RPG tables tend to grow. Once you get the game going and people are having fun, they start talking about that fun, and new players come in quickly. The only problem is, most TTRPGs are optimized to run with 3 to 5 players (plus the DM), and DM gets tougher are you expand to 6, 8 even 10 players.
Throughout our DMing careers, we’ve run a lot of large tables. Most of our current games have 6 or more players, and we routinely have 7 or 8 at the table. We’ve all had some experience running even more than that, too.
In this episode, we’ll dive into the many issues that make large tables challenging and what Thorin, Tony and Dave do to overcome those obstacles.
1:00 The biggest games we’ve ever DMed
3:00 What happens when you start getting a lot of players?
- Players’ backstories start to slip through the cracks
- Encounter balance: The party starts blasting through encounters super easily
- Slow play and “the interminable slog of 2-hour combats”
- Table talk and trying to keep the game moving without losing player attention
10:00 How virtual tabletops like Roll20 influence table talk, combat and player attention
12:00 Monster lineup, CR and the sweet spot that challenges a large party without making it a slog
17:00 How we use CR (and before that, HD and monster category) to plan encounters and adjust for large parties
24:00 Running Curse of Strahd with 6 players and the encounters that still took the party to the edge
27:00 Building encounters to challenge the front and back of the party
30:00 Scene control: How to handle 8 players fighting for airtime, and the ones who don’t
36:00 Encouraging everyone to step up and have a voice
39:00 Overlapping character roles/backgrounds/personalities
45:00 Choosing and distributing treasure for large parties — and dealing with the exponential escalation of magic in and out of combat
47:00 Club band vs. stadium show: Dealing with compounded player expectations
50:00 Can you trust large parties to make consensus decisions quickly, or should you railroad them to keep things moving?
56:00 Should you bring new D&D players into large games?
62:00 How to keep from bogging down, running slow and getting boring
71:00 Technology issues using Roll20 using 6+ players and how we solved them
76:00 Final thoughts