Of course there is such as thing as to many. The real question is how many is to many.
+1
This is too true, as JDWebster ran 23 of us once in ...'76? But that was a pure crunch, dungeon stomp with ZERO RP! And players should count differently as well in this equation. every overbearing, new or otherwise difficult player is effectively 2 worth of disruption, etc. Conversely, players who help the game along can be counted as factions. My last game had 5 solid players and zipped along.
In live games I prefer to keep a ratio of 1 GM to 3-4 Players. Once you hit 1:5 throngs start getting divided up a bit much. At 1:6 thats about the point I consider offering a player a co-GM seat.
At 1:7 I have in the past insisted on splitting play into two mini-groups of 1:3. 2 GMs 6 players. There is plenty of fun having to synchronized adventuring parities running around with slightly different goals.
Here would be a fun thing to try, merge Curse of the Crimson Throne and Counsel of Thieves into one city and link up events. One adventuring party is working with the independent city watch the other for the revolutionary group.
8 PC's! I will have a lot of adjusting and encounter balancing to do to say the least. All this has got me wondering if there is a hard limit on the size a player party should be? I think it's great that there is so much interest in my particular game, I know some gaming groups have the opposite problem, but shouldn't there be some kind of cut-off? Thoughts and theories?
I agree with most people here. Anything in the 3-6 range can be fun, if you count some players twice based on their playstyle. I've had a few games with 7, and one with 8, but I wouldn't suggest it.
FWIW, PFS rules say 7 is hard max, above that split into two groups - and I think that's a great idea.
In your case, since no one thinks they are ready to GM, find the player that is the most ready (you know who it is) and ask him/her to co-GM for a while. Offer his/her character equal loot and XP during the "experiment" if he/she is worried about falling behind. If that player refuses, ask the next. Then you can spin off part of the game on your new co-GM (say, adjudicating combat) or encourage the party to split into two groups.
Once he/she gets his/her feet under him/her, he/she should be ready to take on his/her own game. If you follow the party-split method, he/she will have actually been doing so for some time (with you to ask if something goes south).
Edit: Wow, pronouns suck.
Edit2: Also, you might be surprised how much easier it is to run a stock adventure twice a week than it is to double the challenge and adjudicate 8-player combat. I still think you should increase your GM pool - what happens to your players when you leave?
My max was a 10-person group back in the mid-to-late-'90's, when we were having a good time with 2E. The numbers fluctuated enough that I only had ten a small percentage of the time, and usually played with nine. With 2E, I believe it was much easier with high numbers like that. I had no problem at all keeping that game going, and everyone had a real good time with it.
Now that I've moved on to playing Pathfinder, I don't think I'd want more than 5-6 in a group at one time, and even that can get to be too many with this system. Ideally, I'm enjoying having four party members in the two campaigns I'm running, because once you start to throw animal companions into the mix, it easily becomes equivalent to a 5-6 member party. I've found thus far that the power levels of PF are incredibly difficult to manage once you get too many people involved. Now, part of that is probably my newbness in the 3.5 style system, having played 2E for so long (up until almost a year ago). Power levels escalate so quickly in this system though that I'd hate to try running a game with the same numbers I'd more than willingly put together for a 2E game because people get left out too easily here, especially if there's a couple number-crunchers in the group who can build optimized characters that can make non-optimizers obsolete fast.
Someday, I'll get better with the system, and perhaps higher numbers won't bother me as badly. Right now, though, I'd definitely say 5-6 max, with 4 as the ideal.
I used to run one shot New Year's Eve games. No matter how we started, I ended up with 11-15 players. Most of them weren't really paying attention because they just wanted to socialize anyway. I swore the last time, "Never Again!"
I have GMed since just before 3.0 came out, and I have always found 5-6 to be pretty ideal for me. I've run for as little as 2 and as many as 15, and while I think you can adjust and make it work, after about 6 it just gets too much to be worth it, and the game bogs down. A few players will end up stealing the spotlight typically, so what you ultimately get it a game of 5-6 with multiple spectators. I would suggest breaking that group of 8 into two groups of 4 if you have time for two game nights, or enlist one of them as a co-gm and run a table of 7.
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I prefer 5 PCs but 6 is manageable. For any of the adventure paths, 7 is definitely pushing it but if your players are disciplined and you can handle the party splitting up on occasion, 7 can work. The problem with adventure paths and larger parties is that NPCs can be important to the plot and then you really have too many characters to manage. As others have mentioned, the biggest problem is that players get bored because there is too much time between turns and they start doing other things: side conversations, checking phones, etc.
My max was a 10-person group back in the mid-to-late-'90's, when we were having a good time with 2E. The numbers fluctuated enough that I only had ten a small percentage of the time, and usually played with nine. With 2E, I believe it was much easier with high numbers like that. I had no problem at all keeping that game going, and everyone had a real good time with it.
AGREED! I was in that game, and it went quite smoothly.
Then a couple of years ago, we ran a one night 2E game with a different DM and about 9 players... and THAT was a disaster! Everyone talking at once, no organization, the simplest battle was pure chaos...
In hindsight, I don't remember what that particular adventure was even ABOUT... I just remember that for our 'whoever shows, shows' night.. EVERYONE showed that night... and brought friends!!!
So yeah... i agree with the people who say it isn't always the numbers... it's who the players ARE, and the DM style of the one running running the game.
I've always believed in as many people having fun as possible... but, I REALLY wouldn't be excited about getting 9-10 around the table again >.<
It also depends on how regular each player attends. I have been running and playing in a group of 8 players. HeroLab helps manage initiative order and tracking of active abilities. But even with years of experience and the latest software tools, I find 8 to be too many. My ideal group size is 6. Between 4 and 5 is fine also, but 6 is best as it allows for more flexibility for players who want to play classes that often get overlooked in smaller groups.
With 8 things can get silly pretty quick. Imagine if even two players take cohorts with the leadership feat, and another player is playing a summoner! Pretty soon we are looking at north of essentially 11 players. Ouch.
8 players also makes encounter planning more tricky. One big bad guy encounters are not very workable, while using many enemies to keep players all occupied can add substantially to GM workload and slow combat to a crawl.
Put me down for 6.
This is too true, as JDWebster ran 23 of us once in ...'76? But that was a pure crunch, dungeon stomp with ZERO RP! And players should count differently as well in this equation. every overbearing, new or otherwise difficult player is effectively 2 worth of disruption, etc. Conversely, players who help the game along can be counted as factions. My last game had 5 solid players and zipped along.
So true. A group of 5 or more solid players is way more feasible than a group of 4 where half of the group are more interested in discussing the movie that they just saw, or texting mom, or angry birds, or some other nonsense.
The PF group I am GMing for started with the standard four players. I started them with the module Crypt of the Everflame and everything was perfectly balanced, a happy time was had by all. Word spread around and we had a few more players join...not a big deal...up the challenge of the encounters a bit and things work out. Now, as the group is getting ready to enter the final part of the module trilogy, City of Golden Death, the player party has grown even more. Now, I have a party consisting of a half-elf fighter, a human fighter, an elven paladin, a human barbarian, a human cleric, an elven wizard, a half-elf rogue, and a human ranger...8 PC's! I will have a lot of adjusting and encounter balancing to do to say the least. All this has got me wondering if there is a hard limit on the size a player party should be? I think it's great that there is so much interest in my particular game, I know some gaming groups have the opposite problem, but shouldn't there be some kind of cut-off? Thoughts and theories?
No hard cap. But the more PCs increases your workload by quite a bit.
I'm running a party right now with 5 PCs and 4 cohorts. It has increased my prep time substantially. But since it was the Kingmaker adventure path, I allowed Leadership. Seems appropriate.
I doubt I'll allow Leadership with any other adventure paths. I like to keep my parties normally at 5 or 6. Makes it easier to run as I can modify numbers roughly 50% and get the desired challenge level.
I once saw a guy DMing an AD&D 2e game for 46 people at a gaming con. Of course, the game was supposed to be absurdly big and quite extreme (half the PC's were dead within the first hour), and seemed more like a rules-heavy LARP than anything else (the DM did make 50 character sheets, though. Talking about preparedness), but still quite amazing.
As for normal tables, as Arbarth said, there is no actual hard limit, being more about how many do you feel comfortable with.
Years ago I DMed two 2-year long campaigns in a row with 10-12 PC's. I had enormous fun, but once I finished the second one (with a spectacular bang agains the General of Gehena inside the Crawling City) I promised myself I would never do it again; it was just too extenuating, both in terms of preparation and actual DMing, not to mention the logistic issues (nothing worse than ordering pizza when there are 13 people and each one of them has at least 1 ingredient they don't like). So now my ideal amount is 5 PC's, though currently I'm DMing for 6 (one of my players wanted to get his girfriend into roleplaying and I allowed her to join. She ended up as a great addition to the group, both because she plays a very good Wizard, and because she bakes cakes for each session. Players with added value, what more can a DM ask for?).
A rule of thumb I learned from one of my leadership courses back in university is that you should always try to stick to groups that are roughly the size of your family (parents + siblings, or wife + kids, or any combination that makes up your core family group), since that should be a general parametre of the number of individuals you are used to deal directly and intensely with. It is certainly not a general rule, but helps as a starting point.
You can keep up to 4 + your Charisma modifier players entertained.
-2 if it's an immersive campaign, +2 if it's hack and slash.
(Joking aside... best games I've run have been with two players. Playing in such a small group can be awkward, it gets very intimate, requires a high level of trust to open up, but it's worth it, IMO. I don't know why, but I feel games get less and less interesting with each player beyond the second... perhaps it is a sort of "lowest common denominator" effect, where each player have a set of things they find cool and a set of things they find annoying, and since no two players are alike, the amount of things that everyone finds cool and noone finds annoying drops precipitously as players are added, and then either annoyance or blandness ensues... perhaps it is the shorter time each character gets in the spotlight... perhaps it is just my -2 Charisma modifier)
4-5 is my normal limit.
My current game now has 11 players O_o and I think I'm going insane!
Yeah...that many players tends to make things...um...interesting. Either it's so chaotic from everyone trying to talk at once, everybody is being too distracted by each other to play, or everyone is so bored waiting for their turn that they're falling asleep at the table.
4 is optimal, 5 is fine and 6 is my limit on schnitzengruben.