Too many players!!!


Advice


As a GM, I know where my comfort level/limit is on the number of players I want. I've played in games where there were 9 people at once (never doing that again). For myself, I prefer a group of 4-5 that have no animal companions. Currently, I am running a home brew campaign that consists of a human ranger, half elven wizard (evocation), And an elven paladin of saranrae. I have 3 more people that are interested in playing. For two of them, I had previously invited them to play, but their work schedules conflicted with when the game night is being hosted. All of them have character ideas that could help the group, those being a halfling rogue, human cleric, and a chaotic neutral goblin fighter, but I don't want to have a game with 6 players. I have read on here about taking each player and doing a 1 on 1 game with them in a try out of sorts, but I wanted to get feedback from the community on this.


As someone who has had the same thing happen, my best advice is to simply be honest. Tell the potential new players that you can only handle x number of players before going into terminal meltdown. Most times, the players will understand.

If not, have the three new PCs fight it out and the survivor gets in (JOKE).


Well 6 is not an outrageous number, but then again, when everyone shows up my game can exceed 10 players. I dont mind, though it can be difficult to manage. You have to decide what you want. If these people are your friends then I think you should consider giving it a shot on a trial basis with 6 people. That is only 1 above the standard 4-5 players. Tell them it is on a trial basis and you will make your choice as to whether or not you are willing to run the game for all 6 after a few sessions. Then do so. Keep all, any or none of them based on how things go. 1 on 1 sessions wont tell you everything you need to know, because if you truly intend to keep only 1 or 2 of the 3, then how they interact with the rest of the group and participate in a real game is probably more important then how they play 1 on 1 with you.


hoosierloser wrote:

As a GM, I know where my comfort level/limit is on the number of players I want. I've played in games where there were 9 people at once (never doing that again). For myself, I prefer a group of 4-5 that have no animal companions. Currently, I am running a home brew campaign that consists of a human ranger, half elven wizard (evocation), And an elven paladin of saranrae. I have 3 more people that are interested in playing. For two of them, I had previously invited them to play, but their work schedules conflicted with when the game night is being hosted. All of them have character ideas that could help the group, those being a halfling rogue, human cleric, and a chaotic neutral goblin fighter, but I don't want to have a game with 6 players. I have read on here about taking each player and doing a 1 on 1 game with them in a try out of sorts, but I wanted to get feedback from the community on this.

I was in a game where, due to the kindness of the DM, the game got up to twelve players. I will say this, the battles turned into epic fights. But for a single encounter, since the DM was adjusting everything to equal our amount of players, it took three games sessions to do one encounter. It didn't help matters that at one point, the party split into three different groups as we were assaulting a castle.

After the end of that particular adventure though, he admitted that he didn't have the time to keep planning and doing games like that anymore. He put in place a system where the three longest playing, plus himself, voted to see who was to stay in the group with six players and one dm. We were given three votes each, and whoever collected the most would be invited to stay. His reasoning was that we would know who we like to play with and as we had gotten the group started, we should have a say.

Not sure if this helps, but just a way you could go about limiting the group. I'd recommend letting your players get to know who might be joining them and having them vote on who is accepted.


Nothing lasts forever, right? Give the three newbies the green light and then let the chips fall where they may. My guess is that out of six players, not all of them will stick with it.

Liberty's Edge

lol. 6 players. Too many? I'd say ideal.

For *years* I ran a new campaign at the local university that started with 10, hovered around 12 for a while and got down to 6+2 or 3 more of the other players. I ran a table of 8 regularly at game conventions. However, not every GM can enjoy that cauldron, and I appreciate that.

I'll pitch this idea to you.

In the next couple of weeks, pick one of the players and invite them to join your group for a story arc in the campaign. They play for no more than 6 weeks, wrap up that storyline, and take a week or two to move into the next adventure taking a different player for the guest spot. Two months later, the 3rd player gets his turn.

Discuss the situation with your players, regular and guest. You may find that you like the mix well enough, you may come to confirm your need to limit the table.

This approach has worked well for some in the past, and for others opened a bag of maggots that quickly ate through everything that could be considered easy meat and started an unpleasant buzz. The problems stem from really hurt feelings that a character had to leave the group and the player was greedily enjoying the game. Sometimes, the problem is that the GM feels overworked rotating characters through.

But, like I said, the idea has worked for many people in the past, with some GMs really liking it as they had a few nicely defined stories. Worth consideration.

A final note. It seems that, really, you have made up your mind. You don't want all 3, don't want the first player that became available, and you're looking for some way to add a player or two without hurting anyone's feelings. That is a way trickier thing, and the approach above will not work. Frankly, nothing will. Being honest is your best bet, as you can't be fair or just; someone is out and lonely.

What is probably the best to do, is not add any of these players. Add another game. You've got 7 people that want to play, maybe one of the other 6 can step up and you can find a second night or alternate to get everyone to the table.

Liberty's Edge

FunnyMan21 wrote:

I was in a game where, due to the kindness of the DM, the game got up to twelve players. I will say this, the battles turned into epic fights. But for a single encounter, since the DM was adjusting everything to equal our amount of players, it took three games sessions to do one encounter. It didn't help matters that at one point, the party split into three different groups as we were assaulting a castle.

While my table got too big, the biggest table in a campaign I played in got to 24 before I decided that I'd go and run something, taking some 3 others with me. In the next couple of weeks that game swelled to top 30 players (initiative covered 2 blackboards and the white board was covered in supplementary battle maps with two more hex maps on tables with miniatures) and a few more weeks after that collapsed under it's own weight.

And now you might see where I got regularly suckered into running such monster tables.


My longest running D&D game was a 3x game that started with 12 players, expanded to 16 for three-four weeks, and eventually settled at 9 players...and we had a blast for almost 4 years every week.

But my ideal range is 5-8 players.

Liberty's Edge

Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

I have been running our campaign for the last year or so at around 4-6 players. I tend to have around 5-6 players so that we will have a steady 4-5 at the table each week with the occasional full 6 game sessions.

During this time I have also been keeping a wait list of 3 players that expressed interest after the campaign filled up or or were invited but were unable to make the commitment at the time of the campaign start.

Over the course of the campaign (1st-8th) we invited 1 more player (started with 5 players) from the top of the wait list and he accepted. I added 1 more player to the wait list who expressed interest. I then had another player drop so the next guy on the wait list got invited but declined. The next on the wait list accepted the invite and we are once again at full capacity and with 2 more players on the wait list.

Set the number of players at the desirable crowd you like to have about your table. Accept players in order of acceptance and put the remainder on a wait list in order of original invite/past experience with. Should a player not work out you then have a ready and fair list of attendees to draw invites from.


I ran a couple games, many many moons ago, that suffered from the too many players problem. One had 20 players - I used two assistant GMs to run things, and split the players into two parties. The game didn't last very long, simply because it was too much work to keep everyone involved.

The second had 8 players, with more clamoring to get in. That one also bogged down, after which I came up with a solution.

Everyone who wanted to play had to 'audition'. The audition itself was the first part of the old Basic D&D adventure "The Gem and the Staff", which was a one-on-one adventure with a pre-gen character - and better yet, it was timed (30 minutes), and each encounter was worth points for successful completion. Each prospective player was run through it under the exact same conditions.

The top 4 scorers got to play, and when an additional NPC was added to the group, those 4 chose another player out of the next top 4.

This worked out extremely well - the campaign that I ran with this group is still one of my favorite gaming memories.

I'm going to have to rework that adventure as a Pathfinder scenario. It just worked that well.


I once had a campaign where 10 players wanted to get in. I decided to split them and run the campaign twice. Since we used to play bi-weekly I just ran one group the first week, the other group the next week.

Because they pretty much kept pace with each other I usually had to do the prep work only once. the only difficulty is keeping track of what happened in which group, mostly with NPC's getting killed by one group and not the other and things like that

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