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View Full Version : Newer GM Issues: Dealing with Too Many Players?



kevin_video
2013-08-14, 01:06 AM
When my group first started up, we were all green in various different ways. There were four of us, and while I knew everyone, no one else knew each other. We fumbled through the campaign, but overall it was a great experience. As it grew, so did the group. People moved away because of relationships, school got in the way and practicum had to be done, or school was done so they moved back home, work schedules changed, etc. Because of this, I had to look for more players to join in, or disband what was left with the group. In the end, we had the group back up to the six players, although three of them were only part time or casual players.

For the current campaign, a pre-made adventure path, we started out with three players and an NPC. No one wanted to play the healer so I had the NPC be the cleric. This worked out fine until slowly but surely the players all started to come back because things didn't work out at their place of business or they'd moved back home. Now our group is at eight players with a ninth coming back while they go back to school, and the storyline has two NPC minions for the group. This makes three NPCs and nine PCs. No one saw this coming. When the players left, we thought they were done. No one expected circumstances to bring some of them back to us.

So now I'm dealing with the very big issue of the players getting bored and not involving themselves in the campaign because there's not enough to excite them, or the fights are taking too long because we have to cycle through so many people, or they're just not feeling it any more.

I've already sent an e-mail out to everyone, but only two people have responded. In it, I told everyone that it's obvious the adventure path isn't keeping their attention, and that they don't have the same enthusiasm as they did when we first started. That maybe we should start over again with new characters, and just do a more bare bones campaign. One person responded that I should seek out advice from a forum, and that they believed that it was the sheer number of people that were affecting the group's lack of interest, not necessarily the campaign itself as now that Book 1 was done, he was kind of into it again. However, if the campaign bores him again with the sheer amount of blatant railroading like the last fight, he's done. The second player responded that he too liked the campaign, it's just that he's not always feeling that wanting for play, and that if we do happen to go to E6, he's done because he's all about the high level stuff. I've talked with a couple of other players in person. One person just wants to play because she's never done Pathfinder before. The fourth doesn't care what happens because she doesn't understand any of it, the fifth's fine with whatever so long as she's doing something, and the sixth player's doesn't like adventure paths because they're too linear (he's all about chaos and if he can't bring it or experience it, it's no fun). The final player's not here right now, but she's content with anything.

So, I come to you. What's the way to deal with this? I don't want to kick anyone out, as we've all been playing together on and off for about four years now, and I certainly don't want three people up and leaving all of a sudden because they're bored or not getting their way. One person's leaving in Nov to go finish their practicum, and will once again become a casual player. Other than that we're unsure who's all going to be around at what time or day. When everyone's there, we have nine players. The majority of the time we have six plus the healbot NPC. Sunday night was a five PC session, but one of the players still didn't involve himself because he just wasn't "feeling it" that night.

I'm still a fairly green GM in a lot of ways, gaming more than a half dozen people doesn't help.

Vitruviansquid
2013-08-14, 01:11 AM
You have 9 PC's, so it means there are 10 people total, right?

Why not split the game into 2 groups of 5 people each?

edt: By which I mean 2 groups with 1 DM and 4 players each.

kevin_video
2013-08-14, 01:20 AM
You have 9 PC's, so it means there are 10 people total, right?

Why not split the game into 2 groups of 5 people each?

edt: By which I mean 2 groups with 1 DM and 4 players each.
No one else wants to DM. Like, at all. I'm doing it because I'm the only one of us willing to.

EDIT: That being said, even if you did have someone who wanted to GM, you're going to have one or two people per group who's not able to show up regularly. So one week you might have one person show up, or you might have three show up. It's kind of sporadic.

Vitruviansquid
2013-08-14, 01:37 AM
If you also have a problem with player attendance, you could play a campaign that's more episodic in structure. Instead of picking up where the last session left off whenever you start a new session, you could have each session be a relatively standalone affair. This also helps the campaign by not forcing you to come up with a reason the no-show characters are suddenly very passive in one particular session.

Have you also considered playing a different system? There are plenty of systems that are better at handling larger numbers of players, like Savage Worlds.

kevin_video
2013-08-14, 01:44 AM
If you also have a problem with player attendance, you could play a campaign that's more episodic in structure. Instead of picking up where the last session left off whenever you start a new session, you could have each session be a relatively standalone affair. This also helps the campaign by not forcing you to come up with a reason the no-show characters are suddenly very passive in one particular session.

Have you also considered playing a different system? There are plenty of systems that are better at handling larger numbers of players, like Savage Worlds.
The way things are looking I'm probably going to have to quit the current adventure path anyways, and doing the more episodic series is what we did last campaign, and it worked fine. However, sometimes things ran on. I always had it that someone could teleport, or had sending, or had a bracelet of friends so that if "it's too much for the PCs" they could call a friend.

As for a different system, no one's really interested in that. The new players have always wanted to try D&D/PF, and they're having a hard enough time learning everything. If I have to learn a new system alongside them, it's going to cause even more stress.

Downzorz
2013-08-14, 01:44 AM
Divide them in half, or roughly half. Have half of them play evil characters and half of them play good characters. Play a campaign where one group are the heroes attempting to stop the machinations of the others.

Trekkin
2013-08-14, 01:47 AM
Nine is a lot.

I could start with a big long list of tips to juggle players more effectively, but I don't think that's what you're looking at here. It sounds less like you're failing to involve otherwise interested players and more like you're not running a game according to several mutually exclusive sets of expectations -- which is inevitable. This is compounded by your players being sporadic attendees, so not everyone psyched for a given part of the adventure is there for that part.

You could crack down on them and start handing out ultimatums, but that doesn't sound all that practical. It would, I think, be better to roll with their schedules than effectively kick people out for being busy.

Looking at it, I'd go with something like Spirit of the Century. Not SOTC itself, unless your players would go for it, but something that's designed for a shifting playerbase and pickup play. That way, you can tailor the session to whoever's there, you can add players as you need to, and if someone has to leave for a while there's no huge disruption.

Do be aware that some of the disinterest is outside your control. One out of six people just not feeling gaming on any given session sounds about right for my college group. It just happens, and on its own it doesn't hurt anything to let it happen and hope they're less exhausted next week.

EDIT: Somehow I missed that you're stuck with Pathfinder. That complicates things.

kevin_video
2013-08-14, 01:47 AM
Divide them in half, or roughly half. Have half of them play evil characters and half of them play good characters. Play a campaign where one group are the heroes attempting to stop the machinations of the others.
They're currently all playing evil characters.

Downzorz
2013-08-14, 02:06 AM
They're currently all playing evil characters.

Well then just make them two different parties of evil characters who are opposed to each other. That kind of campaign is a lot easier on the DM because you can just sketch a world with some hooks in it and the characters will drive the action by fighting each other. They get to write their own campaign.

valadil
2013-08-14, 06:24 AM
Here are my thoughts on speeding up combat for larger groups: http://gm.sagotsky.com/?p=225

Aside from that I say ditch the NPCs. I understand why you put them there but they aren't necessary. Until the second half of my most recent game I never had a healer in any of the games I ran. It worked out just fine. They aren't as necessary as you'd think.

My suggestion to ditch the healer serves a double purpose. Don't just have he cleric leave or something. Murder him and don't give the PCs a replacement. They're losing interest because the game has grown stale. Removing their safety net should make them worried again.

KacyCrawford
2013-08-14, 07:24 AM
I'd go with valadil

kevin_video
2013-08-14, 10:05 AM
Here are my thoughts on speeding up combat for larger groups: http://gm.sagotsky.com/?p=225

Aside from that I say ditch the NPCs. I understand why you put them there but they aren't necessary. Until the second half of my most recent game I never had a healer in any of the games I ran. It worked out just fine. They aren't as necessary as you'd think.

My suggestion to ditch the healer serves a double purpose. Don't just have he cleric leave or something. Murder him and don't give the PCs a replacement. They're losing interest because the game has grown stale. Removing their safety net should make them worried again.
I didn't put in the NPCs. The healer NPC belonged to a player before he moved. Since he was the healer, we kept him. The other two NPCs are from the campaign itself. They're minions. As the campaign grows, so do the number of NPCs as you're supposed to be this large organization by the campaign with a legion of followers.

Depending on the group, a healer is extremely necessary. This group's only survived the campaign because of the healer. The other two diviners in the party are barely back ups by comparison so the party will be more than just a little leery of continuing forward. Especially when the campaign mostly consists of paladins and good clerics. Still, might have to do that.

valadil
2013-08-14, 10:23 AM
Depending on the group, a healer is extremely necessary. This group's only survived the campaign because of the healer.

All the more reason to off him. Up the ante and create some tension.

Jay R
2013-08-14, 10:24 AM
I once had a game of twelve players. The problem is that, no matter how you run it, at least 11/12 of the time, a given player's PC isn't active.

The first step is to make sure that the only time a PC isn't active is when another one is. Eliminate time spent not doing anything. One technique for doing so seems a little cold. You need to force them to pay attention to the action, and not allow gaming time to be spent on rehashing what just happened. In melee, I would get to somebody's initiative, and often the following would occur:

DM: Glen, what does Forlong do?
Glen: I'm not sure. What's going on again?
DM: Forlong looks around to see what's going on. I'll come back to you at the end of the round. Val, what does Bramblerose do?
At the end of the round, I would get back to Forlong. If Glen still doesn't know, I will give him three choices: "Hit goblin A, go engage goblin B, or help Gwydion with the ogre. Choose now or nothing happens."

This isn't trying to take his action away, but to get him to plan it - before his initiative comes up.

Next, provide more enemies. Add a few minions so that every PC can attack something every round.

Third, use morale to end a stale encounter. A few of the enemy have fallen, and the rest are injured? If people are still grinning and planning their moves, fine - keep going. But when the energy drops, the bad guys flee, and you can introduce something more fun.

I also favor introducing a puzzle to solve or major choice to make at the end of the session, so all the discussion can happen between sessions, rather than at the table. If that's not possible, then the introduction of the choice is a great time for a food break.

But the person whose focus is hardest for you to keep engaged is yourself. You have to stay active and engaged throughout the game. The game should be planned more than you would for a smaller game, because time spent improvising is more time that they aren't playing.

It's not easy. Good luck!

kevin_video
2013-08-14, 10:37 AM
often the following would occur:

DM: Glen, what does Forlong do?
Glen: I'm not sure. What's going on again?
DM: Forlong looks around to see what's going on. I'll come back to you at the end of the round. Val, what does Bramblerose do?
At the end of the round, I would get back to Forlong. If Glen still doesn't know, I will give him three choices: "Hit goblin A, go engage goblin B, or help Gwydion with the ogre. Choose now or nothing happens."

In my group, that's often the majority of the players. They're all "listening", but not paying attention. You sometimes have to call their name twice to get them to focus on you. Then they need everything repeated. Often they're on their laptop, going through the core rule book, their phone, or playing Solitaire on their iPad. I even make a point of telling them "Well you'd know if you were paying attention."

The guy who was worst at that, his character's now unconscious because he got ambushed. He's not too happy.

kyoryu
2013-08-14, 12:39 PM
Nine is too many, especially for a system like D&D 3.x or 4e.

You realistically have three choices:

1) Go to a system with faster action resolution (Basic D&D, AD&D1, etc., especially with a "caller")
2) Split up the group, and run two games
3) Kick some people out

Just letting run until some people get frustrated and quit is basically the passive-aggressive version of 3, and will probably frustrate the remaining players as well, so I don't really recommend it.

Since 9 is a weird split - 4 and 5 players each group, and leaves at least one group subject to no-shows, a sub-option would be to have a few 'core' players, or ones that are interested, take part in both groups. I'd keep this down to one or two, though. One would give you two groups of five players each, which is a pretty good size for later D&D games. Two would give six, which is on the heavy side, but is more resilient to no-shows.

You could just run the alternate games on alternate weeks if you don't have the time for a second game day. If you do have the time, you may find that schedule availability takes care of who goes to which game.

You also may find that with smaller groups, people are happier, you can tailor what's going on to what the individual groups want better, and you get less no-shows.

kevin_video
2013-08-14, 01:03 PM
The other big issue with splitting the large group into two smaller groups is gaming location. We only have one available to all of us, and it's definitely not my place. We used to have two, but the downstairs neighbours said that we were too loud one week, and the landlord threatened eviction unless he stopped the noise completely.

Jay R
2013-08-14, 01:49 PM
In my group, that's often the majority of the players. They're all "listening", but not paying attention. You sometimes have to call their name twice to get them to focus on you. Then they need everything repeated. Often they're on their laptop, going through the core rule book, their phone, or playing Solitaire on their iPad. I even make a point of telling them "Well you'd know if you were paying attention."

The guy who was worst at that, his character's now unconscious because he got ambushed. He's not too happy.

This is the real problem, and it gets magnified by the large party. As bad as repeating everything for each of three players can be, repeating a more complicated situation for each of nine players is far worse.

The problem is not the time taken up by other players taking their turns. The problem is time taken up by players not taking their turns.

And you cannot keep them from doing it unless they have to pay for it.

In my game, the cost for not paying attention at first is to be moved to the end of the initiative round. If they still aren't paying attention, the penalty is to lose an action. (I have occasionally said, "OK, your character spends the round looking around taking stock of the situation. Goblin A just hit Gwydion, and Gwydion missed in return. Gwennydd cast Hold Person and froze Goblins C, D, and E. The two goblins closest to you are undamaged. If you keep track, you'll be able to act on your initiative next round."

You cannot afford to wait and let nothing happen for awhile when there are nine players.

kyoryu
2013-08-14, 02:04 PM
In my group, that's often the majority of the players. They're all "listening", but not paying attention. You sometimes have to call their name twice to get them to focus on you. Then they need everything repeated. Often they're on their laptop, going through the core rule book, their phone, or playing Solitaire on their iPad. I even make a point of telling them "Well you'd know if you were paying attention."

The guy who was worst at that, his character's now unconscious because he got ambushed. He's not too happy.

That's really the big issue with large groups. There's a multiplicative factor involved in turn time. The more players you have, especially with systems where turn resolution can take a while, the longer it takes between turns. The longer it takes between turns, the more players get distracted. The more players get distracted, the less they pay attention, and the more they have to be caught up on when it comes around to their turn. The more they have to be caught up, the longer their turn takes.

It's a vicious cycle, and exacerbated by the fact that, generally, more players also = more opponents in a fight.

Going to a lighter system where turns can be resolved quickly can help. To a certain extent, so can systems where everyone declares their actions simultaneously.

The other thing that can help, besides removing players, is to set a strict time limit on how long players get to make their moves on their turns. And I do mean strict - if they take even a second longer, their character does some default defensive action. Use a timer if you need to.

JusticeZero
2013-08-14, 11:17 PM
For the current campaign, a pre-made adventure path, we started out with three players and an NPC. No one wanted to play the healer so I had the NPC be the cleric.Lose the NPCs. You don't "need" a healer. All you need is the ability to pick up wands of cure light wounds and a few scrolls. Give them to someone with UMD. If nobody has UMD, they'll get it soon after the cleric leaves. That said, clerics are among the most lethally deadly heavy combatants in the game if you know how to play them. Next time someone bites it, if you were to slip them some of the many guides on how to make a ridiculously heavy duty battle cleric, nobody can blame you.
Reduce the NPCs to noncombatants. The PCs are just too awesomely awesome for them to be relevant.
So now I'm dealing with the very big issue of the players getting bored and not involving themselves in the campaign because there's not enough to excite them, or the fights are taking too long because we have to cycle through so many people, or they're just not feeling it any more.Well, that will trim your group a bit then, won't it?

if the campaign bores him again with the sheer amount of blatant railroading like the last fight, he's done.Don't railroad. Railroading is a lack of imagination. Don't give them a story, create problems and see how they solve them.

JusticeZero
2013-08-14, 11:21 PM
At the end of the round, I would get back to Forlong.
The structure of a round doesn't actually have an "end", so what this means in reality is "Your action is to look around" and they simply lose their action that round in total.
You could treat it as a delay action, so if they come up with an idea, they can re-enter initiative at the new place. Or treat it as a full defense action.

Jay R
2013-08-14, 11:31 PM
The structure of a round doesn't actually have an "end", so what this means in reality is "Your action is to look around" and they simply lose their action that round in total.
You could treat it as a delay action, so if they come up with an idea, they can re-enter initiative at the new place. Or treat it as a full defense action.

That game was original D&D, split into specific one-minute rounds.

DrBurr
2013-08-14, 11:36 PM
I'd say if splitting the group or changing games isn't possible scrap the actual adventure part of prebuilt adventures and just use the Dungeons. Plop the group in some kinda of guild, that way its easy to say why the Wizard or Druid are missing this week, on the borderlands and say there are Dungeons X,Y and Z to explore. You can still have story but now its whats going on between your murder hobo's journeys into various crypts.

Next kill off the NPCs or put them on a Bus, they're just eating up time in your already to large party. Your healbot shouldn't be necessary with nine people some one should just bite the bullet and play cleric or buy lots of potions.

kevin_video
2013-08-15, 01:10 AM
I talked to one of the players today, and we're going to take out the NPCs. We've got a place for one of them. One of the other NPCs are necessary for the adventure path to continue.

As for railroading, I'd love to not have that, but the adventure is the cause of that. I personally don't see it, and only of the players have made a complaint of it. So, I don't know.

kyoryu
2013-08-15, 01:54 AM
Best way I've found to avoid railroading: You present the problem, but don't come up with the solution. Let them do that.