Post Offsets?

Hi,

I’m a relative newbie to WP, so please bear with me…

I’m creating a template home page and I want to divide up the 20 most recent posts into 2-3 different areas of the interface. Does WP have a way to specify the first 1-5 posts go one place (using template tags), then the posts 6-10 go in another place, and posts 11-20 go someplace else in the code?

I’m wondering if there is a way to specify an offset? So I grab 20 most recent posts, then the first example, first 1-5 posts are easy. Then the second example, grabbing just posts 6-10 would require specifying an offset. And the third example, posts 11-20 also would require an offset.

Any ideas beyond trying to use three different database calls?

Thank you!