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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 3898961" data-attributes="member: 16574">The method of early campaigns (and the default assumption of the OD&D rules) is definitely that there's a large and fluid player-base, with a few dedicated/hard-core players and a larger periphery or more casual, less skilled, or less active players (e.g. someone who lives out of town or has a demanding job and only gets to play occasionally). The recommendation of up to 50 players per campaign doesn't mean 50 people gathered around the table all at once, it means that many total players with characters active in the campaign, likely actually playing together in various sub-groups of from 1 up to a dozen or so (though in Greyhawk they occasionally had groups of 20+ players with Gary and Rob Kuntz co-DMing). It's implicit in this model that the more active and more skilled players will outpace the others level-wise, and this isn't a problem because OD&D works fine with mixed-level groups -- characters as much as 5-6 levels apart can adventure in the same party (though they should obviously seek out challenges appropriate to the midpoint between the two -- i.e. if you've got a group made up of a 10th level character, a 7th level character, 2 5th level characters, and 2 4th level characters, the group should be seeking out challenges around 6th level rather than 4th level or 10th level ones). The same could probably be done in an RC-based campaign as well, but the default assumption there isn't that sort of campaign, but rather the model that became the standard sometime around the early 80s and has remained so to this day -- a fixed/stable group of 4-8 players/characters that will start out together at 1st level and generally stick together for the entire campaign. The RC even (IIRC) gives advice for how many sessions it should take the party to level and how much XP the DM should give out per adventure to match that pace, etc., which would've been completely unheard of in the OD&D assumed model.</blockquote>

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