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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5965908" data-attributes="member: 54877">Yes and no. Yes, you can simply change the budget, and the game scales quite well in expected results. What it doesn't do, is scale well in the time of play and the nature of that play. &nbsp;For example, as one who usually runs large parties, I've noticed that somewhere, usually around the sixth or seventh player, there is a drastic drop off in attention if you use cyclic initiative. That is, strictly from the math, you would expect cyclic initiative to take a linearly increasing amount of time to go around the table, based on the particpants (adjusting for individual analysis paralysis and the like). However, once you cross the &quot;boredom line&quot; on that linear increase, people stop paying as much attention, and this in turn increases the time it takes. &nbsp;This is a problem that D&amp;D has seldom addressed well, though in AD&amp;D people probably didn't see it, because the upper limit was higher. Not many people ran for 6, 8, 11, and 15 people. I can attest that the same cut off is there in AD&amp;D, just up around 11 or 12 people. (It varies somewhat by DM, too, of course.) One reason was the simpler nature of low-level AD&amp;D, and another is the side-by-side initiative means that the bottleneck is not action resolution but communication between DM and players. So it's not an accident that the problem start hitting hard at about the same max (12) as can have a long, productive business meeting or sit around a table. &nbsp;I think the answer is that every time some designer feels the needs to write a sentence such as: &quot;This works better for N people.&quot; or &quot;The expected average is N players.&quot; .... that should be taken as a sign that there is something off on the underlying design. Design it to scale by participants (and by level of participants), and it will. It merely constrains the design in ways that might not matter to people that think 4-6 players + DM is Thor's gift to gaming, heretics be damned. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />&nbsp;I'm sure that there are parallel issues in the 2-3 player area, but I can only guess what they might be, rarely having run that way, and never by choice. DM + solo player is such an odd bird, I hesitate to say whether that can be readily and seemlessly included or not.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5965908, member: 54877"] Yes and no. Yes, you can simply change the budget, and the game scales quite well in expected results. What it doesn't do, is scale well in the time of play and the nature of that play. For example, as one who usually runs large parties, I've noticed that somewhere, usually around the sixth or seventh player, there is a drastic drop off in attention if you use cyclic initiative. That is, strictly from the math, you would expect cyclic initiative to take a linearly increasing amount of time to go around the table, based on the particpants (adjusting for individual analysis paralysis and the like). However, once you cross the "boredom line" on that linear increase, people stop paying as much attention, and this in turn increases the time it takes. This is a problem that D&D has seldom addressed well, though in AD&D people probably didn't see it, because the upper limit was higher. Not many people ran for 6, 8, 11, and 15 people. I can attest that the same cut off is there in AD&D, just up around 11 or 12 people. (It varies somewhat by DM, too, of course.) One reason was the simpler nature of low-level AD&D, and another is the side-by-side initiative means that the bottleneck is not action resolution but communication between DM and players. So it's not an accident that the problem start hitting hard at about the same max (12) as can have a long, productive business meeting or sit around a table. I think the answer is that every time some designer feels the needs to write a sentence such as: "This works better for N people." or "The expected average is N players." .... that should be taken as a sign that there is something off on the underlying design. Design it to scale by participants (and by level of participants), and it will. It merely constrains the design in ways that might not matter to people that think 4-6 players + DM is Thor's gift to gaming, heretics be damned. :D I'm sure that there are parallel issues in the 2-3 player area, but I can only guess what they might be, rarely having run that way, and never by choice. DM + solo player is such an odd bird, I hesitate to say whether that can be readily and seemlessly included or not. [/QUOTE]

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