I’ve been running a large party since I started DM’ing 4th Ed., and while I appreciate the fact that I’m able to play and have friends willing to play with me, running a large party has its ups and downs. In this article, I hope to give you several tips to manage the table filled with eager players of all types and personalities.
Preparation
This is key. An unprepared DM is wasting everyone’s time. It’s hard to get people together to play a 4-5 hour game, so it’s your responsibility to be prepared. With a large group, even more so, because your time is to flesh out a story and encounters is reduced. With that thought, I’ll give you this tip: Since you are looking at the possibility of running 1 or 2 less encounters that what you’d normally run with a regular sized party, do your best to spice them up. Be over-the-top, be creative, and make these encounters pop. You may only run 2 encounters due to the party size, so make them memorable. Make them so interesting that your players will not complain about how little they may have advanced the story!
Encounter Area
This is important. Adventurers don’t like crowded spaces. 7 or 8 heroes with swords, axes, and fireballs plus 7 or 8 enemies with their own weapons and claws in a tight little space don’t mix well. Open it up! You have to give all these people room to maneuver. I recommend using a 1″ gridded easel paper pad for making battle maps with large encounter areas. These are large enough to accommodate many combatants comfortably. Pre-draw these ahead of your session to save valuable time, and you’re good to go. Since you are pre-drawing, take the time to really make the areas pop. Think of nice terrain and other fantastic features that’ll make your maps interesting for your large party.
Initiative
While this may seems silly to some, the way you handle initiative can be a time saver when you DM larger groups. I ask for initiative rolls clockwise around the table. I’ve also recently begun using a system I learned from fellow blogger SlyFlourish.com, it consists of hanging folded-over index cards with everyone’s name over the top of the DM screen, in intitiative order. That way, everyone knows who’s next in the rotation. It’s working out great for us. Of course, there are many different tried and true methods of keeping initiative, so ultimately you’ll find one that works best for your group. One trick I have is to pre-roll the monster’s initiative ahead of time, and fit the player’s around them as they roll. I am also going to be reviewing an initiative and condition tracker I found on the net, so be on the lookout for that in the coming days.
Combat Length
And here we get to the one thing everyone seems to complain the most about 4th Ed., combat. Is it long? Yes. Is it even longer with more players? Oh, hell yes. Is it really? Yes. So, then, what can we do? Okay, like I wrote above, pre-draw your maps, and pre-roll your monsters’ initiative. It will save you time. Have your minis or counters clearly labeled so everyone knows who is who, and you avoid the “Who is the purple skittle again?” type questions. They bog down game play. Make your players’ actions timed. Use an hourglass at the table. The sand spiraling down, making its way towards the bottom of the hour glass may even heighten tensions at the table, in a good way. Have a :60 or :90 one, and limit players’ actions to the time allotted. They go over, they are skipped. Some come in neat designs that may even feel D&D-ish enough to not stand out too much. Some player’s may not like this house-rule, so speak about it first, looking at its pros and cons. Also, read and re-read how your monsters behave. You don’t want players looking at you numbly as you stumble your way figuring out how the goblin behaves. You need to know your monsters ahead of time. Don’t learn them during the big fight. Unacceptable.
Communicate
The DMG points out the different types of players that play D&D. This is a great read for us newbie DMs running larger parties. Read this, and identify who in your party fits what description, then use this to your advantage as you plan out stories and ideas. Also, speak to your players about what interests them, ask them what they get out of the game. You may be devoting your energy to planning out a cool story arc to a player who may just want to hack n’ slash his way up to level 30th, without caring about a plot or an adventure. “I just want to kill stuff.” Okay, give him that. Obviously he’s not interested in playing a large “story-arc” role in your campaign. That’s a good thing for you, because you can take more time to devoting story moments to the type of player that does like that kind of play. Talk to your party, you may be surprised at what type of game they are expecting.
Table Assignments
You need some crowd control at the table. Have one guy be the party spokesman. When you ask, “What are you guys doing?”, you can’t have 8 people talking all at once. It’ll drive you nuts. Assign one guy to be the party voice, telling you what the group is doing as a whole. Also, have one guy be the rules guy that opens the book when a discussion comes up. He’s the book reader at the table for rules issues that may creep up, while obviously, you are the final judge and referee.
Me? I ran 6 players, a pet, and one bad guy. Piece of cake.
In summary, preparation, adjustments, and communication are the key to streamlining a game with a large party. It can be done, and it can be very rewarding for all of you. I hope these tips help you out in your game, and I would appreciate it if anyone had other tips for DMs, to leave them below! Thanks!
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xerosided
August 2, 2009
My current group is three strong right now, including the DM. Our last campaign petered out because of a few less-than-stellar players, and ultimately we used the resulting hiatus as a way to ditch the dead weight. As a result of the previous batch of bad players, we’re also all a little hesitant to bring new, untested people into our group… so we’re going to give a two-person party a try.
I’ll be DMing this one in Eberron (having fallen in love with the setting through the recent books), and I’m going to keep the adventure more toward the role-playing side of things to minimize the awkwardness of rebalancing encounters for such a small party.
Is this going to work? Who knows! Combat will be quicker, because there will be far less combatants on the table, but it’ll also be much tougher because of the lack of party balance. Whatever the case, I think this is going to be a fun challenge for us.
Icosahedrophilia
August 2, 2009
Great post (although the plural of “player” is “players,” not “player’s,” and the plural of “DM” is “DMs,” not “DM’s”). I know you’re aware of my homemade JavaScript initiative tracker, FightCard, which saves me a lot of “bookkeeping” time at the table. As detailed in the show notes for various episodes of the Icosahedrophilia podcast, I almost always build my encounter areas (using WotC’s Dungeon Tiles, SkeletonKey Games’s e-Adventure Tiles, Dundjinni output, or whatever) ahead of time on foam core board or posterboard, unless I really want the players to have a sense of exploring the unknown. I agree 100% about preparation. The 4e DMG even suggests that you run through an “encounter script” during your preparation time; the better you know your players, the better you know what to expect, and that can help you react on the fly.
Icosahedrophilia
August 2, 2009
Oh, by the way, my group has been 7 PCs for the last year, and is probably about to grow to 8 PCs.
xerosided
August 2, 2009
I’ve been using the easel pad for the past few years. It’s really nice in a lot of ways, but of course it has its drawbacks: first, the pad is really tough to store anywhere as it doesn’t stand up on its own and the paper picks up stains with ease. second, markers bleed and the paper is fairly thin, so unless you’re tearing out each individual map, the players will be able to see the next encounter area fairly well… which will either confuse them during this combat or tempt them to metagaming. third, flipping pages is dangerous when there’s books, minis, dice, brownies, mountain dew, and chinese food on the table already. Otherwise, it’s a great way to do things. My ground ultimately settled on a combination of predrawn maps on the pad and off-the-cuff maps on my Mega Battlemat.
xerosided
August 2, 2009
my ground -> my group
MTGeezus
August 2, 2009
I play in a group of 6 PCs. Combat is very slow and it becomes terribly dull when the party has inevitability and just need somebody to roll a finishing hit. Something that took me 10 months to figure out is that effects are a pain for the DM to keep track of, so make either little tokens or tiny signs to stick on the monsters when you daze them or mark them or curse them or whatever it is your character can do. Little tokens and fences for your zones are great too. Especially, write (save) on tokens so the DM can remember to roll saves if he needs to. I’m not sure what else to do to help the game, it gets pretty cramped. Players get bored while a character talks to the NPCs, players get bored when combat drags, players get bored when their character’s awesome power whiffs. I don’t know what keeps us coming back. Maybe we should just watch sports on Sundays afternoons instead.
Richard
August 6, 2009
Don’t forget that if players are not prepared, then it doesn’t matter if the DM is prepared. I am a player in Newbie’s world and at times we have players still lerning their character and that slooooows down game play termendously. Overall, a DM has to keep a tight leash on the group or else they will make your life hell. Make your word final and be firm on that stand. I’ve had my share of abuse from my days of DMing but I kept my cool and after a discussion on a rule or new house-rule I would enforce it and not let players try to reopen discussion on the topic thus losing more time playing.
Newbie, you are doing a great job with this site and as a DM. Keep up the god work and have fun @ GENCON.
Telas
August 7, 2009
Good article.
Something that I did back in my 3.5 days was to preroll initiative for the whole party. This can be more tricky in 4E if someone has the “+X if you see me” abilities, but it can still be done.
If you’re using index cards, have them pre-sorted, and you can even do a quick re-sort if the “+X” shows up.
Another pointer – Have someone at the table time the combat rounds, and point out who takes the longest. This isn’t to berate anyone, but most players can’t see how long their rounds are, only how long everyone else’s is.
Neal Hebert
August 9, 2009
The most important advice to give someone running a group of more than 5 PCs is, in my experience, to simply find a way to run a smaller group (preferably by running a second game or offering some players first preference for a slot at the table next campaign). It’s better for the players and it’s better for the DM.
I’ll repeat my (possibly tired) refrain – all players want screen time for their PC. There are legitimate real-world constraints on a session that limit the amount of time available. The fewer people there are, the more everyone’s PC gets to be the star (for a little while).
Though there’s more to gaming night than playing the game – camaraderie, bullshitting and alcohol are also important (though now that I’m a teetotaler the alcohol isn’t all that important to us). But the game is pretty important, and it’s the moments when PCs get the spotlight that make the game live in everyone’s memories.
I mentioned in a comment a long time ago that I was losing a player, and I wanted to give him a memorable good-bye game. The way I did it was by putting the spotlight on his character (something all the players helped me do, quite generously of them). He’s a hack-n-slasher, but he roleplayed with great gusto for this game because I made sure everything came down to his characters’ interests – a test of riddles, a pictographic puzzle (that took me four hours to design), a formal dinner heavily inspired by the Colonel Kurtz scene at the end of Apocalypse Now, and a fight with a dragon.
The game came off splendidly. But part of the reason it came off the way it did was because I only have 4 players, so even with the spotlight on Chris’s character everyone else got meaningful screen time.
Understand that I’m not saying large groups can’t work or that they aren’t rewarding – I’m just saying that they’re a perfect storm to royally fuck up a newbie DM’s new campaign. I’m a veteran DM, and most of them time they’re something I’m just not willing to tackle because the things I value in gaming are largely incompatible with the screen time diffused among that many players.
-neal
newbiedm
August 10, 2009
@neal: I agree with this entire post, but unfortunately for me, running 2 parties is out of the question, as i have limited playing time as it is.
DM extrordinare
October 24, 2010
I know this is an old post, but I wanna brag to some one. Just ran an 8 hour game with 10 players, 2 pets and 10 bad guys and it went amazingly! A damn feather in my cap if I do say so.
Michael
July 28, 2012
Recommending this article to my DM. We’re about to start a campaign with 7 players and a DM on the other side of the internet. This’ll be interesting…
Bill W
April 16, 2013
I know this post is oldish, but I appreciated the suggestions and thought I’d add another for anyone else that stumbles across it. Our group has 9-10 PCs every session. One suggestion that I did not see, but we use, and has been very successful, is that we have 2 DMs.
The other DM is responsible for the RP portions of the game and I am responsible for the combat. We meet once during the week to compare notes and plan ahead so the story lines and encounters match. Plus, it cuts the amount of work for each of us in half so we’re not getting burned out. In addition, if the party is split in two, it makes it much easier to deal with both (or multiple) groups at the same time.
In addition, this allows players who want to try their hand at DM an opportunity, knowing they have at another experienced DM to work with to help them along. 🙂 Large parties are hard to deal with due to all the different personalities, fights for control, etc, but having twice the DM power goes a long way towards better controlling the room. 🙂
wraith
January 25, 2014
i find that a dry erase board with magnets to represent my players and monsters to be very useful. they make quick battle grids and are useful for recording initiative as well. i have mine hung on the wall so everyone can see it
ziggy34
February 11, 2015
Thanks for writing this, I’m a first time DM and my party is 8-10 ppl depending on attendance. This was not my plan. (I’ve turned away four other ppl who want to play too!) we’re discussing splitting into two parties, but I dont have the time for that. Im gonna try some of these tips 🙂