In our recent episode on “How Many Players Are Too Many for One D&D Game,” we answered a listener’s question regarding “How big is too big” for adventuring parties. As we do with most discussions, we broadened the question to include earlier editions of Dungeons & Dragons, as well as completely different systems (like TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes and Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu).
However, the great question from our listener was referencing D&D 5E, specifically. This is a topic that we’ve discussed on multiple episodes, as it can alter the gameplay of 5E significantly. Thorin, Tony and I are also uniquely positioned to discuss this as we all run games within 5E that include six, seven, eight, and even nine players!
The challenges this creates can be confusing for both beginners and advanced DMs. So, I decided to share two examples of running 5e games with eight players to reflect on how I did it, what worked and what didn’t, and, hopefully, help you agree that, while having too many people wanting to play is a good problem to have, it’s still a problem.
Tradition: How the Game WAS Played
As I mentioned in the episode, the roots of the game, reaching back all the way to 1974, encouraged many players at the table – a far cry from the four-person adventuring party that has become the standard.
The Original Dungeons & Dragons game (known as “the White Box”) has this quote from creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson:
“Number of Players: At least one referee and from four to fifty players can be handled in any single campaign, but the referee to player ratio should be about 1:20 or thereabouts.”
Can you even imagine running a table with twenty players? However, as our OG Gamer friend, Scott, has confided to us, he ran an OD&D game in college with 22-25 players. We won’t get into the specifics of why the older editions could handle this kind of play, but suffice it to say, it was unique to the earliest editions of the game.
What this does tell us, though, is that the problem of having a lot of people who want to play started all the way back then, so feel comforted that you’re not completely alone in the wilderness.
A Tale of Two Games
Two specific examples come to mind when running large groups, and I’ve referenced them both on the show: My Halloween One-Shot set in a post-apocalyptic New Jersey – where the party had to traverse the Pine Barrens and deal with The Jersey Devil and Mother Leeds – and the first game of what was to be a West Marches-style campaign. As an aside, I was seriously considering including the 7-person Marvel Super Heroes game I ran as well but wanted to keep the focus on D&D 5e. Suffice it to say, many of the same issues arose in that game as well!
Both of these games ended up having 7-9 people at the table, and both were originally meant to be one-shots. As you can gather, especially from the Jersey Devil article, neither was finished in one night. This leads to the first and most obvious issue with large groups: the time sink.
Time Dilation
On the surface, you could approach this as a math problem. What I mean by that is, if your party of four adventurers spend four hours in a session and get through X amount of material, it’s not outlandish to think that doubling the amount of players will take double the time to get through the same amount of material.
Obviously, there are an incredible amount of variables to that equation, such as your party make-up, experience level of your players, the type of encounters that they come in contact with, etc. The problem will still remain: If everyone at the table is involved in the game, you’re adding exponential amounts of time with each additional player. Everything from shopping lists to talking with the innkeepers to dealing with the town guard and entering that most time-honored traditions of D&D – sweet, sweet combat – takes longer with more players.
This happened in both of the games I referenced above. What could have been a one-shot adventure through the Pine Barrens of New Jersey turned into a multi-night adventure. To be honest, it would have been a stretch to turn that particular adventure into a four-hour session, but the size of the group only added time.
Conversely, the adventure that I ran in the West Marches-style game was based on Matt Colville’s Delian Tomb one-shot. Between getting the party to the initial town and then having them travel to the temple ruins and engage with the goblins that had taken up residence within the ruins, we ended up only exploring two of the three rooms by the end of the night. Those poor characters have been about to face that bugbear boss for two years!
The Combat Slog
There’s no getting around it: D&D is a TTRPG that has combat as its majority shareholder. We have discussed on multiple occasions the slog that combat often turns into for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is how many players are at your table. It doesn’t matter how quickly you track initiative (or do away with it entirely, as PDM discusses), how fast your players are at making decisions, how well you know the monsters and their abilities, or any number of other skills and tricks that you use. They all help, but in the end, when you’ve got eight players at the table, one more monster makes it nine. Then ten. Then fifteen … You get the point.
This was one of the main issues when I ran Colville’s Delian Tomb. I had eight players who had to decide when or if they would move, what spell or attack they wanted to use and what bonus action they might employ before moving on to the next person. As I had several brand-new players at the table that night, this could have run quicker with more experienced players (our Curse of Strahd group for instance), but eight players is eight players, no matter which way you slice it.
And as I made clear during the episode, this example shows that it is not only a problem with high-level play, where players have access to a wide range of choices, but with basic first-level characters as well.
Splitting the Party Is Inevitable
Splitting the party. It’s going to happen in a four-player game, it’s going to happen in a two-player game. Hell, the only way it couldn’t happen is in a solo game, but I’ve learned to never say never when it comes to D&D players!
It often leads to some of the most memorable encounters in any session and can run pretty smoothly with a smaller group. But, as we’ve been seeing with other aspects of the game, this becomes difficult to manage when you’ve got more players at the table.
In the Pine Barrens adventure, the party had come upon the town where my character had last been seen. For context, my paladin, Aeron Pendragon, had gone off on a quest and gotten himself captured. The party had to go and rescue him. As an aside, this is the easiest way to run a quick adventure to give the existing DM a break: Have your character get captured and send the party on a person quest instead of a fetch quest!
This is where the party decided to split up, with several of them returning to the inn, one of them going to speak with the blacksmith and one deciding to break into the Mayor’s office. “Why would they want to break into the Mayor’s office in a town that’s trying to help them locate their companion?” Great question. I would respond with, “Why do D&D players do 90% of the things they do?”
This turned a simple social encounter cut scene into three separate episodes and left the players that weren’t involved in the break-in to be the audience for one player. While this can lead to laughs, it also leads to the third problem you’re guaranteed to face when your party gets too big.
Screentime
We often discuss the importance of giving every character the spotlight at different times. In a long-running campaign, this is easily done as you have dozens of sessions within which to focus on different characters. After thirty sessions in our Curse of Strahd campaign, I’ve been able to open up the backstory and character arc of every character and recently spilled clues as to the backstory and plot involving the final one – our gnome chaos engine named Little One.
However, in a one-shot or multi-night adventure, the party screen time becomes a finite resource that is used up completely in four hours. So, the player that wants to go on a midnight raid without telling their party uses up some of that finite resource for nothing more than the rest of the players to become audience members.
In a four- or five-person game, these types of interludes will affect the overall game less because you have more of that finite resource to give to each player. In a seven-, eight- or nine-person game, you might as well start scheduling the next session midway through the first, because you’re gonna need it.
Final Thoughts
It bears repeating because of its importance: Having too many people who want to play is a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem. As we discussed in the episode, we have a player pool easily numbering in the twenties, which is cool as hell. But, we also realize from our experiences running large groups that it has to be managed effectively or your games will suffer and you won’t have the same level of player enthusiasm to start a new one.
I’ve detailed three guaranteed issues that you’ll have when your table begins to exceed that five-six person limit. Depending on your own unique skills and the make-up of your table, that limit could shift slightly up or down, but between three experienced DMs (wise, even…), we’ve found that limit to be accurate.
So, what do you do when you’ve built it and they’ve come? That’s where you can start to experiment with things that you never could of if you had only your core game group. You could have another player finally take over the reins of running a game. You could launch a West Marches campaign that is built, specifically, for a lot of players. You could create our brainstorm of The Cannonball Run McGuffin race.
Whatever you decide, make sure that you, as Mike Shea advises, “Optimize Towards Fun.” Not to be too corny, but fun is the only thing that you can have too much of at the table and not have your game suffer because of it.
Until next time, Heroes … LIVE THE ADVENTURE!
Nice article, Dave! I wanted to mention that while I did in fact run a single session of my D&D campaign with over 20 players (and it became legendary) it was far more typical to run games with 8-10 players. Thinking back, I seem to recall that we eventually decided that the idea adventuring party had 8 members. Usually two magic users, two clerics and the other four fighters with maybe a thief thrown in.