PDA

View Full Version : Large Group Games?



Rhaegar14
2015-02-26, 08:16 PM
Hey Playground, I have myself in a bit of a situation.

Due to a number of factors, our game group is expanding from 6 players (including the DM) to 9 players. I've been DMing Hoard of the Dragon Queen for them, but that's an adventure built for four characters, and even with me adjusting monster numbers I doubt it will hold up with a party of literally double that size. Frankly, while I think we could make it work, I think that 5e D&D as a whole is not really a great system for handling that large a game group. So I'm here to ask you all for game system suggestions: we are a group of dedicated roleplayers, so roleplay-based mechanics aren't gonna be something anybody shies away from, and I for one place a lot of value on systems where players have options in combat.

Do any good game systems come to mind?

Valameer
2015-02-26, 08:39 PM
Savage Worlds is what I would use to run a large party D&D-like game. It has a good amount of combat rules to bite into, but the system runs large (in D&D terms) skirmishes fairly quickly.

The learning curve from D&D to Savage Worlds is pretty gentle as well. The games have a familiar feel to one another.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-26, 08:56 PM
The most I've succesfully handled as a lone GM is seven players. Past that point, it starts getting hard giving everyone fair share of play time. In my experience, what game system is used is of little consequence, because they all tend to lack advice on how to manage real time between players. Get a stop watch or a small hourglass, and maybe consider splitting the group into two halves, with one half active at a time and the other shopping equipment or eating nachos in the interim.

Kaun
2015-02-26, 09:17 PM
The most I've succesfully handled as a lone GM is seven players. Past that point, it starts getting hard giving everyone fair share of play time. In my experience, what game system is used is of little consequence, because they all tend to lack advice on how to manage real time between players. Get a stop watch or a small hourglass, and maybe consider splitting the group into two halves, with one half active at a time and the other shopping equipment or eating nachos in the interim.

Yeah when your getting up to 9 there is no system that really handles it well, it basically comes down to the GM.

Savage worlds card initiative system would help, as you can delegate initiative to a player to handle.

Set some house rules to keep things moving, like;

When it becomes a players turn they have 20 seconds to state there action and start rolling. If they dont do it in time, move on.

Keep the flow of the game going, try and stamp out random chatter.

Don't drag out combats, if the PC's are obviously wining just wrap the combat up and move on.

Try to regularly jump between players. To help with this set a 20 min alarm on your phone or pc, write all the players names on a piece of paper, then place a marker over their name when you engage their character. If the 20min alarm goes off and any players dont have a marker on their name, do something with their character right away. Reset the alarm, remove the counters.

Maybe aim for a really rules light system like Dungeon World. That involves less paperwork all round.

Valameer
2015-02-26, 09:23 PM
That is true, too. The largest group I've ever GMed for was 10 players, and that was in D&D 3.5. It was a mess. Half the table was involved, but I'm sure the other half was bored and wondering what they were doing there. I was too busy to even notice.

When you run for a large group you need to cut corners for the sake of speed and efficiency even at the cost is of game balance or immersion. Initiative goes around the table left to right in the same order every round. Players are expected to have their actions ready to go as soon as their turn comes up in combat. Don't delay combat for someone who wasn't paying attention or isn't in the room on their turn - give them the option of either acting quickly, or allowing another player to roll their character's action for them that round, or passing. Out of combat, anyone who's character splits away from the main group gets no spotlight for their side task (it always happens "off-camera").

Keep book keeping to a minimum by hand waiving expenses like inn rooms and meals, or encumbrance. Have quests be simple and straightforward. Despite what you would expect, puzzles usually only become more difficult to solve as a group gets larger. So avoid puzzles, riddles, and difficult to follow plot twists.

People will be tempted to carry on side conversations, and you can only ask them politely to focus so many times. If you always try to keep the pace fast and the action loaded, they should have an easier time staying focused and interested. Fast paced combat with clearly labeled bad guys is probably your best tool for keeping people involved.

If someone loses their character, invite them to play one of your bad guys in combat, and allow them to join in with a new character as soon as you can (even if it doesn't make tons of sense).

That said, I'd still use Savage Worlds for something like this. But I haven't played Dungeon World yet. :)

endur
2015-02-26, 10:37 PM
Do any good game systems come to mind?

I would split the group into two groups. Instead of you and nine players, you could have 2 GMs each with four players. Four players and 1 GM is the perfect table. I'd go with two perfect tables instead of one out of control table.

Rhaegar14
2015-02-26, 10:39 PM
Okay, since I've seen some confusion with this, we have nine PEOPLE IN TOTAL, including me as the DM. That would mean a table with one DM and eight players. Small distinction, but worth noting.

@endur: I considered that idea, but I would need to work out a game structure with another DM that would work with multiple DMs. Running entirely separate games kind of defeats the purpose of expanding the group in the first place.

Thrawn4
2015-02-27, 01:57 PM
The most I've succesfully handled as a lone GM is seven players.
I am curious. My maximum is usually four players. I've played with five players on a few occasions, but I found that combat becomes bothersome and the time for individual roleplaying decreases too much.
So... how did it go? What is your sweet spot?

MrNobody
2015-02-27, 02:21 PM
I would split the group into two groups. Instead of you and nine players, you could have 2 GMs each with four players. Four players and 1 GM is the perfect table. I'd go with two perfect tables instead of one out of control table.

I did this once with a friend of mine... and we found it a beautiful experience. We ran separated roads of the same story arc for a group that, counting us Dms, counted 14 members.
We've split the group into two smaller group (6 players each), playing in the same room but on different tables (we were in a recreation center).
Each group battled, investigated and travelled on their own, just to meet now and then to put together the "pieces" they gathered of the big pictures and to decide the next moves. It all ended with a giga battle against a demigod.
It was hard and tiring, but fun has Hell... no... not enough layers... fun as Abyss!!

1337 b4k4
2015-02-27, 05:05 PM
OD&D was (and can be) run with larger groups than is currently standard in TTRPGs. Group initiative helps a lot with this. Rather than each individual person going at one time and everyone waiting patiently, roll initiative for the whole group (in OD&D it's 1d6 per side, lowest wins), and then just ask everyone what they want to do. Everyone who's attacking can roll at once and you can just total up the damages vs the targets. The simplified combat helps too of course.

Realistically though, I'd look for any system that avoids per-person initiative and focuses more on the story than the numbers. Dungeon World would be an example. Basically as you add more people, you want to pull back from the personal second by second actions and time tracking and move to a more abstract and collective action system.

Frozen_Feet
2015-02-28, 11:04 AM
I am curious. My maximum is usually four players. I've played with five players on a few occasions, but I found that combat becomes bothersome and the time for individual roleplaying decreases too much.
So... how did it go? What is your sweet spot?

Four is a good number. The way I run my games, I give each player distinct turns, going clockwise around the table and asking them what their characters are doing, resolving any immediate action following the player's move, then moving to the next one. If players move in distinct groups (and they don't always do; I don't adhere to taboos about PvP or splitting the party), the group will ideally have one spokesperson who will discuss with other players in it and then tell how the group moves. With a lot of players, it either gets really hectic, with short player turns and lots of things going on at once, or reallu slow with some players or cliques having to eat snacks while the others complete.

Knaight
2015-02-28, 12:31 PM
If everyone is very focused on the game, 8 players can work - though it's still pretty huge, regardless of system. On the system side, the big thing you're looking for is low overhead systems, ideally without too much clutter in the mechanics. Things like individual initiative in combat represent a significant slow down, find systems which don't use them.

Personally, I'd be inclined to use Fudge here. It has a simultaneous combat system with meaningful decisions in it, and it can be dialed up and down in complexity really easily. With that said, it's a bit tricky to get the hang of GMing it (though on the player end it's an easy system to grok).

Mr. Mask
2015-02-28, 02:05 PM
Anyone know of a game where players act simultaneously, instead of taking turns? I was curious how such a game would go for large groups.

AdmiralCheez
2015-02-28, 02:11 PM
On the topic of two DMs, I once played in a game where we had 11 people. During combat, one DM was responsible for keeping track of health and initiative order, and die rolls, while the other one focused on enemy placement, strategy, and describing the action. It worked out pretty well, and kept things running relatively smoothly (with that many people, minor confusion and chaos is inevitable).

We also implemented some previously mentioned rules, like have your action ready when it's your turn. If you don't name it in under ten seconds, your character is assumed to be stuck with indecision that round, and it's the next character's turn. Not paying attention is unacceptable, because we really can't afford to re-describe the battlefield for every person's turn.

Knaight
2015-02-28, 02:26 PM
Anyone know of a game where players act simultaneously, instead of taking turns? I was curious how such a game would go for large groups.

Yes. A number of these are fairly complex or pseudo-simultaneous, but there are also a few which have simpler simultaneous systems for combat. Fudge is the big one, with an opposed roll based system for most things, and without all the crunch of something like Burning Wheel (which, while simultaneous, is still slower than most turn based systems because it involves checking a table for every interaction, rounds broken up into sub rounds with conflicting actions, so on and so forth).

Tengu_temp
2015-02-28, 02:35 PM
The best thing to do with a group of 9 is to split it in two. That's simply too many people.


Anyone know of a game where players act simultaneously, instead of taking turns? I was curious how such a game would go for large groups.

Use group initiative - not for the PCs, but for the monsters. First, everyone who beat the monsters' initiative moves, then the monsters, then everyone, then the monsters again, then everyone again, etc.

Players still take turns, but they can move in any order they want. So the guy who's ready first moves first, and time wasted waiting for the slowpoke to think what to do is minimized.

sktarq
2015-02-28, 02:51 PM
I know of no system that works better with 8 players than 4-5. That said certain techniques help large games more than small ones

Simplified combat-what I really mean is fast combat-the fewer round of dice rolling needs to be done in order to move on the better. Perhaps encourage co rolling of init, to hits, etc based on semi standard colored dice. Of all this init management is most important-also calling out who is next becomes more useful as the group grows so people are ready-which speeds things up.

Use more visual aids-with longer gaps between description and actions, fading out while another player takes a turn etc people loose track of what's going on more in large games- I normally say battle maps are only semi-useful but in large games they help more.

Be more railroad-y than normal-not to say you should script out the next battle but in group discussions can tie down a large group for extended periods-so make progression more clear and step by step than you usually would.
Sandboxing is not recommended

I recommend dungeon crawls-sure a couple people may wander off together they don't generally get up to a whole miniadventure- which happens in town quite a bit.

Give clear goals-again less for players to ague about

Be more aggressive in being involved to character creation and more willing to nix things-this is not the time to have to learn a new sub-system (if you are not totally familiar with psionic for example just ban them at the start) You as DM don't have time and mental resources to deal with looking up new rules (I have seen many bad habits picked up from large games where the DM didn't have time to properly work out how everything was supposed to work due to many players). This can be hard since in big games people many time want to "stand out"

Give a clear reason for the group to be and stick together. The number of times I seen/heard of big games going south because of internal conflict is legion. To minimize this work out ahead of ways for the players to relate to one another

Edit: for visual clarity

1337 b4k4
2015-02-28, 04:18 PM
Anyone know of a game where players act simultaneously, instead of taking turns? I was curious how such a game would go for large groups.

OD&D basically did this with per side initiative. Combat was split into phases, not turns. So when the player's initiative came up, everyone who was moving moved, then everyone who was making ranged attacks made attacks, then everyone who was making melee attacks made their attacks etc. All actions for a given initiative were assumed to occur at the same time. Players had a caller, someone who was responsible for summing up and telling the DM what everyone is doing. If you poke around youtube, there's a handful of videos of Frank Mentzer running some OD&D games this way. Basically, it winds up going something like this (simplified):

P: OK, Bob and Joe are going to attack the goblin, Kat, Jane and Paul are going after the ogre.

DM: Ok, goblin attackers, give me your rolls.

P: 15 and 18

DM: Hit, hit, roll damage

P: 5, 8

DM: Goblin is down, ok, Ogre attackers you're up

P: 17, 18, 4

DM: Hit, hit, miss

P: 2, 5

DM: The ogre charges ...