Classic D&D - number of Players - rule books vs. advertisements

[Lanefan]

On Monday, four players have a dungeon adventure. Six others have an expedition scheduled for Wednesday. Tuesday, Nancy's Wizard assaults the castle of Danny's Lord; allied players also participate. Thursday is an adventure into the Wilderness conducted by three players' characters and their retainers. A company of nine makes a foray against a demon prince on Friday. On Saturday, seven players attend the conference at which a treaty to end the Second War of Drometian Succession is under negotiation.

Oh if only I had this sort of time, to be able to run a game every night of the week!

Lan-"hey, I can dream, can't I?"-efan

 

[knightofround]

Personally, I've always found larger groups more satisfying to DM. My ideal group is about 8 people, although the best campaign I DMed had 10. It certainly is a different style of DMing though, and I've noticed several awesome 4-group DMs burn out at the mere addition of 2 extra players. I've DMed much more than I've played, but I've yet to come across another DM that does well with more than 5 players. However I have played under several DMs who did phenomenally better than me with a small amount of players. The best campaign that I ever played in consisted of myself and a single friend.

For me, DMing a larger group for D&D is nice because you can depend upon the party to do just fine even when of the healers can't make it that night. There's certainly never a shortage of powergamers that are happy to take over a PC for session. I also think a larger quantity of players is easier to guide than a smaller one; they provide more hooks, and if one player wants to go off on a ridiculous tangent, often times the PCs themselves will rein them in themselves so I don't have to do the railroading. This is particularly handy for me, since on-the-spot improvisation is probably my greatest weakness as DM.

From an RL perspective its good too; the more people you gnab, the chances that you'll find good company (and good players) will improve. Plus, its just plain good sense for recruitment. By playing/DMing with a large group of people, you can find more people that are specifically interested in your favorite style of playing D&D. And the more players you have, you're more likely to come into contact with other people who enjoy D&D as well...which can always be handy if your group falls apart. I think most of us have been stuck in D&D campaigns that were too horrible to continue, no matter what the shortage of players in your area was.

 

[Stormonu]

And no one ever rolls dice, or writes on their character sheet, (or even looks at a character sheet).

Funny, but most ads for D&D were completely false advertising

I wonder, did anyone get into D&D gaming *because* of an ad or commercial? I've never heard anyone say they looked into the game after seeing an ad/commercial.

Bullgrit

Does a piece on the nightly news count? That's how I found out about it. And at least one other person I played with was a comic fan that got the game because of the "oh, no - it's green slime" ad in one of his comics.

 

[Beginning of the End]

It seems that Gygax often had many Players (up to 20) at a game session.

While I'm not going to rule out the possibility that there may have been a special session or three in which 20+ players were actually sitting in the same room with Gygax, I think this is arising from a fundamental misreading of "in any single campaign [...] the referee to player ratio should be about 1:20 or thereabouts".

He's talking about the total pool of players participating in the campaign world. He did not have the same group of players sitting down each week: You had different players participating in each session, rotating the other people they played with.

Many classic adventure modules said they were designed for 6+ PCs.

Note that the number of players does not necessarily equal the number of PCs.

And many people around here have claimed to have regularly played classic D&D with 6+ Players/PCs. (Personally, I never *regularly* had more than 6 Players at a time in my games; my average was probably 4 Players.)

Whereas I don't think I've had a regular campaign with less than 5 players since elementary school. (And back then we each ran 3 PCs, so there were still 12 PCs on the adventures.)

I've recently been playing in an OD&D campaign centered on the Caverns of Thracia. The DM has had 20+ players participate (with probably about half that number attending more than 2 sessions). Although the single largest session had 11 players, most have featured 5-8.

(The session with 11 players probably had something close to 20 characters involved.)

Why, then, do all the examples of play, and advertisements for the game show only 2 to 4 Players?

That's probably a matter of clarity and photo composition. Not to mention expense when it comes to hiring talent for the photo shoots.

Was it just because showing 10 Players at a table looked cluttered for an ad? Or was there some other considerations? And if 10 people in a photograph is cluttered, aren’t 10 people around a kitchen table cluttered?

And if following 10 Players in an example of play is too confusing, aren't following 10 Players at the table too confusing?

I'm not really following the connection you're drawing here. The fact that introducing you to 9 different people in an example of play that runs for 500-1000 words is cumbersome and unnecessary doesn't seem to have any relationship to the effectiveness of nine people playing together.

It just seems like a real disconnect between what the advertisements for the game showed and what the publications for the game said was expected.

Next you'll be telling me that women on their periods don't spend their days dancing in all-white clothing through spring-time meadows filled with flowers.

I wonder, did anyone get into D&D gaming *because* of an ad or commercial? I've never heard anyone say they looked into the game after seeing an ad/commercial.

I became aware of the whole concept of "roleplaying games" through ads in comics. It then took me months/years to finally track down a BECMI Basic Set. (After being baffled by the impenetrable rulebooks of MERP, Bunnies & Burrows, and Batman: The Roleplaying Game.)

Of course, I was 10 at the time.

 

[howandwhy99]

To my understanding, caller play was more common in the 70's. I don't know when that declined, but the advertising definitely shows groups smaller than 10-20 around a table.

10-20 works well with a caller because a caller is the designated intermediary between the group and the DM. The top end number is really more a DM memory issue than a spatial one. The turn taking, 1-player-to-DM style couldn't handle that many. Caller play is more of a group cooperative activity.