Groups with more than 4 PCs - I'm New

[Voadam]

The more players the more you want to keep combat flowing quickly.

Have characters prepare their actions before their turns come around. If they are not ready they are delaying until their next turn.

Encourage players to have the reference to their turns relevant spell, power or action ready so time is not wasted flipping through a book looking up specifics after the character declares his action.

Don't get bogged down in arguments with players during combat. If you need to say "This is how I am ruling for now, we can debate it later but that is my ruling as DM now. Next?" then that is fine and should be accepted by the players.

Try to have social/interaction elements to involve each player at some point so they all have some spotlight time. Go based off of archetypes, thieves will notice loose items, bards will notice social cues, rangers will notice terrain and track clues, etc.

 

[Mallus]

1) Offload as much of the bookkeeping/mechanics stuff as you can on the players.

2) Try and resolve as much as you can with simple judgement calls.

3) Most importanly, make sure you give every character some attention during the course of a session. If a character wants to give some input, use a skill, do something take into consideration how involved they've been in the action up to that point. I've bent the rules into neat hoops, even re-written section of my adventures on the fly just so I can involve as many players as I could into scene at hand. Players don't need to win all the time, but they need the to feel the DM is responding to them --with someting other than a 'no'. Otherwise, they will wander over to your Playstation and pop in a game...

Besides, player's are lot like small children. They need constant attention. Umm, and they like to break stuff.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

One of the biggest problems I've noted with bigger groups is an increased tendency to want to split up and pursue multiple objectives at once. With a small group, fear of being outnumbered tends to keep that in check. This does have the advantage of everyone who wants RP time getting a chance, though.

A couple of tricks I've used to deal with this in the past:

1. Food -- get one group to order/prepare food while you spend a few minutes with one of the sub-groups. Then, alternate one group with the other - one eats while one plays, then they switch. Then, the group that didn't make the food, cleans up.

2. Assistant DMs -- Often, I've had one of the other players 'DM' one sub-group in another room. I give him the basics of what I think the other group should be able to accomplish if all goes as well as it can, and let him run it from there. Usually there is very little the other group can do to break the continuity of the game, and a lot of times I get unexpected plot hooks and such from it. Plus, it helps build up the DM skills of the others.

 

[Arnwyn]

What are a few of the pitfalls I should be aware of? Suggestions? Rules I should be wary of? Questions I haven't asked?

To be honest, I've found no difference in DMing a larger group for 3.x than it was when DMing a larger group for 2e. Same thing (for me, at least).

 

[Strider The Ranger]

I've run large 3E games before, especially my Jr and Sr year in High school (I'm a Soph. in college now). Back then, I had 8 players, and things could get really bogged down and troublesome if you weren't prepared with a few tricks.
1. Make sure the PCs all get along. It's up to you to decide, but for me, I never allow dramatic differences in alignments (i.e. LG Paladin and a LE or CE PC....just not a good mix and it WILL explode at some point). If the PCs are generally the same alignments (all G or all E and their variants) the PCs are less likely to fight amongst themselves and slow things down.
2. Make the PCs write a character biography for their characters. This gives you an idea of what they're like (so you know them as a "person" where it matters..i.e. social interactions). This lets you make social encounters that will engage everyone. Plus, I also do XP a bit differently than most people. I give the standard XP for encounters, but I also award roleplaying XP for how well they played their character based on their character biography.
3. Always be prepared. This goes for everything, but especially large parties. If you're going to have a dungeon crawl, make sure you review the rules about Door DCs, traps, etc so when it comes up you don't have to thumb through your book.
4. Encourage the PCs to pay attention in combat so when their turn comes up they can act instead of being indecisive. Perhaps limit the time they have to decide what to do (but be reasonable as a "real" fighter with his equipment would know what to do).
Hope that helps out

 

[Davelozzi]

I was running with nine PCs for most of the past two years, but thankfully I'm down to seven now, and things are going much smoother.

Regarding roleplaying, I found that changing the XP system helped a lot. The standard XP encourages a focus on battle in general, but this was made worse with the bigger group as my players felt like when someone was roleplaying, no XP was being earned but in combat everyone was doing something and earning XP. Now I use a system where everyone gets XP on a variety of factors including combat, magic, roleplay, style, character goals, and group goals. Now everyone enjoys character interaction a lot more.

Regarding speeding up combat, most of the advice given above is spot-on. Also, definately start using initiative cards if you're not already. Don't let people take long to decide their actions -- if they're not ready, hand them they're card and tell them that they're delaying until they decide. Then when they're ready they can hand it back and you can just slip it back into initiative pile at the current count. Make players keep track of spell durations themselves. Try to set up the combats in intersting ways so that everyone has a chance to do something.

Finally, throw out the CR system. Even if it works at all (and I'm not convinced that it does), it definately does not for large groups. I keep trying to use the recommendations that Jonathon Tweet provided for larger parties in his adventure "Wedding Bells" that was in Dungeon a year or two ago, but it still doesn't work. Just look at the monster's abilities, think about your PCs and try to judge accordingly.

 

[Creamsteak]

I've had a lot of experience with large groups as well. Averaging 6, but I've ran sessions for groups of 11 for more than 6 months. When people say it slows down combat, it does this quite well, but I've got some strategies now that reduce these problems.

Some Ideas: Use Initiative Cards, Spell Cards, Feat Cards (gonna have to create these yourself), special attack cards (trip, disarm, bull rush, sunder, charge), monster cards, pre-roll initiative, and use miniatures. These all help for their individual purposes, the goal here is to put all the information a player would need to consider for their combat round directly in front of them.

Initiative cards are used so that you know exactly where combat is at, and can go through the deck in order without fail.

Spell cards of all prepared (or known for spontaneous casters) spells keep the mages from needing time with their players handbook. If you issue one card for each instance of the spell known, the player can "hand the card over to the DM" in a HeroQuest/Magic the Addiction manner. This makes your player of a spellcaster that isn't a complete and total master of his spell-list into a much faster element.

Feat Cards, Special Attack Type Cards, and possibly Skill Cards do the same thing as spell cards, but for monks, fighters, and rogues. This way, you'll never need to look up grapple, bull rush, or sunder. Even if you know these rules, this lets the player look at his "hand" and quickly assertain if he should use these methods, rather than sitting there trying to think of which one is appropriate or if he should perform a regular attack. Skill Cards aren't all that useful, but maybe listing the by the book DCs would help players make judgement calls to guess how difficult a skill is going to be.

Monster Cards and Pre-Rolling Initiative are just methods to speed up the DMs actions as much as possible. Roll all your dice together, and designate which dice represents which attack and which damage (I have 4 sets just for this). Monster Cards aren't necessary if your book-keeping is good, but since mine are the same size as my initiative cards, I use them in place and they include special attacks/qualities descriptions.

Miniatures, I do recall you have. The more players you have, the more you need to have precision placement of everything. You don't need this advice, but it's still worth pointing out.

 

[Ylis]

See, I usually have the opposite problem: playing with a tiny group. Many of my players no longer have the same days off work, etc, so it ends up being games where I might be running one (two if I'm lucky) person. Now, that's more challenging than one might think.

Running large groups can be a challenge. My biggest problem was when I inevitably had that one person that *had to break off from the group and do his own adventure solo. Of course, once I started killing off characters that did they, they realized the value of having a group.....

But I veer from the point: It's often harder to run larger groups mainly due to how long it takes for the rounds in combat, etc. I've played in groups with about 10 people...and it usually involved half-hour out-of-game chats with the other players while one combat round was finally completed. So, in my mind, the major challenge is keeping it interesting for everyone.

 

[John Crichton]

Wow, there is some good advice here. I had no idea so many had groups that large. Anyone else?

I like the cards idea. I already use initiative cards. Spell cards sound like a real time saver...

 

[Garboshnik]

Besides the fact that each player spends less time in the action, I think the biggest problem with large groups is that due to the amount of time combat takes up, it often becomes impractical to wear the party down through 4 or 5 encounters that might make for a more entertaining game experience.

-The amount of damage that many players can get off in a round is phenomenal. Try to use defensive or high HP opponents.

-If three or more PC's have area of effect spells prepare for this or they could easily wipe 100 HP off of a huge group of targets in one round. On the other hand, AoE spells are very effective against a large party.

-Large parties may run out of healing spells fast unless they dedicate extra resources to this.

-Avoid using one powerful foe to challenge the party as this will tend to kill off a few characters. If you do use one, use one with a strong defense or one that spreads out its damage amongst the entire party.

-Try to remember how well each player does during the adventure, its easy to miss it if a player feels that he's not accomplishing anything.

-Try to use monsters whose rounds can be gone through faster, ie mosters with fewer attacks or fewer options. On the same note, encourage players to avoid characters whose turns take too long to play out or else be prepared to make their turns very quickly.

-Avoid adding extra NPC's, summoned monsters, cohorts, or anything else that will take up more time.

The advice to encourage interaction among player vs npc interaction is very good, I will definately try this during my future games.