Help in running a huge group (15-20 players)

[MadBear]

So I'm in a bit of an awkward situation. I'm the adviser for my school's D&D club. It started out with 1 student and his 3 friends who needed an adviser to run a game for them. I've gone over the basic rules and and run a few sample combat encounters, but every week, 1-2 new players showed up wanting to play. We're finally ready to start the overall campaign, and I now have anywhere from 15-20 players. Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Being a school club it's inclusive, so I can't just bar students from joining, nor do I want to. (I'd love to help grow the popularity of D&D in my area).

2. I'm a veteran player myself (been playing since AD&D), but none of the players at my school have ever picked up or played an table top RPG before. (this will make it hard to split up and have multiple DM's)

3. There's only 1 day that I can run this club. (Being a teacher, I don't have time to run a 2-hour session more then once a week).

4. All the students want to run their own individual PC's (none of them are interested in helping manage extra monsters, co-DM, etc.). This is to be expected since their all new to this type of game in general.

Now with that said, I'm excited to see so many students interested and excited to try out 5th edition, but I in no way know how I can possibly make this group work in a normal way.

So playgrounders, I need your help. What crazy out of the box ideas do you have to help this player bring a bunch of new players into the hobby?

[CubeB]

Well, D&D is really only balanced around 4-5 players, and a 2 hour session with a literal army of people is... hard.

I mean, you can do it as a literal army, maybe? But people will be sitting around and will generally not enjoy themselves. You need to get more GMs. Explain to them how the game is balanced. Maybe institute a round robin GMing thing? Offer bonus items to people who want to try GMing?

Maybe run something like Vault of the Dracolich (http://www.dndclassics.com/product/120762/Vault-of-the-Dracolich-DD-Next?filters=0_0_45190)?

[AgentPaper]

What if you split the large group up into 3-4 "sub groups", each of which operates as a sort of mini-party, all acting on the same initiative (best of the group, average, whatever). They're also required to stick close to each other, so even if they decide to split up, you're still only managing a limited number of different things at once. This will also encourage the players to work together with the rest of their group, and if there's a particularly enterprising student, you could put them in charge of co-ordinating the various groups to try and keep everyone relatively focused.

Probably the easiest way to do this would be to split up party members with similar roles, for example you could have a dedicated spellcaster group with wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks, a "commando" group with rogues, rangers, and monks, a main-line battle group with fighters, paladins, and barbarians, and then a more jack-of-all-trades group that can fulfill multiple roles depending on what's needed, with clerics, druids, and bards. None of those are hard-set in which classes you need, of course, and I'd encourage each group to work together to build a sub-party that can fulfill it's given mission.

This sort of borrows from the "have everyone act on the same initiative" variant that you sometimes see used to speed along play, but the sub-groups help keep any single person from being ignored when 15+ people are all trying to do something at the same time.

[jaydubs]

You could make them run and act in squads. Essentially, instead of your standard grid where 1 character takes up a square, have a 4-character squad take up a square. Organize squads by similar roles. For instance, 4 melee characters. 4 ranged characters. Not sure how you would run casters, unless you limited it to healing/blasting.

Instead of running individual turns, you run "squad" turns. And everyone in the squad moves together, gets attacked together (by similar enemy squads or packs), and takes actions together. Designate a rotating leader for each squad, but they have to come up with a decision within 30 seconds of their squad turn. Enemy squads have the same basic stats as normal enemies, but make an attack against each member of the PC squad, and have 4 times the normal HP. You can even roll a single d20 to be applied against all their possibly different ACs.

Players still get to build their own characters with individual stats, but rounds will probably go much faster. And it's not too hard justifying squad-based combat, since it's a concept most people are familiar with.

As a simpler solution, recruit more DMs from the faculty or parents.

Edit: Got ninja'd by a very similar concept. :smalltongue:

[CubeB]

What if you split the large group up into 3-4 "sub groups", each of which operates as a sort of mini-party, all acting on the same initiative (best of the group, average, whatever). They're also required to stick close to each other, so even if they decide to split up, you're still only managing a limited number of different things at once. This will also encourage the players to work together with the rest of their group, and if there's a particularly enterprising student, you could put them in charge of co-ordinating the various groups to try and keep everyone relatively focused.

Probably the easiest way to do this would be to split up party members with similar roles, for example you could have a dedicated spellcaster group with wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks, a "commando" group with rogues, rangers, and monks, a main-line battle group with fighters, paladins, and barbarians, and then a more jack-of-all-trades group that can fulfill multiple roles depending on what's needed, with clerics, druids, and bards. None of those are hard-set in which classes you need, of course, and I'd encourage each group to work together to build a sub-party that can fulfill it's given mission.

This sort of borrows from the "have everyone act on the same initiative" variant that you sometimes see used to speed along play, but the sub-groups help keep any single person from being ignored when 15+ people are all trying to do something at the same time.

Actually this could work, if you set it up properly. Do it as an army, have people coordinate as a unit against a significant foe.

Once people are more comfortable, maybe begin introducing people to GMing. But this is a good way to get people's feet wet.

[Galen]

Another DM asked a similar question on this forum (although he didn't have twenty players...), and I introduced him to the wonders of prescreening. What you need to so is give the would-be-players something to do before the session. Email them and ask for something. It doesn't need to be difficult. Something as simple as "read up d20srd and decide which class you want to play", or "make a character sheet on myth-weavers and print out two copies, one for you and one for me" - very simple tasks, which are essentially busywork. This is basically a trick to weed out non-dedicated players without insulting them.

I guarantee that out of twenty players, maybe half will actually fill out the character sheet and print two copies. The others will suddenly remember they have something else that needs to be done, like maybe watching the World Series on TV. The half that does the small task you asked for and shows up - those are the ones you want.

[Slipperychicken]

Even with 7 people and a group which is relatively accustomed to D&D, as a player I would often find that I barely got an action in during a 5-hour session.


My first thought [I have not DM'd, so take my word with a grain of salt]: Instead of killing yourself running a 2-hour session for so many kids, you could use the first few meetings to teach them about roleplaying concepts and principles (i.e. in-character vs. out-of-character, backstory, description of actions, storytelling, cooperation, respect for others, gaming etiquette) in addition to game-mechanics. Basically stuff to help nudge them away from being That Guy. In each meeting, you could run basic scenarios (probably for a subset of the group, while the rest observe?) which help demonstrate the fundamentals of roleplaying, game mechanics, and also reward some of them by letting them fight stuff in-game (because let's be honest, most of them are probably there to fight monsters), and then you can provide feedback based on what your players did during demonstrations.


Also, what age-group are these kids? I'd probably advise against giving them human opponents, so that you can defuse potential criticism about teaching kids to murder people (same goes for celestials/fiends, so you can avoid religion stuff if that's taboo). Robots Constructs, monsters, and zombies will probably do nicely.

[Demonic Spoon]

Even if you get around issues of having 15-20 players taking actions, there's the concern of monsters. You can't really use over-CR creatures or they'll one-shot everything, so you'll have to use large quantities of smaller monsters, which is going to cause the same math issues in the opposite direction. And even if you overcome the combat, no single player will ever get to feel like they contributed meaningfully in a 2 hour session.

This doesn't seem like a good idea. I suppose it's a bit late for this, but it probably would've been better just to hard cap the number of players until you can get another DM.

[XmonkTad]

Ne I actually have a bit of experience with this sized group. Our school had a roleplaying "tournament" where each DM would handle 20-30 players at once.

A few things made this manageable:
-Theater of the mind. Now standard in 5th, but you do not want to deal with minis. All the best spots are taken, and friendly fire is a problem.
-Turn order. Everyone rolls for initiative, whoever wins (almost always a natural 20) goes first and it heads in the direction of the second highest. Enemies get to do a little something after every PC's turn. This meant for us that mooks had their turns with the PC's and only BBEGs got dedicated turns of their own.
-DM in the middle of the players. No DM screen was used. We needed to be able to stand near players when they rolled their dice. In huge groups it becomes very tempting to cheat so you can stand out. Watch for this. If you need to cheat, consider a dice rolling app.
-Lots of checks are useless. If everyone rolls for a knowledge or perception check, someone will roll 20, and with bounded accuracy, someone will succeed and inform/alert the rest of the group. I don't know how to fix this, we just didn't use these checks.

Our game was based on 3.5, but very very silly. We had our players in nonsensical situations (a beholder beauty contest for example) and we pre-made their equally nonsensical characters (characters from non-existant, cancelled, TV shows). I don't know if this 1-shot style will work for you, but pre-made chars can get people into play faster without frontloading the rules too much.

Sounds like fun, best of luck!

[CubeB]

Even with 7 people and a group which is relatively accustomed to D&D, as a player I would often find that I barely got an action in during a 5-hour session.


My first thought [I have not DM'd, so take my word with a grain of salt]: Instead of killing yourself running a 2-hour session for so many kids, you could use the first few meetings to teach them about roleplaying concepts and principles (i.e. in-character vs. out-of-character, backstory, description of actions, storytelling, cooperation, respect for others, gaming etiquette) in addition to game-mechanics. Basically stuff to help nudge them away from being That Guy. In each meeting, you could run basic scenarios (probably for a subset of the group, while the rest observe?) which help demonstrate the fundamentals of roleplaying, game mechanics, and also reward some of them by letting them fight stuff in-game (because let's be honest, most of them are probably there to fight monsters), and then you can provide feedback based on what your players did during demonstrations.


Also, what age-group are these kids? I'd probably advise against giving them human opponents, so that you can defuse potential criticism about teaching kids to murder people (same goes for celestials/fiends, so you can avoid religion stuff if that's taboo). Robots Constructs, monsters, and zombies will probably do nicely.

This is actually the best idea I've seen so far. It actually teaches them how to play in a normal setting, which this isn't.

For club longevity, I think this is the best solution. If you run a Huge McLarge game, people are going to leave with the wrong conception of D&D. It's not a 20 person game, it's a five or six person game.

The people who are like "UGH, I'M BORED" can just leave, and the people who stick around are conscientious, know how to play, and can eventually learn how to run adventures of their own.

[Chaosvii7]

My advice? Get more DMs. I'd love to say the 20 people thing can work, but honestly the game does have a weight limit behind how many players it can really support at a time. Besides, it'd be good for you to have an inner circle to bounce ideas off of and all of that.

[infinitetech]

being the insane gm i am, i can confirm that (so far up to) games with 387 people "can" work with one gm,

i would not suggest it unless you too have multiple fully functioning split personalities to pawn math off onto, however, this being said, here are some tips,

make everyone roll with the same dice program (i know we all love the real thing, but for time and sanity use tech)

give everyone a word doc with all common rolls, that way they can copy paste,

build yourself a map on ur computer or in your work zone(aka behind you on a walled off desk) that they cant see but you can put notes on and make a very simple one that they can see that give the basic gist of where things go play book sketch style,

make a list of everyone's equipment, dont tell them more than they need unless they want to appraise/research their gear, that way they can just sa they attack and you can go to character 3 weapon A and know what to roll or what you are rolling against

have each player sign in to a chat program, this way ideas and comments wont get overlooked (make them only visible to you unless they are sending a msg to someone, then resend the msg yourself and/or say it aloud

minimise chitter-chatter if you can

make each caster give you a spell list each rest and put them on excel, highlight what they use each casting

give each member their own loot, dont advertise what the loot is to the group, have each member send you their loot manifest at each rest to double check

make sure that people have snacks/drinks or they get cranky in such groups

make pregen characters or be prepared to spend at least one game day fixing those to all work together

give out magic items somewhat often, but the utility kind, make everyone end up with something to covet because its their special thing, thieves lanterns, horn of plenty, robe of many things, living rope, and other such things

give all players a belt of many realms (aka 20 max lvl bags of holding which only the front 4 can be seen by strangers, the owner can summon forth any item in any pocket others cant find things without a search check and then only stuff stored in the front 4 bags which are effectively concealed pockets anyway, it seems to be a normal belt at first glance, all items inside way nothing)(this helps with gear and stuff)



options for campaign:

split into groups that are competing for different goals that intersect but don't necessarily go against each other straight out

give the trinket items at generation based on back story

make the groups all work for a larger force/leader and have them split up to do tasks that help the same cause

split the group into 2 or more and alternate weeks

place the groups on different sides of a big war

make the group choose what role they wish to fill each session or time slot, (face, sword, bag, tinker, ear, cog [politics and such, attacking or guarding and such, general life/goods/tasks and such, healing or repairing, researching/listening for jobs and such, helping the gm as npc fighters or??? helpers of any kind] and that's what they do for that day/hour/half hour, anyone who doesnt know defaults to their character doing a day job and the person becoming a cog

take all initiatives, dont roll off ties, and make stuff that happens all go off at once aka fireball five point star Mexican standoff can happen

give bonus xp/gold/stuff for good jokes and good rp...

allow custom items if the person is willing to write you a draft and have you edit it, weapons/armor/animals are a player's signature

mix in puzzles, stories, direct challenges, and other things, dont get locked down

encourage dressing in character




if you want more help ask, if you want tools i know good rollers and more, just here to help :-)

[silveralen]

Strip out the parts that aren't needed. At least to start with. Don't bother making perception checks, have lots of auto succeed when people declare actions, use averages for things like damage, even the players damage possibly (every little bit helps). For monsters, pick two saves they have prof in, and have them succeed at saves targeting that ability. Have them fail at all others. Multi target spells could have the majority pass/fail, with one or two success, just to keep certain tactics from ending encounters to easily.

Apply that to the adventure itself, strip out the parts that aren't need. I'm not saying cut out bits like describing the dungeon, rather don't have pointless encounters. Having them walk through a dungeon, fight a set of guards, disarm a couple traps, then kill a dragon (or whatever you want to have them kill) is going to be pushing it for a group that size in two hours.

Squads may or may not speed things up. Internal debate can bog things down, and players may resent losing their own chance to do something.

Honestly, in a group like this, you are going to have to fudge things a bit to ensure everyone has a good time and gets to actually do something. A die rolling app is a good idea. If you don't have one or a smart phone, pretend you do and make up numbers as needed.

An alternate idea is splitting it into two seperate groups, which meet every other week. More enjoyment for less time investment on the students' part. Of course if everyone who joined up was a friend of a friend there may be no good way to actually do so.

[Finieous]

Two pieces of advice:

1. Use a retroclone such as Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry. These D&D games are much simpler in terms of character and monster abilities and were designed with very large groups in mind.

2. Focus on dungeon crawls and major single-monster (e.g. dragon) lairs. This kind of adventure structure, along with being "classic," really focuses play and will help you keep the game moving, and keep everyone engaged, without (always) driving you mad.

Have fun! This kind of game can be a real blast and few people have an opportunity to play them anymore.

[Lemonblu]

Running the game as squads sounds interesting.

It reminds me of The Last Remnant, where the squad formations could affect battles. How well would it work in 5e if formations were used? ie. a tight knit formation could give bonuses to AC (like the Spartans from 300), a sparse formation could give bonuses to dex saves for example (more room to jump out the way etc).

[SliceandDiceKid]

You could make them run and act in squads. Essentially, instead of your standard grid where 1 character takes up a square, have a 4-character squad take up a square. Organize squads by similar roles. For instance, 4 melee characters. 4 ranged characters. Not sure how you would run casters, unless you limited it to healing/blasting.

Instead of running individual turns, you run "squad" turns. And everyone in the squad moves together, gets attacked together (by similar enemy squads or packs), and takes actions together. Designate a rotating leader for each squad, but they have to come up with a decision within 30 seconds of their squad turn. Enemy squads have the same basic stats as normal enemies, but make an attack against each member of the PC squad, and have 4 times the normal HP. You can even roll a single d20 to be applied against all their possibly different ACs.

Players still get to build their own characters with individual stats, but rounds will probably go much faster. And it's not too hard justifying squad-based combat, since it's a concept most people are familiar with.

As a simpler solution, recruit more DMs from the faculty or parents.

Edit: Got ninja'd by a very similar concept. :smalltongue:



Great idea!

[archaeo]

You could also grab a couple copies of the Starter Set (or one copy and borrow the school's photocopier...) and take a step back from the campaign to spend a club meeting teaching them to be DMs and then letting them run the Starter Set's adventure. You could separate them into four groups, and then let them rotate as the DM every meeting as they run through the adventure, since the pre-gens are easy for the players to step in and out of.

[Palegreenpants]

For the sake of everyone having a good D&D experience, more DM's is really the way to go. Four groups of five is way more realistic than one DM attempting to entertain 20 kids.

[AgentPaper]

Whatever you do, you should definitely plan to get more DMs in the long term. If you can bring in outside help quickly, then great, but more likely you'll be mentoring a few of the students (perhaps whoever took charge in the squads would be good candidates?) to be DMs.

At first this might be something you do on the side, for example, at the end of one week you might declare that the group has to split up and each go on their own mini-adventure as part of the larger quest. Write up a few small adventure guides and give them to your student GMs to run next week. Make it something short and easy to run, probably just a few combat encounters to get their feet wet. You'll be there to answer and questions, give advice, and resolve disputes if necessary.

Then, once each group has finished their tasks, they all return the following week and resume the larger adventure format. Eventually, you can make these sub-quests more and more frequent, rotating the GM roles around until you find people that enjoy it and are good at it. As soon as you think a student GM is ready, you'll break him off from the main group with 3-4 players to run a separate game while you continue to run the rest of the group. Keep doing that until you're left with a normal 4-5 man party yourself, or until everyone is running with a student GM, depending on whether you want to DM or just supervise.

Offer to create adventure guides for the student GMs if they don't think they're up to making their own, and/or help them plan out their own adventures. Being able to ad-lib is good, but especially for a new DM having a plan that you can fall back on is key. It can also help them try things they might not otherwise do with more confidence, whether that's running a tough combat encounter that could kill the PCs, or role-playing an NPC-player interaction that lasts longer than 10 seconds.

[MadBear]

Thank you all very much.

In the long term, I'm looking to get more DM's to help flesh out the group.

In the short term, we've been going over the basic mechanics, and showing them the basics of the game.

As to the idea to screen them, I've actually done exactly that (there 15 with done character sheets, and 5 more that are finishing them, I have another 10 that didn't do it b/c it was too much work).

I really like the idea of running the game in squads, and stripping out the basics.

[infinitetech]

maybe play the i want to be the man style to start, each week you start again in the same dangerous trap and enemy laden dungeon,everyone has no idea how they got there, in a Saw like manner they just need to try and survive to escape, there are treasures and items all around the place that reapear each "morning" if someone dies they respawn either when all die, when you run out of time, or when they escape, each level is set up differently, anything you take with you from one level to the next becomes a respawning item

all people who die take over rolls and checks and traps

[rollingForInit]

As others have mentioned, get more DM's. If you need to train some of the kids to DM, ask around and see if anyone would want to. Out of 20 kids, a few will probably be interested. Then you can start with those. Give it a month, play only with them so they can learn, and then split the rest of the large group into smaller groups, one for each DM. That could be an incentive for people to want to DM; they get to start playing before anyone else. Then you can, at least at first, supervise their DM'ing during the club time, sort of like a workshop. Move between tables, give advice both on rules, strategy, role-playing, etc. Might not be as much fun at first as it would be for you to run a game and actually get to play, but in the long run, if it works, you could start running a group of your own as well, when you aren't needed to guide the others. And you'll have groups that are a decent size, instead of one huge group that'll probably fall apart under its own weight.

[Sjappo]

Assuming you have a group beside the school group, could you get them to guest DM the fist few sessions? After that you set op 3 to 5 groups and play through LMoP with the group members alternating DM duty each chapter. As said before, you supervise.

You could award the DMs for DMing for them once a month in a DM only meeting. That might be the incentive they need to choose the DM chair.

Incidentally, what age group are your pupils?

[rlc]

-Lots of checks are useless. If everyone rolls for a knowledge or perception check, someone will roll 20, and with bounded accuracy, someone will succeed and inform/alert the rest of the group. I don't know how to fix this, we just didn't use these checks.

Good post, but I just wanted to take this point a little further. 5e has passive perception, which is definitely going to be OP's friend, if he decides to use this check specifically.

[BW022]

So I'm in a bit of an awkward situation. ...

So playgrounders, I need your help. What crazy out of the box ideas do you have to help this player bring a bunch of new players into the hobby?

The game is designed for four to five PCs at a table. In organized play conventions they often set maximum table sizes at six or seven. I've run eight at some conventions, but even this is a bad idea. Large groups create all sorts of problems which aren't worth it -- people don't get a chance to role play, people get bored waiting for their turn in combat, combats are hard to scale (leading to mistakes where fights are just too easy or too hard), you get too much table talk (slowing the game down), you typically don't get through much of the adventure, players often don't feel they contributed, shy/inexperienced players often not get a chance to participate, you don't have a chance to spend much time with individuals developing their characters, etc., etc.

IMO, avoid any table over six or seven players.

1. Get help. Go online in your community and look for other gaming clubs, groups, stores, Wizard's of the Coast's Adventurer's League, organized play groups, city-based gaming clubs, etc. Many have forums, FB groups, allow you to post in store notice boards, etc. Ask the club members if anyone has a friend, family member, etc. who can DM. Let people know that you are looking for a volunteer DM to run D&D games for your university gaming club. In our city, our local gaming club happily volunteered to run games for a local university club.

If necessary (and if your university club rules permit it), you can trade a location in return for DMs. For example, rent a classroom two nights a week provided that they run at least two tables on one night open to at least 12 players. Worst case, you could also look at taking up a collection and paying someone -- although most people are happy to volunteer.

2. Run multiple, short sessions. Try running two (or three) session in a night or try getting another night. Run shorter modules (maximum 3 hours) and then just run the same module twice. That gets at least 12 players with two sessions. If it is the same module... then players won't feel "left out" of the other session.

3. Run the same game two weeks in a row. Yet, players will only play half as often, but they won't feel "left out" knowing the same module is being run again.

4. Send players elsewhere. Look at the Adventurer's League and other organized play games happening elsewhere. You may be able to send players to other games running in conventions, comic shops, home games, etc. Using the Adventurer's League does allow them to keep reusing their characters in different games.

5. Have a sign up sheet. Yes, it sucks, but it is likely better to give six players a good time or half twelve players playing half as often, as giving everyone a bad game. Have rules for drop outs, wait-lists, how often someone can sign up in a row, etc.

6. Train DMs. Have a sit down with your club and just explain it to them. Make some rule that folks need to run one game a month or otherwise volunteer in order to sign up for games.

[MaxWilson]

Here's a crazy idea:

Run short sessions with a time limit: two doors, one of them trapped with two goblins on the other side (one hiding), and a hidden treasure in the room plus an exit door; the other door has a wall of fire over a river (but it is possible to swim under) and a crocodile in the water, with a treasure on the other side. Take 4 players at a time through this mini session, and give them thirty minutes to get as far as they can. If they can manage to collect both treasures and escape the dungeon, awesome! Anyone who is done can stay to watch the next session. Keep track of who does the best and post scores at the end, and let them say what they spend their treasure on (give them a conversion between gp and dollars).

Hopefully this keeps the group sizes small, minimizes the amount of preparation you need to do, but keeps the kids engaged for the whole two hours as they watch others struggle and/or come up with different ideas than they themselves did.

[infinitetech]

what state ru in btw? someone here might be able to help,
other than that expanding on the post one above this, and the i want to be the man thought i posted, what about characters get points for each challenge they beat, 1 for temp/part beat, 3 for full beat, people can gain points and use them to either get prizes or to give their characters a permanent item for all characters they play,

alternately have half the group come in for first/2nd half of time, each group plays the same area the other did, alternate who goes first, whichever goes first effects the other group, if one kills all the orcs on one path that parts safe, or if one group sets traps for the other team...

[eastmabl]

what state ru in btw? someone here might be able to help,
other than that expanding on the post one above this, and the i want to be the man thought i posted, what about characters get points for each challenge they beat, 1 for temp/part beat, 3 for full beat, people can gain points and use them to either get prizes or to give their characters a permanent item for all characters they play,

alternately have half the group come in for first/2nd half of time, each group plays the same area the other did, alternate who goes first, whichever goes first effects the other group, if one kills all the orcs on one path that parts safe, or if one group sets traps for the other team...

He would appear to be in Seattle, if his profile is accurate.

Something to note:

Initiative, in large groups, can be difficult to manage initiative. I have seen groups of 10+ in Living Greyhawk handle initiative in the following way:

Everybody rolls, and the person with the highest result goes first. The person to her left goes second as you go around the table. Every so often, a monster (or a group of players) goes in between the players.

[jaydubs]

Initiative, in large groups, can be difficult to manage initiative. I have seen groups of 10+ in Living Greyhawk handle initiative in the following way:

Everybody rolls, and the person with the highest result goes first. The person to her left goes second as you go around the table. Every so often, a monster (or a group of players) goes in between the players.

An initiative tracker can help. (I'm used to roll20.)

To do it in a live game, get something like a whiteboard or chalkboard. List the characters from top to bottom, in order of initiative. Then use something that will stick (a magnet, one of the vacuum suckers, playdoh, etc.) and move it up and down the list to track who's turn it is.

[MadBear]

update: Thanks again for all the replies,

The group had their first meeting and it was a mixed bag of fun success and some awkward bits.

I was able to find one of the players who was willing to act as a 2nd DM. The overall numbers of kids was closer to the 15 mark then it was to the 20.

While, I do sympathize with the view that it's a 4-5 PC game, being a school club creates issues if I limit who can and can't join. Almost all of them are students who've heard of, but never had a chance to play d&d and this is a great chance to introduce them to the hobby in a fun way that they might never get to otherwise. So like it or not, whoever shows up is welcome to play.

With that said, I let the players know that we were playing this week and that if they wanted to participate they had to have completed characters. Of the 15, only 8 had characters that were ready to go. So with that said, I had the remaining students finish characters in the back, while I ran the opening encounter for the rest. It was a bit frustrating that many students had a full week to create their characters and opted to forgo it completely, and instead rely on me to do all the work for them. While, I definitely don't mind helping all students learn the rules, I do think it's a good idea for players to at least be familiar with your class/race/background.

The idea of having the Initiative winner go first, and the 2nd highest initiative decide the rotation worked wonderfully. At this point the students haven't arranged themselves in the "best order" to abuse this rule, so as long as that stands, I feel this will be a perfect system for them.

The adventure itself went really well with all of the students who played having a blast. The rules system for 5th was intuitive, and they understood it really well for having never played it before. The biggest hiccup was getting them to differentiate between an attack roll, ability roll, and saving throw. A few students would roll a 15, and declare that it hit the goblin because that was the target for an medium AC.

Others wanted to have their character take multiple actions over the course of their one turn (the best example was a ranger who wanted to kill 4 goblins, kick over a 5th, backflip across the room to the rogue, untie him, and then shoot the last goblin with an arrow, and he was very unhappy when I pointed out he couldn't accomplish all of that in 1 turn) .

I had one student try to play the sociopathic rogue that seems to creep up whenever someone first tries out D&D. Upon learning that the stores were closed due to a festival he decided to start stealing the things he wanted, upon getting caught his reaction was to stab the commoner whose things he took that caught him stealing. This ended with him being chased down and put in chains, since the entire event took place in broad daylight in a town full of people who watched him commit the crime. (lucky for him, his saving the town later on, and the fact that the commoner lived will have his sentence commuted, but not before he learns that playing murder hobo does in fact have consequences).

The rest of the players played an fun game, with some wacky fun thrown in.

The bard, rather then use an attack, or cast a spell wanted to know if she could use her perform to distract the goblins by singing the goblin's invasion song that she heard them chanting earlier (running a modified Rise of the Runelord's campaign, and they heard them goblins singing "we be goblins, you be dead"). It was a fun idea, so I let her make a performance check, which was high enough to convince at least one goblin to stop attacking (for 1 round) and begin dancing to her version of his song.

Starting next week, we'll have the rest of the students joining in with the new DM handling them. The groups are still bigger then I'd prefer, but without an additional DM we'll be making it work.

One thing I found to be super helpful was to make it very clear that no one gets to hog the spotlight. Some characters did in fact want to dictate what others did in response to them, and that was quickly squashed by me reminding them they only get to control their characters actions, not others. When there was down time, I round robin'd the table and let everyone know they had 1-2 actions per hour they could do, and in this way no one felt left out (I even let them know they could do more if they combined with other players in the hope that this would encourage them all working together which did have a positive result).

anyways, I just wanted to thank everyone again for the great ideas, and any future ideas.

[infinitetech]

sorry just found out my job has no set hours, otherwise id probably offer help irl,

and one thing that i know helps with this size of group if you don't use the note card approach to talking is using a timer(30 sec maybe?) that they need to explain their action within

glad it went well, not surprised so many weren't ready that tends to be the case

[rlc]

Will probably lose one or two kids from the first session and might get some new ones