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Deth Muncher
2010-11-03, 02:45 PM
Hey all. So, I've got (yet another) campaign starting up next week, and it looks like we're gonna have six players. Which, to be honest, scares me, but I don't want to tell two of the dudes to not play, because, well, I mean, that's kind of a jerk move. So what I'd like to ask you, the Playground, is what do you do to deal with larger groups of players? My main concerns are about stuff like combat bogging down, taking an entire session just to go through town because everyone will want to do their own thing, stuff like that.

Also, as a personal help kind of thing, what kind of challenges can six level 3 players be assumed to overcome with a little bit of difficulty? Since I'd been planning on four players, I had sort of an idea of what to do, but I didn't have anything numeric, so now I don't know what to do. :/

jiriku
2010-11-03, 02:47 PM
Figure that the group can handle encounters as if it was a 4-man group of its average level+1. Lean towards larger groups of bad guys when planning encounters, instead of solo monsters or pairs, to avoid creating an excessive action-advantage discrepancy between party and opposition.

gbprime
2010-11-03, 02:50 PM
With 6 players, you need to set up role play such that some of the players will need to talk to each other while others are talking with the DM or NPCs. it also means that you can limit yourself to exactly ONE NPC with the party to be your voice in a conversation, and you should probably limit access to the Leadership feat.

Encounters will have to be tweaked. Most of the time you'll need more grunts. Making the monsters bigger doesn't help the advantage in number of actions per turn a larger party will have. (Edit - Ninja'd. :smallsigh: )The good news is that XP for slaying more grunts balances out dividing XP six ways instead of four.

Jolly
2010-11-03, 02:52 PM
Saying "I am not equipped to handle 6 people, I designed this for 4. Sorry guys." is not a jerk move. It's realistic, and insures that the original players can have fun. Just saying is all.

Deth Muncher
2010-11-03, 02:56 PM
Figure that the group can handle encounters as if it was a 4-man group of its average level+1. Lean towards larger groups of bad guys when planning encounters, instead of solo monsters or pairs, to avoid creating an excessive action-advantage discrepancy between party and opposition.

Hokay. Makes sense - more players, more mooks.


With 6 players, you need to set up role play such that some of the players will need to talk to each other while others are talking with the DM or NPCs. it also means that you can limit yourself to exactly ONE NPC with the party to be your voice in a conversation, and you should probably limit access to the Leadership feat.
The good news is that XP for slaying more grunts balances out dividing XP six ways instead of four.

Yeah, I'm probably seriously going to discourage the Leadership feat - or if someone takes it, I'm playing that character. Or something. I'd probably say no unless they wanted to try to raise an army or something, and then their Cohort could be the General of that army and go off doing stuff with them and not really be with the party all that much.

gbprime
2010-11-03, 03:01 PM
Heh, our game group has swelled to EIGHT players plus the ref over the years. Three original group members, plus one wife, one sister in law, two teenage daughters, myself, and my good friend. Can't really tell anyone to bow out, so we've learned to adapt.

Most campaigns just don't give plotlines to the players who role play less than the others, but mine always do. It's an art form to tie the personal interests of eight characters together into a couple plots. Thankfully each campaign tends to run for 2 years, so there's plenty of time to play them out.

For me, it's only possible because I script the adventures each week (and carry over anything that didn't get used) and because I have a great head for numbers and can run combats quickly, with slightly simplified bookkeeping on my end.

The pain is the one gamer who takes FOREVER to figure out attacks and add damage. And consider that he's currently playing a TWF rogue with lots of sneak attack... The party wizard turned him into a hydra recently, slowing his action turn down to about 20 minutes per round, and we about killed the wizard's player for it. :smalltongue:

mint
2010-11-03, 03:09 PM
My regular group is 8 people.
A lot of us stay in character and talk to the rest of the party. We don't all just sit and wait or all butt in in a conversation between NPCs and other players.
You will have a problem if you have a lot of players who do not understand this or do not think to share the spotlight.


Combat:
You have 30 seconds to preform your round. If you fail to do so, tough titty.
No sitting around optimizing your turn or looking things up when your turn is up.
You also do not get to confer with the rest of the party about what to do to to any greater length.
"Can you heal me if I come over there" fine.
If you can't find the optimal place to position yourself or whatever, that's on you.
This makes combat hectic and borderline amazing.

I think you are really overestimating the impact of a six player group. It will not be that significant. Solve it with mooks.

kyoryu
2010-11-03, 04:06 PM
There's two main issues to be solved when scaling up from 4 to 6 people:

1) Combat balance. As said before, Just Add Mooks(tm).
2) DM attention issues, and sharing RP time. Try to get players to do stuff on their own (shopping? Here's the list of what's available. Tell me what you want). Other than that, you just kind of... have to adapt.

One thing to watch for is that with a party of 6, it's more likely that you'll have overlapping roles than with a party of 4.

Welknair
2010-11-03, 04:47 PM
For a few months I DM'd a group of NINE players. Heh. 6 hours on one monster...


As far as the number goes, I think that combat pace is the biggest hurdle. If you know your monsters and have a decent story, balance and attention shouldn't be a problem. As far as the type of challenge that they can be expected to overcome, I find that beyond 4, they start to get in each other's way.

Combat tips:
Limit the number of monsters per encounter, and know what they're going to do ahead of time.
Try splitting the group (*Gasp*) for the purposes of a few encounters. It can really speed up combat, but the drawback is that some players don't get to participate in a certain fight, and it sometimes can't be done due to setting.


With 6, it's doable. It'll take a bit of getting used to, and you'll have to learn their limits as you go, but it's very much possible. I wish you the best of luck.

Tyndmyr
2010-11-03, 05:07 PM
Six is still quite doable. I've DMed for 6 on a fair number of occasions. Above that gets increasingly unwieldy, though.

1st off, ban leadership, henchmen of any note, etc. Don't give them NPCs that accompany the party, etc. Encourage players not to use minion heavy classes *cough* dread necro *cough*. In short, ensure that there will only actually be six characters taking turns in combat on the PCs side. Don't worry about minor chars who never engage.

2ndly, keep combat snappy. You may need to enforce time limits. You might need to ban OOC chatter during combat. Make use of a clear initiative system such that all players can see who is currently taking their turn. Encourage people to plan out their actions while others go, and note that anything that needs to be looked up, like spells, should be done in advance.

3rd, utilize shared init for monsters. You don't have to do it for ALL of them, merely for all of a type. So, all the mooks act together. May not be strictly RAW, but it's a much faster way to get through the NPCs actions.

Those few things can help keep it from slowing down. Difficulty of encounters can be adjusted fairly easily(and you have to adjust campaigns a bit for any party anyhow...power levels vary quite a bit), so the biggest problem is combat bogging to a crawl. As a variant, consider allowing all PCs to act in any order on a single init roll(use the highest modifier among them).

I believe my personal record for PCs in a single session is...24. Four players, controlling six full PCs each. It was fairly interesting, and still manageable, but a couple of players had extensive experience, and were able to preplan all six characters actions on the turns of others. Definitely not for everyone, but a real blast for experienced types.

mint
2010-11-03, 05:17 PM
Oh yeah, also: rolling software.
For players who do math slowly and for when you have to make a lot of rolls in general.
I had my players fight 30 hound-archons, slightly tuned upwards for challenge.
It took 15 minutes, they did not use much aoe.

Galsiah
2010-11-03, 08:14 PM
I'm currently DMing for a group of 6, and it really isn't much worse than 4, as others have said. I'd encourage your players to either write down or memorize the relevant modifiers to their most used attacks, to speed up calculations. Also, have casters write down a short description of their spells and what the saves and damage rolls are, to avoid casting bogging down combat.

Aotrs Commander
2010-11-03, 08:21 PM
I consider any party size less than six to be sub-optimal at the best of times. I never understood why 3.x ever went for that as the default, personally. Six was good enough for AD&D (and Baldur's Gate and Torment...) It means that you can cover all the roles, and more importantly, it gives everyone some leeway in character choice. (Bards, for example, function much better in 5-6 or six character group.)

For converting 4-player modules to six players, the easist thing to do is increase the numbers of all the monsters by 50% if more than one (and the treasure awards if you like.)

The problem you will have is with single monsters, because the extra concentration of fire is murder! Even with maxed-out hit points. So for those, either add some more mooks (or a second supporting creature) or find a way to ramp up the monster's defensive abilites (offensive, not so much, since you'll likely only get a round or two's actions anyway.)

For my own games, I whipped up an idea based around 4E's solos. Link here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/archive/index.php?t-125737.html) (in the GitP archives). In practise, it's worked very well in keeping the "boss" fights drawn out enough while not completely nerfing all the SoDs to no effect. And it's frak-easy to apply on the fly, if need be. You might want to either nick that or do something similar.

One other thing to be aware of. A larger number of characters means one going down is not proportioanlly as serios. One guy going down in a 4-PC group is bad; one is a six-PC group is less so, since you've got 5/6ths of the party to deal with it. (One going down in a 3-PC group means the situation often spirals out of control very fast!)

houlio
2010-11-03, 08:29 PM
I normally DM for 6 people, my advice for the DM sharing/RP thing is to let more table talk (not necessarily relevant) between players occur than you maybe would let slide in a game with fewer people. That way, people don't get so bored if you have to focus on one or two players.

Deth Muncher
2010-11-03, 08:37 PM
Oh yeah, also: rolling software.
For players who do math slowly and for when you have to make a lot of rolls in general.
I had my players fight 30 hound-archons, slightly tuned upwards for challenge.
It took 15 minutes, they did not use much aoe.

What rolling software do you recommend?

Also, re: having people memorize their modifiers - I know two of the guys are sometimes kinda bad at it, so I'll have to yell at them to remember exactly what does what, etc.

As to classes:
One's playing an Esper Knight, from these forums (basically, a Jedi).
One's playing a Monk into one of Fax Celestis' prestige classes - a mage-killer type deal.
One's a Samurai - again, fixed from these forums.
One's a Druid - which I'm allowing despite the minion, because they need a healer. I'll probably end up keeping the Animal Companion's sheet with me, so they'll just say what they want it to hit and I'll roll it.
The last two players are still figuring it out, but possible choices include Rogue, Beguiler, some other mage, or a Binder.

And to whoever said I'm overestimating a 6 man group - I'm just very wary of anything over four. My first campaign I ever played died because A- it got too many players and B- as such, combat sucked, in-town sucked...it just sucked.

Re: Buying stuff in towns, yeah, I'll probably just have to come up with a list of "This is what you find in town for sale" with maybe a secret list if they can hit a Gather Information check.

Squally!
2010-11-03, 10:19 PM
our group routinely swells to 12 or so players a session.
For the most part, it flows smoothly.
the major thing in combat is making sure the players have all their mods written down.

Its not fun when the druid summoner has none of their minions stats written down, and cant do math very quickly :P

the other thing, is if you trust players, pre-rolling. some DM's dont accept it, some do. i dont mind, ive known the group for a while, i trust em.

a battlemap of some form is a nice help as well, lets them see whats goin on.

As far as outside combat goes, its a little bit more tough, encourage players to interact with each other while you have smaller group RP going on.

Its tough, but you can do it!

Barring that, just tell 2 of them to bugger off and have your game your way :P

Thurbane
2010-11-03, 11:00 PM
It depends...if you're running a homebrew campaign, it's easier to cater to larger parties. If you're running a pre-published adventure, it will be designed for four characters (usually) - meaning you have to beef up most of the encounters.

Deth Muncher
2010-11-03, 11:33 PM
It depends...if you're running a homebrew campaign, it's easier to cater to larger parties. If you're running a pre-published adventure, it will be designed for four characters (usually) - meaning you have to beef up most of the encounters.

I pretty well can't do premades: I can't really understand the books all that well. So yeah, it'd be homemade.