How big is your gaming group?

[kenobi65]

Has anyone ever DM'd or played in a group of 8+ players? Are there potential pitfalls I should be concerned about? Everyone in the group is willing to try it, but we are all a little wary. We can't come up with a logical reason for the wariness; we just know that a group of 8 players is rare.

I currently DM for 3 different groups, with 8, 6, and 3 players, respectively.

The 8-player group could, in theory, get bigger...we've got 3 players who have dropped out, for various personal reasons, over the years, but "the door is always open" for them to come back.

That said, I've decided that 8 is about as big a group as I want to DM for. The two biggest reasons:
1) Combat gets progressively slower and slower with more players
2) With more players, it gets harder for the DM to give each player / character a sufficient amount of attention.

 

[KB9JMQ]

The group I DM has 6 players.
The group I play in has 5.
My family group game has 4.

I like the small groups better. I have played in a group of 8 and it was fine but I wouldnt want to DM that many.

 

[The_Universe]

I am currently DMing two different gaming groups, each of which has 6 players (for 7 total including me). Now one of these groups appears about to grow to 8 players (9 total). I can't think of any reason to discourage this except for the fact that people don't seem to have groups that big.

It's just hard to divide your attention as a DM that many ways - it tends to slow down the game any time you're doing anything "tactical" (round-based) like combat, because you have so many characters to cycle through every round.

Further, players tend to pair off to chat when they're not getting attention, which eventually can snowball into no one paying attention to what's actually happening in the game - especially when it may have been close to an hour before you get back to their individual turns.

Has anyone ever DM'd or played in a group of 8+ players? Are there potential pitfalls I should be concerned about? Everyone in the group is willing to try it, but we are all a little wary. We can't come up with a logical reason for the wariness; we just know that a group of 8 players is rare.

I've DMed groups as small as 2, and as large as 14. If my only choices are on the extremes (and I'm rating them based on quality of the game, not just "did we have a good time") I'd rather have the 2 than the 14. Large groups are self-distracting, tend to factionalize, and are generally less efficient at completing group tasks, since it's harder to reach a consensus of a dozen people than it is for four people to agree on something.

For me, 3 or 4 + the DM is ideal, and I generally like to limit myself to 6 (or less) when I am DMing, or things just happen too slowly.

My current group has six - I wouldn't want to lose any of them, but it's definitely a more satisfying experience to run for a slightly smaller group.

My advice would be to split the groups - 2 groups of 4 where everyone is getting their share of the spotlight is a lot more fun than a single group of 8, when no one is getting what they feel they deserve - and, no matter how good you are, there comes a point when you just can't keep a game moving quickly and efficiently when you have to hear, process, roll for, describe, and react to 8 different sets of actions every 5 seconds (in the game).

My two cents. Take it or leave it.