I ran a number of 7 player tables in the very early days of PF2 -- both my Age of Ashes campaign, and some PFS2 tables before they changed the cap from 7 to 6.
In general I found 7 to be too much. Time between turns gets excessive in combat and social scenarios feel like its hard for each person to have their own moment. If you're able, I would suggest getting a second GM who is able to run and split from 7 to 3 & 3 (assuming one of the seven players is the extra GM). You'll probably need a GMPC to fill the party back to 4s. Obviously this cane be tough depending on the type of campaign. An AP or homebrew campaign can't easily change from one to two to one table session to session. A West Marches or PFS based campaign has a much easier time splitting and recombining week over week. Of course you still need some level of advanced signups to know how many GMs you need, and getting a small pool of GMs ready to run to rotate through who the backup GMs can take some time, but is worth the investment.
If you absolutely have to run with 7/7+, for encounters I would generally still try to scale wide at least initially. Scale wide for 6, then use scaling tall (Elite template) to from the 6 to however many you need. Encounters are still more fun when roughly equal number of enemies and PCs, hence the initial wide scaling. But at some point, reducing the number of opponents to help the turns go faster is worthwhile, and with the 7th/8th/9th player the party should have an OK time dealing with the tall scaling. You'll have more chances to get a heal in, more chances to debuff. You will have to be inventive when dealing with single boss encounters. You still don't want to scale past PL+3/4 in the early levels, so you will need to add minions to single boss encounters.
I would strongly avoid FA in huge parties -- you already have a lot of redundancy and FA just adds more. It will generally be hard to people to carve out a niche for themselves. You also want simpler characters, in general, to help people (especially newer players) play their turn quickly.
You will need to get in the habit of calling on quieter players. In a table of 7+, 1-3 players will probably dominate the conversation (same as in a 4 player table), but now the less assertive/quieter people are a greater percentage. Make sure they have a chance to be heard.
Be more willing to call encounters early, mop up can take a lot of time in a 7 player table. Look for changing the moral conditions for more enemies running away or surrendering.
I am the GM for a Junior College game club. Can you please share any tips you have for working with large parties (5-9)? Any advice, guidance, or hero points you can throw my way will be greatly appreciated.
Try to make an effort to get your players to learn the game and their character sheets. Turns will be much faster and the game more enjoyable.
Be careful on encounter design, the running few but strong enemies tends to not be fun even if it's technically "balanced" exacerbated at low levels (though I just wouldn't do it at low levels as I'd say it's not balanced). I genuinely wouldn't recommend putting more than one +3/4 enemy, find some other way to increase the difficulty. That can be from favourable environmental conditions, favourable terrain, hazards, or just minions.
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Be careful on encounter design, the running few but strong enemies tends to not be fun even if it's technically "balanced" exacerbated at low levels (though I just wouldn't do it at low levels as I'd say it's not balanced).
Seconding this. When you run for large parties, you forego the option of 'solo boss' fights.
The problem is that the math isn't mathing. There are two axis for encounter balance. One is party vs party balance, the other is character vs character balance.
If the character vs character balance is good because your solo boss enemy is only a level+2 enemy, then the party vs party balance is off. The boss battle may very well be over before the last PC gets to take their first turn.
If the party vs party balance is fine but the boss enemy is at level+4 to do that, then the character vs character balance is off and the combat is a slog of frustration that the party will statistically win but no one will have any fun doing it.
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I regularly run seven-player campaigns. I once tried an eight-player campaign, but my wife, who was a player, had to start serving as assistant GM in order to keep the game moving smoothly.
A campaign with a large party will take more time for equivalent encounters. Where a four-player party would fight four weak opponents, the seven-player party would fight seven of the same opponents to make the encounter feel the same. And that simply takes longer. I play online via Roll20 and I can hear (and see my wife in the same room) the players engaged in other activities while waiting for their turn. This would be bad among inexperienced players, who might stop listening and lose track of events, but my players listen while multitasking and jump in immediately when their turn comes up.
Finoan is right about solo boss fights. A single level+3 creature is a reasonable Severe-Threat encounter in a four-player game. A single level+4 creature might seem like a reasonable Severe-Threat encounter against a six-player party, but the risk is higher. The six-member party is 50% stronger than a four-member party, but each player character is individually just as weak. A solo boss's attack are concentrated, focused on a single PC, and that PC is more likely to go down. Using two level+2 bosses rather than a single level+4 boss is less likely to kill a PC.
I mentioned combat threat: trivial, low, moderate, severe, and extreme. These are covered on page 75 of the GM Core under Combat Threats in Chapter 2, Building Games. The GM will have to learn to adjust the XP Budget of the combat encounter according to the size of the party. Back in 2023 I started a thread on that topic and related topics: Encounter Balance: The Math and the Monsters.
One aspect of a game club with five to nine regular players is that players will miss the game sessions due to real life. Thus, the GM needs to be able to adjust the planned encounters quickly. For example, when you designed a social encounter around the most social PC in the party, but the player is absent, you either find an excuse to delay the social encounter until the next game session ("On the way to the prince's ball, you are ambushed by bandits.") or you redesign the encounter to be less social ("Let's pretend that the bard is here and having a great time playing with the orchestra. But the king calls the rest of you off to the side for a private conference."). More players mean more unexpected absences and require more improvisation.
As for hero points, I am terrible at hero points. When a PC does something awesome that would earn a hero point, I am too busy roleplaying the enemies' reactions to remember to award a hero point. During Pathfinder 1st Edition, my wife invented a system of talking about the game session and how each player character was valuable during it. Then we awarded hero points to these valuable PCs. IN PF1 hero points are kept between sessions. In PF2 they last only during a session, so the Valuable-Player system would not work. We kept the PF1 rules in our PF2 games because we liked that system.
Curious if anyone's tried Proficiency Without Level on a large party. My instinct is this would simplify things somewhat, more allow for higher-level enemies that could function as a solo boss even to 5+ parties, since the math doesn't become so extreme. Basically moves things a little closer to 5e's "bounded accuracy" or whatever it's called. But, I haven't tested it and can't be sure.
Glad to see this discussion, the level-based proficiency scaling implicitly locking people in to the assumed four-person party was something I noticed way back when the 2e playtest first came out.
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I also think 9 is way too much, but there are more possible ways you can split things up.
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Using PFS is an option. There are plenty of simpler adventures (quests, bounties, and some scenarios) that are good for a less experienced GM to get started with.
The episodic nature of PFS also helps with players who can't always make it. Each adventure takes one session, so you don't get stuck with people who played only the first or second half of something.
It also enables people to have more than one character, try out different classes and ancestries.
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Aside from PFS, you can also do what's called a West Marches style campaign. Original Article
You don't have to follow that script exactly of course, but it's something that works well in college like settings.
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Back in college we had yet another variant. There was one head GM who was sorta in charge of main setting lore and overall plot. But each game day there'd be 1-3 GMs running one-session adventures. Players would get a "cert" with XP, gold and special treasures after the adventure (these were coordinated with the head GM to keep them reasonable).
It's similar to PFS, but we used a different game system (a sort of lightweight D&D 2E with some 3E ideas thrown in). And of course our own setting with our own plots. Unlike PFS, if you missed a session, well there's no re-runs.
What I liked though was that it encouraged a whole lot of people to try out GMing a couple of times, and making up their own adventures.
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The problem with large parties is the balance is thrown out with regard to being able to focus fire.
If you can concentrate all that damage on one PC or the party can focus fire on one enemy then players/enemies can go puff before they get to act. Or even just totally neuted.
6 players instead of 4 is 50% extra.
I'm running a group of 6 at the moment. My suggestion is make sure the terrain is complex. Split your fire onto at least 2 targets as the GM. I home brew all my monsters and I'm no afraid to step outside the bounds for the numbers of hit points for monster etc.
A lot of good suggestion here already and I'm just going to empahsize a few points that I think are important:
When balancing combat for a larger than expected party, it's typically best to keep the number of enemies close to the number of PCs.
If you had a table of 9 player characters, and you wanted a moderate encounter you would normally have an XP budget of 80. With 9 players it increases by 20 per PC, going from 80 to 180 XP.
In a scenario like this, I'd probably do 6 APL-1 enemies.
For a lieutenant boss fight scenario, a severe encounter, (120 XP normally, 270 XP adjusted) I'd probably do 1 APL+2 enemy, 1 APL +1 enemy, and 4 APL enemies (technically the 4 is a little high but eh).
In both scenarios I would probably break them into 2 groups to attack from opposites sides, and I'd probably put in a lot of terrain to break up the battlefield and make it challenging for either side to dogpile onto one enemy.
And beyond simple terrain challenges, for fights you might consider adding traps or hazards that technically should eat up part of the encounter balance budget, but you only activate them if combat seems to too easy. That way you can kind of tune the combat on the fly without the PCs knowing.
Fighting in an area with lava? The party knows to look out for exploding puddles of lava. But you as a GM can roll behind the scenes and only have it go off when the party is having a little to easy of a time. The party can be aware of a threat, and sometimes that awareness is enough of its on to make the party cautious and add the feeling of tension to a combat even if it never inflicts damage.
Widen the map, especially corridors & doorways. +5' is often enough, but more if using Large enemies in bulk. Add corridors & doors so multiple fronts can develop without overt risk to back-row creatures. Principle being to avoid choke points since they often exclude much of the party (and villains), while also avoiding too much openness where PCs fear to advance.
Use playing cards for initiative. Pass them out in order so when you're on 4, 5 knows they should be choosing their action, & 6 too once fluent in combat mechanics. This also helps players help you with keeping the turns turning. Yes, this gets awkward if players Delay, but for the most part creatures stay in order. Barring dramatic shifts on the battlefield (w/ a cushion for newbies), players should expect to say what they're doing as soon as their number's called (or perhaps ask a clarifying question). (You might even try this out of combat if a player or two dominates conversations.)
Beware clumping enemies into groups. It makes for simpler tracking (yay!), but turns into focused fire even with otherwise non-tactical monsters. A few groups with similar initiative rolls can make "attack nearest" more deadly than intended if one PC's out of formation.
Fudge/invent mutant monsters, i.e. bosses with separate components or perhaps stages. Usually just for upgrading bosses who need it, but who wouldn't have cannon fodder around. So the party might fight two versions of it mechanically all while seeing one boss on the battlemat. Because yeah, bosses innately focus fire already; upgrading them directly exacerbates that.
Of course all the usual GMing tips apply too so your side of the screen runs smoothly, but even more so with more to juggle. If there's no secrecy to it, see if you can delegate a task to players, i.e. wiping down the map and minor chores can add up; ease your mental load.
If you have skilled RPers, like say an improv actor at the table, consider making file cards w/ NPC personalities & situational objectives on them that (when the player's PC is perhaps elsewhere) you can pass them side NPC so you don't have to RP too many NPCs at once, can focus on the key ones.
Where in a normal game you might read out what a scroll says or what a PC has found, consider printing it out, even if only a description, so the player can read it out IF their PCs shares it. Generally for areas where players might separate to search. Uncommon, as I imagine combats will dominate table time, but for some campaigns.
Oh, and for RPing, I've laid out several NPCs pictures so players can see who's whom, and then marked the pictures with tokens as PCs do (or do not) succeed at making progress with them. Mostly this is for social PFS scenarios with subsystems. Can also be done when doing skill tasks in multiple rooms, etc. where there many avenues toward success and the party should diversify their efforts. Again, mostly PFS stuff more than in modules/APs.
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I regularly run seven-player campaigns. I once tried an eight-player campaign, but my wife, who was a player, had to start serving as assistant GM in order to keep the game moving smoothly.
A campaign with a large party will take more time for equivalent encounters. Where a four-player party would fight four weak opponents, the seven-player party would fight seven of the same opponents to make the encounter feel the same. And that simply takes longer. I play online via Roll20 and I can hear (and see my wife in the same room) the players engaged in other activities while waiting for their turn. This would be bad among inexperienced players, who might stop listening and lose track of events, but my players listen while multitasking and jump in immediately when their turn comes up.
Finoan is right about solo boss fights. A single level+3 creature is a reasonable Severe-Threat encounter in a four-player game. A single level+4 creature might seem like a reasonable Severe-Threat encounter against a six-player party, but the risk is higher. The six-member party is 50% stronger than a four-member party, but each player character is individually just as weak. A solo boss's attack are concentrated, focused on a single PC, and that PC is more likely to go down. Using two level+2 bosses rather than a single level+4 boss is less likely to kill a PC.
I mentioned combat threat: trivial, low, moderate, severe, and extreme. These are covered on page 75 of the GM Core under Combat Threats in Chapter 2, Building Games. The GM will have to learn to adjust the XP Budget of the combat encounter according to the size of the party. Back in 2023 I started a thread on that topic and related topics: Encounter Balance: The Math and the Monsters.
One aspect of a game club with five to nine regular players is that players will miss the game sessions due to real life. Thus,...
This is something I noticed even in a 6 person party. A couple people tend to take the brunt of all the attacks, so the increased difficulty is concentrated on a few of the party members (usually the frontliners), even in encounters with reasonable enemy levels. It's easy to make one minor mistake that drops you to 5hp.
In encounters with a PL+4 enemy, or multiple PL+3 enemies, the increased difficulty is basically guaranteed to be focused on those few players. It's just not fun for both the people getting focused, and the healers. Throw in something like Reactive Strike on an enemy with Reach and it's really unfun.
Yeah, teamwork grows exponentially more difficult with party size. Hence I'd often use battles with two fronts at my larger tables. If not outright coming down different corridors or opening a second door, a simple pillar, table, or other obstacle can naturally separate the enemies' focus, prevent overwhelming PC #1.
The inability to split focus makes a singular threat sometimes too threatening. So I'd avoid them or maybe warn the PCs so they know how much more they'll have to coordinate to address this enemy. Yet a singular enemy is also vulnerable; losing an action becomes more severe, even if only by making it come to you at first, or scattering. Lots of debuffs work for a round on a save, and a round's a lot vs. a boss, i.e. Slow or Fear. Force Barrage is also your friend vs. above-level defenses (unless they're notably chunky, like a troll or zombie, but they typically have lower AC too.)
(I'm reminded of a spooky Starfinder scenario where our random team was a whole bunch of Ysoki ranged attackers and one Android, also ranged. No tanks, no in-combat healing, so we'd take turns opening doors with the rest of the party hiding far away and scattered. The door-opener would flee ASAP as would whomever the enemy threatened later. Bunch of scurrying mice, but it was so, so effective.)