Hey all, sorry for the lengthy post...concision has never been a strong point for me. :-)
Anyway, I am interested in hearing about the numbers of players/PCs you folks normally have in your campaigns and how many is too many. Something that has been a bit of a challenge for the DMs in our group is the number of players in each session as well as over the course of the campaign.
Let me explain our situation. Our group has 4 pretty regular attendees, 4 occasional players and a couple 'guest' players that pop in a few times a year. Most people in the group can and/or will DM at some point and each player usually only manages one PC (including the DM who generally runs a low-impact DMPC). The 4 regular folks attend probably 99% of the sessions with the next four having varying levels of availability/commitment. Most nights we have at least 5 but can have as many as 7 or 8.
We are currently playing AoW AP (I'm not DM'ing) and are looking forward to the ST AP (which I will be DM'ing) and a couple of us have been talking about the number of PCs. Our concern is that we may have too many PCs at times during the campaign. This brings a couple of challenges:
1) It’s too easy – most adventures are based around a ‘balanced’ party of 4 (fighter, cleric, rogue, mage). We never manage to have a ‘balanced’ party, but that is another story. The real point is that when there are 7-8 PCs going up against an encounter built for 4, things get pretty easy for them. The additional mix of skills/powers/spells/firepower/melee combat strength makes most pre-written encounters too easy. Now, you can crank up the CR of an encounter (more baddies, tougher DCs to overcome something, etc) but since the number of players we have fluctuates, it’s tough for a DM to prepare in advance and there is the fear that changes on the fly could sometimes produce unpredictable or unwanted results (it becomes too tough or even insurmountable).
2) Combat complexity – it’s not really a linear progression when more players are added to combat in terms of the complexity of resolving combat. Our last big combat saw 5 or 6 concurrent wall spells all with different effects, areas of reverse gravity, disintegrations, mass healings (from both sides and with opposing effects), epic one-on-one melee battles, flying, summoning, ranged weaponry, spells and spell-like effects, areas of effect, etc. Even though a couple of things may have been missed, I applaud our DM for managing that much at once; I know it could not have been easy. I’m sure there are many of you who would say, “All combat is like that” or “Suck it up, princess” but my point is that with so many PCs capable of so many things, it can get complicated in a hurry and you can sometimes find yourself bogged down in the nuances of the rules to resolve some of these situations as well as increasing the chance of missing something really cool for the baddies. Smaller parties are less likely to produce so many such scenarios.
3) Keeping all players interested – it’s challenging enough to DM and produce an environment that is exciting and compelling for 4 players but it’s nigh impossible to do that for 7 or 8. As a DM, I strive to keep all players involved and give each PC at least a little bit of individual attention. It keeps them involved and gives them the assurance that their character is really important to the adventure. Failure at this leads to #4.
4) Distractions – more players means more non-game related conversation. We’re a pretty social bunch to begin with and getting 7 or 8 of us in a room is a recipe for chatter. We have a couple of folks who are worse for spawning such conversations, but at the end of the day we are all guilty of extended out of game chatting. This is not a bad thing, per se, but it can sure drag out an adventure which can then cause people to lose interest in the campaign. Add the challenges of not being able to draw people into the game by giving them all individual attention and things get worse.
So long winded way of saying that having many PCs is challenging. We certainly don't want to exclude anyone, but are just looking for some hints on how to manage things a bit better.
How many PCs do you have and how do you manage some of the above points for larger parties?
Thanks,
Jeff