OMG Help I Have 9 Players!

[Obryn]

Not too long ago, I had 9 players, too. It was an explosion of colossal scale - I had 3 people leave the group because of schedule conflicts, and 1 person who was so flaky they were never there. I invited 2 new people to join. Then all 3 schedule conflicts cleared up, and it was insane.

4e is very, very hard with 9 players. It CAN be done, if everyone is completely on the ball. But it's nowhere near as slick as the sweet spot of 4-6 characters.

-O

 

[Blackbrrd]

I am used to running with a 7 person group in 4e. Not optimal but quite manageable.

I am playing in a 9 person 3.5 group who has gotten to level 17. It's a monumental task coordinating what happens before encounters and it's quite impossible for the DM to balance encounters. It's only working because we focus on RP, not combat, but even that is a bit slow.

Splitting the group into two is probably a good idea if you can get another to DM. Maybe you can get some time with a PC as well?

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

I played with a large group. My advice, if you have a lot of players, is to be really firm on forcing them to keep up the pace.

Your most frequent question should be "Who's next, and what are you doing?" You'll need to live up to this by making sure you act quickly as decisively when it's your turn - players pick up on your energy and reflect it back.

If you can keep the pace up, particularly in combat, you'll be OK. Oh, and Elite monsters are your friend.

 

[Mengu]

I essentially have 6 players plus a substitute. The substitute plays the character of whoever can't make it for a session. You could do something like this. Just have 7 characters. And let the two new players be substitutes or one can also be co-DM, playing monsters/NPC's as needed. When there is too many people you can plan for a party split, have three PC's go to another room with the co-DM and you run it for the remaining four.

Whatever you do 9 PC's is not fun for you, not fun for players. Way too much wait time between turns. And you have to get the encounters to be progressively more difficult since a party of 9 will have a lot of redundancy, and then combats take even longer.

If you only play one game a month, make the best of it. Or better, find more time to play

 

[Obryn]

To expand on what I said before... I currently have a roster of 7 players, but I can usually expect 1 to miss each night. 6 is pretty easy for me to run; I'm used to it.

If you have 9 players, your absolute focus must be on speed and efficiency. And it still won't be great, frankly, but if everyone makes the most out of it, everyone should still have a good time.

* Stick with low levels. At high levels, things get exponentially more complicated with 9 players.
* Make everyone keep a pad of scratch paper to track (1) The conditions on them, and (2) The stuff they have active and up in battle. Enforce this rigidly.
* Give everyone no more than 10 seconds to decide what to do on their turn. They should have all necessary dice in hand. After 10 seconds, make them default to their favorite At-Will.
(3) Take all the help you can get. You will have a bajillion monsters. Find and learn how to use a copy of Masterplan or another combat tracker. You need something to help you keep track of 9 enemies.
(4) Stick with simple monsters. Complex ones will get to be too much.
(5) Combat gets weird. Do not rely on any single monster as the cornerstone of your combat. Avoid anything like a BBEG. While more PCs means more monsters, more PCs also means a greater ability to focus fire on a single enemy. Any particularly scary standard or elite monster will die very, very quickly if the PCs concentrate on them - they're taking 9 attacks now instead of 5. Any solo will suffer from the action economy - especially in regard to immediate actions. Compensate for this either by changing up the opposition, or by using a different encounter composition.

That's the best I can offer. Nine is far from ideal, but it can still be a fun time for your players.

-O

 

[the Jester]

My current 4e group has seven players, and almost every session they're all there for at least part of the game.

My advice is straight out of the DMG2: instead of using more monsters to challenge your pcs- for example, nine standard monsters- try using a mix like this:

1 solo (counts as five)
4 standards

or

2 elites (count as four)
5 standards

Tougher monsters, not more monsters, will speed things up a little bit. Good luck!

 

[Amaroq]

To that, I'd add:

Making the tension "who dies first" is not going to work very well.

Hypothetically, if they have 2 defenders and 2 leaders, the leaders and the defenders will work together very very well to keep PC's from dying.

So, I'd aim for alternate tension methods building methods, such as:

1. Battles with time limits. "If you can't accomplish X by the end of Round 4, bad things happen." .. This can be anything form "the evil wizard completes his ritual" to "the bad guy reinforcements arrive" to "the NPC-in-trouble dies" to "the good guy defenses start to collapse".

2. Battles with different goals. Starting from point A, get around/past defenders to reach point B. (The "defenders" for this one should be tougher than its worth fighting, or 'seemingly infinite in number'.)

3. Protect non-combatant(s). Similar to #1; there are non-combatants on the field of battle who are in trouble. The party has to spend some number of actions to keep them out of trouble. E.g., somewhere in the village of Blah is an old man who can tell you guys the location of the McGuffin. When the party reaches Blah, they find it being overrun, with bad guys visibly killing villagers in the streets. The object: protect the villagers and escort them (especially the old man) out of the village to safety.

4. Split the party. No, seriously - not permanently, just for some fights. You can use a portcullis, a pit trap, a slide, any number of things. Drop half of the party into a battle tough enough for the entire party ... and leave the other half trying to figure out how to get there from here.

4.a. Alternately, the portcullis drops, and it turns out the melee attackers are coming from behind, where they're now threatening the ranged strikers, controllers, etc.

4.b. You can achieve much the same thing with creatures that arrive at the edge of the map at the start of Round 2, and roll their own initiative.

5. Use enemy controllers liberally. Focus on walls, zones, etc: things that divide the party. This is essentially the same idea as in number 4: anywhere you can create local superiority for your creatures will create some significant tension for your players.

6. Use enemy soldiers sparingly. (They can last too long - though any BBEG you're counting on lasting for more than 2 rounds will need to be a Solo soldier.)

7. Use morale for bad guys - when you're writing an encounter, write the "script" of "when certain bad guys will break and run". For example, the goblin archers might break and run when the last of the wolves goes down, or dropping the BBEG might cause any of his surviving hirelings to flee/surrender, etc. Likewise, that BBEG with 1200 HP might be willing to offer some Diplomacy when he's down 500 HP and all of his minions.

8. Offer "mop up" to the players. For example, "If two players pay one healing surge, I'll let you guys mop up the rest of this lot 'off-camera' so we can move the story along.."
(7 and 8 are almost necessary for limiting "grind")

9. Use negative environmental effects which hurt the party's action economy. For example, a swinging rope bridge that is tough to move across safely. A battle on the deck of a ship during a raging storm, where some PC's will need to be spending Standard actions on keeping the ship from sinking, etc. Archers firing down from a second story balcony, with the Jump and Climb rules slowing down any melee fighter who wants to get up there with them, and the balcony railing providing Cover against ranged attacks.

10. Use lethal environmental effects which threaten insta-death but offer a "if one of your friends bails you out" moment. For example, that ship in a storm, perhaps there's a chance of a huge wave knocking people overboard ... then its "Standard action as an Endurance check to keep your head above water for another round; it'll take help from your friends to get you back shipboard before you drown." ... or if its an airship battle, allow "falling" to happen at the start of any airborne character's turn (cartoon-like) rather than as soon as they are airborne. That'll give you "rescue him before he falls" moments, like Nightcrawler's rescue of Rogue in X2.

.. Okay, so none of these are 100% specific to big parties, but hopefully they do give you some inspiration about how to keep encounters interesting even though the 9-PC-party would walk through most stand-up, knock-down fights easily!

 

[Aplus]

thanks for all your tips guys! there's a lot of helpful advice in this thread. i ended up saying no to the 9th player, so I have it down to eight. Given that we played for the first time together last session with seven players and a DM all still learning the rules, and it wasn't terrible, i think this will be workable. between implementing these tips, and just naturally getting better at managing combats through experience we should be okay.

thanks again everyone for taking the time to give such useful tips.

 

[Amaroq]

You're welcome!

A couple other ideas -

- We use a white board to track initiative order, hit points, and conditions.

- Task one non-DM player dealing with initiative, keeping things moving
("You're on deck" to the player after the current can help a lot.)

- Task a different non-DM player tracking monster hit points
(We have them tallied UP from zero; the PC's never know the max HP but can always see the total HP dealt to a given target.)

- Task a third, experienced non-DM player with being the single point of "keep track of all the plusses for people", so you don't get a half-dozen "did you remember the +1 for our banner?" "And the +2 from my Tactical Presence!" "And you have combat advantage!" "But you're pone." ... by the time everybody's said that, the less experienced player whose turn it is has forgotten what their original modifiers were.

- Enforce a "no tactical help" rule - e.g., no saying "Hey, did you think of ..." unless your character did it as part of his six-second "free action" speech on his turn.

- Try to keep a "read" on whose having a good time. During non-combat times, ask the player who you think is disinterested, losing focus, etc, what they do; its a great way to keep everybody involved.

 

[mneme]

It's probably worth limiting in-character chatter in a large group, but I'll note that the "6 second speech on your turn" is a 3.5ism, not a 4ism. Speech is a free action in 4e, and free actions are at Immediate Reaction to Interrupt speeds (depending on who you ask, but explicitly subject to GM tolerance). By the rules, you can say "no, don't target him, target the big guy in the center" fast enough to get you buddy to change his mind.

Does that mean that this should be encouraged in a big group? Well, maybe not, though limited, in character (and short!) advice might help keep a large group engaged.