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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5406239" data-attributes="member: 3448">I've run over-sized (7-8) player games in 4e before.  It's very difficult, and the play experience is substantially diminished.  One of my players suggested that you basically get the same amount of total fun as in a game half that size, but now that fun is split 8 ways instead of 4, so everyone's having half as much fun.  I set a cap of 8 players when I was running--I figured that 9 or 10 players was just clearly too many.You need to keep things moving quickly.  Fights are huge in a game this size--if you have 9 players, a typical fight might be against 9 monsters, or 7 monsters and 8 minions, or a solo and 4 normal monsters--much more complicated than normal.  That makes it hard for the DM to be on top of everything, but it also means that there can be really long gaps between a player's turns, which can make it easy to space out, which then makes things worse in terms of speed of play in a vicious cycle.  Maintaining a strong sense of who's on deck and who's 2 plays out helps, but only up to a point.  I strongly urge you to consider house rules designed to speed up play (like doubling monster damage and halving monster hit points).  Also, when a fight is all over except for the PCs grinding out the last monster or two, just call it over.  Again, grind is a huge enemy in a game like this.It looks like you have only one leader and a bunch of strikers--that's good.  More leaders would be more effective, but they also contribute to grind.  Conversely, strikers speed up play, and that's really helpful.Full group role-playing oriented encounters can be very difficult with a large group.  I suggest having role-playing encounters that focus on a couple characters at a time, but that has the effect of leaving the other players in the cold.  I wish I had a better suggestion, but...Hand-outs are excellent in a large group; a nice meaty puzzle with one copy per player allows everyone to play in parallel, rather than in sequence, which is a big win.  That said, it's hard to regularly prep those.  Alternately, to the extent that you can recruit an assistant GM, even if just to run combats ("we're dropping an imaginary dividing line between the two halves of the battle--Jane will run that half and I'll run this half; once one of the combats is over, everyone from that side can jump in to the other side to mop up."), that offers the potential for a dramatically better game.  If you can get an assistant GM who you can give a quick briefing to and then have run role-playing encounters as well, all the better--you can then run for the whole group but let the players functionally play in shifting groups of 4 or 5 players, which is eminently doable.4E is not a system that's particularly well suited to a very large group.  I wish you luck, but I'm not at all confident that you'll be able to maintain a high quality experience for a group that large, even with some absences each game and assuming that both you are a great DM and the players are excellent.  It might be more fun for everyone involved to chop the group and alternate weeks or something (since you said that you can't run multiple games/week).  Or you might be better served with a faster, lighter system (even 3.X/Pathfinder is probably better, at least at low levels), although that may not serve the needs of the group/the needs of the store.Good luck!</blockquote>

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