First time running Starfinder: How many is too many for Dead Suns?


Advice


I have a problem that's the opposite of a problem. I volunteer at my church with the kids, and I suggested playing Starfinder, which has actually gotten a surprising amount of buzz! Here in lies the problem: since I would be the only one running, and I don't want to turn anyone away, how many people is to many for this AP? At least to the point where I would need to make a second group and hold two separate games? This wouldn't be to much of an issue, we should be able to play every week, or every other week at minimum. I would like to have everyone playing together if possible, just unsure of how many I could swing. Any way that I could run the AP and make it possible for a large number of people to play at once? We plan to use Starfinder as a group building type activity, so the more people I can get playing at once as a team the better, but I still want to preserve the spirit and enjoyment of the game. Any ideas?


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Four to 6 players is the maximum I find for any RPG, Above 4 you will have to increase the difficulty of encounters. However more than 6 players rapidly brings games to a crawl and leaves many players doing nothing for long periods of time and is very disruptive and annoying for all.
If you are an inexperienced GM you should probably try to stick at a lower limit particularly with inexperienced players. I have played and run games with more than 6 players and for it to work it needs a completely different structure than a normal game and even then the game falls apart more often than not.


JohnHawkins wrote:

Four to 6 players is the maximum I find for any RPG, Above 4 you will have to increase the difficulty of encounters. However more than 6 players rapidly brings games to a crawl and leaves many players doing nothing for long periods of time and is very disruptive and annoying for all.

If you are an inexperienced GM you should probably try to stick at a lower limit particularly with inexperienced players. I have played and run games with more than 6 players and for it to work it needs a completely different structure than a normal game and even then the game falls apart more often than not.

ah, ok, I figured that would be the case, thank you for the help! I'll split the groups up as need be!

Contributor

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I’ll second JohnHawkins on that. I’ll also mention that, if you’re not totally set on Dead Suns, the Starfinder Society scenarios might work really well for this, especially if you expect people to not be able to make it every week or the players want to switch around who is in which group each time.

RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32

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JohnHawkins wrote:
Four to 6 players is the maximum I find for any RPG, Above 4 you will have to increase the difficulty of encounters. However more than 6 players rapidly brings games to a crawl and leaves many players doing nothing for long periods of time and is very disruptive and annoying for all.

... Especially with kids!

Scarab Sages

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Additionally having multiple tables running will give the kids something to talk about, they can tell stories about how they handled the encounters. Considering I already enjoy discussing things like this as an adult for PFS, I can only image kids would have a blast doing this.


Excellent ideas everyone! I do like the idea of running multiple tables, I won't be able to get another GM, so I'll have to run it myself, but I can just run for group A one night and group B the other, and so on. I'll keep you all posted on how it goes, I'm hoping for a great turn out and hopefully we can have some fun and exciting stories!

Contributor

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Great, let us know how it goes!

Grand Lodge

I've run it twice with a table cap of seven and it wasn't really problematic. Incident is one of the fastest APs I've ever gone through with a group.

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