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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lostingeneral" data-source="post: 5528854" data-attributes="member: 6674340">Hi everyone.I've been running a 4E Eberron campaign for a few months now, and we've rapidly escalated from our humble beginnings with 3 players and myself. We quickly moved up to five players, then six, and then one moved away so he was replaced by a new player. This kept us at six, and for me even that is bordering on too much to effectively handle, given the somewhat-sluggish nature of the game's system. It is clearly not meant to comfortably fit player groups greater than five.Recently, I've had two more requests to join. Of these new potential players, I already told one that he could play (way back when we had 3 and needed more), the other was invited by another player and assured a spot, and regardless I still don't want to cut them both out. To make matters worse, my original player that moved away is potentially coming back home, which would bring me up to 9 players and 10 people at the table over all.I don't pretend to have the mental wherewithal to handle this. I will tear all of my hair out before one encounter is finished -- assuming that it is even possible to finish one encounter under these circumstances.Due to social dynamics of my group I will reiterate that I really don't want to cut anybody out. I've come up with five possible (reasonable) solutions to this problem:1) Take one of my newcomers (one of them has some experience) and enlist him as a co-DM instead of a player. DM roles would then be split between us and the party would number at eight instead.2) Split the campaign up into two. One of my current players has been itching to try on the DM hat and was in early planning stages for his own campaign; I'm thinking of just asking him to DM a branching campaign instead. In this scenario he and I would be dedicated DMs and likely also play in each others' games (in large part because he's very attached to his PC and wouldn't want to lose him). The upside is that no table will ever have more than five players (quite manageable I think) and players can switch groups between adventures, but the downside is that this is probably going to be pretty chaotic and difficult to coordinate.I'm leaning most towards this one right now. I think it has a lot of potential, plus I like the prospect of actually playing versus being DM for a change. Between adventures maybe we could have gatherings of both groups, full party encounters (ala idea 1) for major battles... I don't know.3) Like 2, only instead, two separate campaigns are had and there is no crossover between them. This keeps things a lot more organized but player groups become rigid this way and we tend to like the social gathering aspect of D&D.4) Divvy up roles usually DM-only and assign them to players to both speed up combat and give them something to do; this includes the ever-popular "on-deck" initiative system for one player, giving others hit points to track, damage, etc. I'm on the fence about this because I know that whatever speed boost this provides will be nothing compared to the inevitable slowdown of trying to play with 9 PCs. I feel the game gets bogged down with 6... I can't even imagine nine.5) Just tell the two new players they cannot play and we are overfilled as it is. Again, though, this is a last resort if nothing else pans out.So, I'd really like to hear some thoughts. Which of these ideas (if any) seems like it will work, and if not, any suggestions on what we can try? Anybody else ever have a similar problem?Thanks in advance!PS: I'm not sure if this was the right place to put this but since I'm only really familiar with 4E and the combat slowdown appears to be one of its hallmarks, I put it here.</blockquote>

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