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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaginary Number" data-source="post: 5083839" data-attributes="member: 63056">I frequently DM for large groups but, for the reasons everyone's pointed out above, it's not easy to do for an entire campaign.  If you're going to do it that way, however, I'll offer the following in addition to the excellent suggestions already provided. 1) Make sure that everyone at the table knows that the campaign will not involve a lot of individual role-playing.  Every group has at least a player or two who likes to interact with the setting, gather information, talk to NPCs, etc.  This can be a lot of fun with a normal-sized group, but it often gets really tedious when eight people have to sit still and listen to one other person try to develop their character.  If I have a group of nine, any one person gets at most ten seconds to banter with the tavern wench, haggle with the merchant, ask questions to the sage, or whatever before I cut them off.  Nobody gets to be a special snowflake.  That's not to everyone's taste, obviously, but you need to do it to keep everyone's attention and move things along.  For the same reason, the DM needs to make sure that the players can get all the information they need for the adventure without requiring them to do a whole lot of investigation or fact-finding beforehand. 2) As someone mentioned earlier, the usual adventure model where the players go through a number of reasonably challenging encounters before reaching the boss fight at end does not work very well for large groups.  Because combat takes a long time, no matter how much initiative bookkeeping you delegate, I typically plan for only one big combat encounter per session.  The encounter should be complex:  I often send waves of enemies at the party from different directions, and the group tends to separate into smaller groups to fight different threats before they finally can combine at the end and take out the big bad who is directing the action. 3) Any combat with that many players and monsters needs a lot of room for the participants to move around, particularly in 4e.  Grids for miniatures need to be huge -- I've had as many as eight standard-sized battlemats laid out for a single encounter.  Your DM should know that published adventures and modules will not work well for this reason alone. 4) For a variation from straight combat, try 4e skill challenges.  The math needs to be adjusted to accommodate a big group, but you'd be surprised how much players pay attention when they need to come up with creative uses for one of their skills and roll some dice. 5) Finally, the DM should be more tolerant than usual of the players engaging in non-game activities.  My ideal is to keep everyone engaged at all times, but if a player knows their turn is not likely to come up for five minutes, they'll naturally look for other stuff to do.  As long as they're able to survey what's going on when their turn comes up, I have no problem with them doing whatever they want to do in the meantime.</blockquote>

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