When the party gets too big

[Jhaelen]

Did you somehow not see the rest of my post?

I did, here it is in its glorious completeness:

I suggest you do what Gygax did. He could have as many as about fifteen players at once, but ran for as little as one at a time.

And that's supposed to help me how?

If you aren't interested in being helpful why are you posting at all? I happen to be a player in a group of 13 and would really like to know how other groups are dealing with that challenge.

I find our current 'solution' to be a bit unsatisfactory to say the least because it's basically 'first come, first serve' with a hard limit of seven players for a given session.

 

[Lwaxy]

Is your group online, too?

We have little issues in offline games with high numbners, save sometimes the delay when people think about what to do. Largest offline group is 13 and the GM, too.

 

[howandwhy99]

I prefer large D&D groups that number in the teens, but certainly not with most other games. For D&D, if the group ever did get too big I think I'd simply suggest we divide and put each in a different Probability Dimension. A kind of schism that split the original timeline in two at that point. Easy enough if one half does some Astral travel.

Then there might be some ability to travel back and forth between dimensions without (too much) worry. The only issue might be players assuming something held true from their dimension to the other because they share a single history.

 

[Jhaelen]

Is your group online, too?

No, we're only playing face-to-face, meeting at one of the players' house.

In past we played with up to ten players, but the delays get very long, resulting in players getting distracted by other things which makes the delays even longer... It's also a lot harder for the DM's to design challenging encounters and manage the multitudes of opponents required.
We never managed more than 2-3 encounters in a 12+ hours session!

That's the one good thing that capping the number of players at seven achieved:
We can easily manage twice the number of encounters in one session.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

I like [MENTION=20323]Quickleaf[/MENTION] 's suggestion to have the characters pulled in separate directions by two objectives. But I'd also have a frank discussion with the players about how the size of the group isn't working and it needs to be split in two. Then I'd collaborate on how to split the group and have discussions on ways to alter the connections between characters so their relationship still works or gets more interesting from a story standpoint.

For example, like Quickleaf suggested, separating the bard and magician could add drama to the relationship. Or start resolving some of the connections--the orc shaman learns that the dwarf's father spent his last days in Waterdeep (where incidentally Quest A is taking place). Now there's no reason that the shaman has to stay by the dwarf's side.

Bottom line is, I think you can resolve it by everyone acknowledging the issue and collaborating on splitting into two groups. (But that's without knowing the people and emotions involved.)