Groups with more than 4 PCs - I'm New

[Squire James]

(snip all that unimportant stuff)

Oh, and trolls kill characters. Often.

Especially if they're Olog-Hai who know martial arts (visualize the LoTR movie cave troll in karate outfit). Kind of a running joke from my MERP campaign.

 

[Crazy Monkey]

I've been playing with a group of 6-7 plus dm since 3.0 came out. What we do:

Make everyone have their action chosen before it gets to their turn. Use an short timer if you wish. Make sure casters have any reference materials opened to the right page for whatever spell they want to cast before their time.

Try to get as familiar as you can with special tactics, it speeds things up if everyone knows how to do a bull rush / trip etc as opposed to looking it up in the middle of a fight.

Also with a high number of players, try to keep the OOC banter to a minimum, it can be really distracting.

 

[MerricB]

This is a trick question, right Merric? The more people who have to act in a round, the more time it takes to complete that round.

Someone upthread suggested that players decide what they're going to do and even roll before their turn in the round comes up. However, the more players you have, the more likely that monster you were aiming at will be dead by the time your turn comes around again, so I'm not sure how much help that idea is.

It's not really a trick question.

When people say combats take longer to resolve with more people, I was wondering if it were a linear increase in time, or something more. The way it's phrased makes me think 3E combats take much longer than 1E combats to resolve with a similar number of people.

Cheers!

 

[WayneLigon]

I have 5-6 PC's now, with two NPC's and one animal; half the party are both melee attackers and spellcasters.

I guess we're all pretty organized and the players know their stuff because we have gone through four and five large combat encounters in a typical five hour play session and still had time for Rping. 3e combat is actually faster, to me.

 

[John Crichton]

I've written columns on my website about this topic here:

http://www.montecook.com/arch_dmonly27.html

and here:

http://www.montecook.com/dmonly.html

My first couple of columns in Dungeoncraft also dealt with the topic. It's challenging, but not as scary as some people would have you believe.

Wow, how did I miss those? Time to go back through the Dungeoncraft articles and find what I evidently don't remember.

 

[Buttercup]

When people say combats take longer to resolve with more people, I was wondering if it were a linear increase in time, or something more. The way it's phrased makes me think 3E combats take much longer than 1E combats to resolve with a similar number of people.

Hmm. I know absolutely nothing about 1E, so you'll have to ask someone else. But yes, it's essentially a linear increase.