and we're forming a relationship!" arc, but like "what if we play ourselves in a fantasy world??" it has been done.

Honestly, everyone should read Fate's "Phase Trio" https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/phase-trio and the rest of character creation.

My fix has always been: that's fine! They go off on their own adventures. Now please roll a character that's going to play the game we're running here tonight.

Ngl, this has never been a problem for multiple sessions for me. As a player or DM.

As a player, I show up willing to play characters that will work with a group, even if they don't trust them. Trust isn't necessary to work together.

As a DM I remind all players of that fact before they roll one up. If they don't have an idea on how their character would manage that, I'll give them ideas.

Yeah, you'll run into players that just don't get that not every character has to have the same motivation to work with others, or just refuse to play different characters (instead, they try to play the same character with different names). But those are rare. And, so far, I've yet to run into a player that wouldn't take the "look, you don't have to keep playing with us, but give it a try my way and see how it goes, yeah?" talk and give it a fair try.

I've also never had a player quit because of the game not being engaging and fun.

Alone and vulnerable, you are murdered by thieves. Make a new guy for the next game.

I'm a big fan of "you all wake up in loincloths sitting in a wagon, hands bound" and as long as someone at the table can roll higher than a 1, they can break free.

Or something attacks them while they're all in a tavern

Basically I'm a fan of "you could ignore having your shit kicked in, but will you?" since so many players would stop at nothing.

Fallout NV had the right idea. "Where's that little fucker who shot me in the head?!"