How Many Characters In Your Party? (read post 1 first)

[Lanefan]

OK, this poll relates to *characters*. Not players.

How many characters are in your party at a normal given time? For those who run or play in more than one party, answer for each.

When answering, include:
- player characters
- party-member NPCs (a.k.a. DMPCs)
- henches, cohorts, and levelled hirelings

Do not include:
- prisoners or captives taken by party
- commoner-level hirelings, guides, etc.
- rescued slaves or prisoners being escorted to safety
- militia or army units accomanying party

Tying this together with the current "how many players" poll will give a good idea of what proportion of parties are strictly one-player-one-character.

Edit: it'd be fun to somehow include what edition you're playing, but that would make the poll a bit unwieldy...

Lanefan

 

[Bagpuss]

What about Animal Companions? Or cohort mounts in that case? Or Followers?

 

[TessarrianDM]

Six players with 7 PC's in a 13th-14th level 3.5 game. One player is running his son's character (whose work schedule regularly prevents him from attending) as an NPC. Until recently, it was 7 players with 8 PC's and 1 NPC (one player was running two PC's, another was running an NPC Healer).
Regular attendance is 3-4 players who run 4-5 characters. Usually, characters whose players are not present are "flown home" by a wind-walking cleric. Any character run as an NPC during a game only receives 1/2 xp, with the remainder divided up between the characters of the participating players. Any player who runs an NPC gains a 100 xp bonus (and no, this has not encouraged players to run more characters so their primary PC can advance faster).

 

[MrFilthyIke]

Tying this together with the current "how many players" poll will give a good idea of what proportion of parties are strictly one-player-one-character.

Edit: it'd be fun to somehow include what edition you're playing, but that would make the poll a bit unwieldy...

Currently 7 players and 7 PCs.

We also have an Imp and genie-like wizard as NPCs tagging along.

The campaign is 3.homebrew.

 

[Gilladian]

This campaign has been the smallest I've run in a long time - started out two players with one primary character each and one NPC henchman each. Added a third player, so the druid player dropped her NPC. But then the third player left (good riddance)... and we brought the NPC back. A few months later, we added a different third player, and the druid's NPC went bye-bye again.

It now looks as if we may lose our third player again, this time due to work constraints. I need to find another regular player or two!

 

[Michael Silverbane]

In the campaign that I'm running right now, which has only recently gotten started, there are currently...

Five players and 10 characters... Assuming that the two units of footmen (24 1st level commoners and 2 1st level warriors) and the one unit of mounted archers (12 1st level warriors and 1 3rd level warrior) each only count as a single character.

In the campaign that I ran previous to that, each of the eight players had at least three characters. Also, there were dozens of Henchmen (cohort level characters that the players controlled most of the time) and hundreds of Hirelings (follower level characters that the PC's ordered around, but the DM controlled most of the time).

Later
silver

 

[Richards]

We have four players (one who went off to college, but his PCs are run by other players in his absence), and each player has two different PCs, all tied together as part of the same local chapter of the Adventurers Guild. However, they only run one PC at a time in each adventure (although one player doubles up, running the college player's PC when he's not able to game with us), so they have a 4-PC party with rotating PCs for each adventure.

In addition, there's Old Clem, a Commoner 2/Expert 3 retired fisherman who's greatly enjoying his new career as an adventuring party hireling. Old Clem sets up tents, watches the horses, and makes meals while the PCs are off doing their adventurer stuff. So, for the purposes of this poll, I went with 5 characters.

Oh, and we play 3.5, and anticipate keeping with this version of the game for the forseeable future (although you never know).

Johnathan

 

[The Thayan Menace]

Dëthkløk Dragonlance

We have five characters in our current campaign ... played by five players (although only four show up consistently).

-Samir Asad (Saul Carver)

 

[Thurbane]

Both groups I play with have 5...

Group 1 - 3 players, 4 PCs (1 player has 2 characters), 1 DMPC (deceased as of last night )

Group 2 - 5 players, 5 PCs

 

[Graybeard]

Our group has 3 different games going on. We play one campaign for a few weeks, then switch to a different one. Each is run by a different DM.

Game 1: 6 players, 1 DMNPC, 6 PCs
Game 2: 6 players, 6 PCs
Game 3: 6 players, 6 PCs

Each of the games has had leveled npcs as guides, temporary party members, etc.