Dungeon Master: Large Player Character Groups

The size of the adventure group has a great impact on the campaign. Everything from the resources available to the players to how death is handled is impacted. For this reason, I hope to go over some of the reasons to have a large group of player characters as well as some of the difficulties that results.

Many Players, Many Characters

Having the right sized group is important for creating a fun game, since too few players doesn't give enough for people to build off each-other and too many players leads to large breaks during combat as well as conflicts when role-playing. However, it's not always practical to break a larger group into 2 smaller groups. When run correctly, a large group of many players also means that the players can build off each-other more effectively since the larger group allows a larger variety of ideas.

Solutions

The main issue that can be solved in a large group is the large breaks during combat. Part of the problem in these cases typically comes from players wanting to make good decisions in a life or death situation and as such taking time to think through their decisions. The more players there are, the more this will become apparent. Knowing your group is especially important to solve this, but even something as simple as making people talk through their entire turn can help players take less time to take their turn. In extreme cases, you can impose a time limit (some groups even prefer this to make it more tense and because they have other people's turns to think). To make things fair, the Dungeon Master should follow the same rules (though leeway may need to be given since the Dungeon Master is responsible for for more).

Multiple Characters Move at Once

The Dungeon Master can also make the players take their turns at once. This allows them to collaborate on strategies but also makes it more interesting for people who are watching since there is more to keep track. There are some minor rules considerations for this situation, such as how to decide who goes when (let players choose their groups based on a group size determined by the Dungeon Master and let the best initiative bonus roll for initiative). In extreme cases, you can even determine surprise and initiative completely by group instead of individual characters. The dungeon master can also do the same to reduce rolls and make it fair.

Few Players, Many Characters

The more player characters there are, the more resources the players have available to them. I've been careful up to this point of saying player character because the Dungeon Master can always allow each player to have more than one character if that number of players isn't available. There are many benefits to doing so. It gives the players more options in combat. The power of numbers can allow the party to accomplish feats impossible with a smaller party. It gives them more options in role-playing situations (they have more skills in total to distribute). It also makes the death of a character less of a hassle for the player, since they have other characters to play in the meantime. There are also all of the some disadvantages of having many players and many characters present.

Multiple Characters Move at Once

Like with the previous example, allowing multiple characters to act at once helps speed things up and keeps people engaged. In this case, however, instead of multiple players moving at once it will be only once player at a time but they will move all of their characters at once. As in the previous case, I suggest determining initiative and possibly even surprise on a group basis (in this case, it is also a player basis).