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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SiderisAnon" data-source="post: 3858572" data-attributes="member: 44949">In college, we had a chess and gaming club where we had to take any student and put them into a game. We never had enough GMs for anything, so I've had 9+ players before.* Have a party leader who speaks for the party. This can help move things along if you have a decent player at the helm because they can cut through the noise and get things moving.* Be willing to allow the players to split up, especially if they have different ideas. Note that I said "players". I remember one situation where half the players were concerned with the mystery, the other half with just kicking in some doors, so the players split up and while half of them worked at the table to figure out the pieces they had, I ran combat with the others. When the combat was done, they puzzle-people had their answer worked out.* Find a player you can trust to handle shopping and such. Make them a kind of assistant. They help people with buying gear and that sort of thing. (This is not really intended for keeping players honest, it's because there's always a couple of people who don't have the book memorized and need some help with things like that.)* If you allow the buying of magic items, make up shopping lists you can hand out in town. List the quantities available and let people buy what they want. (Or just do things like, "You can buy as many of these as you want.")* When it comes to combat, everyone has tons of time to think. When their turn comes up, if they cannot immediately say what they're going to do, they get skipped. There's no excuse for slowing things down when you've got nine people's actions to think through.* Have everyone roll their attacks BEFORE their initiative comes up. That way they can go, "I swing on the orc. I get AC 18 and do 9 damage," and you can keep rolling.* No henchmen unless their job is to guard the horses and never speak. Detailed character-specific roleplaying is handled in e-mail. Don't set up encounters where having a mob of people is impossible, unless you want to leave most of the PCs bored. (Or just wave your hand and say, "Fred goes in and gets the following information...")* Don't get upset if someone is reading or doing homework quietly in the corner. If they're not disrupting the game, they're not a problem.* Be prepared to make things happen if the players get too distracted. I taught this to one group by having them get attacked every time they started yelling at each other in the dungeon. (The noise attracts monsters, after all.)* Don't allow odd classes, psionics, new prestige classes, or material from third party books unless you know them by heart. There's nothing worse than having to look up a rule in the middle of things.* Make a rule that no PC can perform an action that the player doesn't know the rules for. This can involve opening the book and reading them step by step when doing the action (such as a grapple). Allow for another player helping, so that more experienced players can help newer players with the rules.* If you have a newish player, assign a more experienced player to help them with the rules. This saves you tons of time.* Have the players e-mail you between sessions of what they'd like to accomplish in the next session or two. If they don't e-mail you, then don't worry about it because they obviously aren't worried about it.And finally: Just remember that you're there to have fun. It doesn't matter how far the plot advances. If you're having fun, you've succeeded. (In all honesty, if you figure out how to ignore the slow progress and never stress over it, tell me how. I never figured it out. Sorry.)</blockquote>

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