Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Whisper_Swiftblade 04-05-07, 03:56 PM	the biggest I was ever in had 7 people and was a horror story. The DM was an experenced player but was still new to DMing, the group seemed to develope ADD like you would never belive, two of the players where boyfreind and girlfreind, our alignments where all kinds of messed up for charicters who choose to work togather (acctuly that was kinda fun, my hexblade the rogue and the barbarian where ploting against the pally) we did not have a healer (unless you count the pally and the ranger, but they did not help much) 5 players had no idea what they where doing which left myself a freind and the DM franticly trying to help everyone at once while makeing our PCs, which took so long the DM eventuly just said to forget about skills and worry about them later (which as you may have guessed left the rogue pretty mad). it did not realy get any better after that, which probally has something to do with why that particular adventure was cut short. so what are your stories?
Aliquid 04-05-07, 04:03 PM	I was at a birthday party once with a couple hundred people.... oh wait that's not what type of party you are talking about ;) Most I have been in is eight. I don't like groups that size.. everything just takes too long to happen. Not just the combat, but decision making as well, and there is always someone who isn't paying attention. I like a party of three to five.
Nature-boy 04-05-07, 04:19 PM	I was leading a session for a normal group of four, when another player showed up late because he dragged in a bunch of friends we hadn't seen in a while. It was a great reunion, but they also played, or wanted to learn to play D&D. The table was crowded with a party of eight plus myself as DM. It was rather hectic, but I kept my cool, and mostly everyone had enough fun to get them through the night. I did have to come up with a quick table rule--"if you're not contributing to the plot or taking an action, don't speak."
SokenzanMarauder 04-05-07, 04:22 PM	I've hit five (six including myself) it was hellish. I prefer DMing for groups of four or less, preferably less. -Gene
MagicKnight 04-05-07, 04:22 PM	Mine was a first edition party. There were 8 players and me as the DM. We had a cleric, fighter, assassin, thief, magic-user, druid, fighter/thief, and paladin. They were chaotic at first, there were clicks (sp) formed and people opposed each other. The thieves would steal from other players, the assassin was always trying to be hired to assassinate the paladin and the paladin was always kicking someones ass. And ultimately the cleric and magic-user held the power that everyone wanted to keep friends with but they picked on each other. This was fixable I thought and I did fix it. I gave them an extremely powerful adversary that could beat the stuffing out of them then back INTO them again. After the first such fight where three of the eight were slain and of the five all of them were beaten severaly. They were levels 8 through 10 at this point and they had not taken such a beating before. They raised the dead and got it back together and pursued the enemy. They were still up to their old tricks but not quite as vehmently. When they battled it this time it had cohorts to help and the ass beating was much worse. The assassin got it worst having lost an eye and another charcter lost his hand. It was brutal, five were killed (I gave them plenty of chances to get away but they kept up the attack) and the others had to flee and come back later for the (now looted) bodies of their allies. Raise the dead. From that point on there was some serious team work. They were out of money, their magic items were running out and they even had to scrape together armor. This had unified them into a cohesive party of adventurers that didn't bicker anymore. They still had their differences but suddenly they were less important and they were able to discuss them with more maturity. This was great! Really, wonderful to see such a group of players. The draw back was from that point on I was totally screwed. They were a well oiled machine that slaughtered anything I put before them. No matter how diabolical the encounter. No matter how dangerous the environment. Time went by to the point that we all had to go our seperate ways in life and the group broke up but I still have all of their character sheets and some times go back to them to remember the 'good times'. Haven't had a group like that again. :(
Archangel_James 04-05-07, 04:30 PM	Hmm. It was only one session, but I think there were ten or eleven players (including myself), plus one DM. You had to make your character pretty damn interesting to get any spotlight time at all in that game...
Seeker95 04-05-07, 04:43 PM	1e/2e party of 12. 3e party of 8. I was a player for the first game. I was DM for the second.
RavingDork 04-05-07, 04:55 PM	Once hosted a game for 8 players. Two of the players quit halfway through because they had the lowest initiatives in the party and the fight would be over in the first round before they even got their turn. They literally sat at the table for 4 hours prior to quiting and did absolutely nothing in combat through several encounters--all because they had low initiative. :rolleyes: The two players actually hooked up as a result of their time together on my couch. :P My groups now consist of 3-6 players with 4 being the optimal middle ground.
Illeveun Bloodblaze 04-05-07, 05:43 PM	I've played in 3.5 party of 13. That was some of the longest combats I have ever seen, and it was great, if hectic.
Gemstone 04-05-07, 06:01 PM	Pft. ;) I've run Eon for 14 players. For those who doesn't understand this, imagine a system that makes d20 AoO rules look like "hey, even a child can understand this". A single round of combat took 30 minutes! In DnD, the record is approx. 11 people in a room large enough for maybe 6... When one guy left the room and entered, he said "hey, you should try this... it's called AIR"
Prince_of_Murder_Kinghall 04-05-07, 06:30 PM	about five players everyone was plotting except one player who got to sit there and watch people pass notes to each other and snickering. ten players and up sounds like fun for a political intrigue kind of game though.
Singer_of_the_Song 04-05-07, 08:32 PM	From the sidelines, I once witnessed a party of 13 wiped out in one battle versus an ogre mage and his hydra pet.
rudie 04-05-07, 08:39 PM	12....mostly new players...mostly powergaming.....never again....
Imperator58 04-05-07, 11:05 PM	I swear by all that's holy, I DMd once for like 12-14 people. I don't even remember. They were draped all over the place. It was pretty unmanageable - you just can't service that many folks, even if all you do is whack things! Forget about role-playing. As a side note, I don't like the "traditional" 4-person party, though. I much prefer five. Gives you a lot more flexibility. I think it's the perfect number.
KillerVole 04-05-07, 11:11 PM	I run a weekly quest for 5-11 (depending on the attendance). It can get a bit crazy sometimes.
thecasualoblivion 04-05-07, 11:17 PM	The biggest game I've been a part of was an AD&D campaign with my running a permanent NPC as DM with 8-11 players. And it was 11 players more than just occasionally. I preferred keeping it at 8, but 11 wasn't a complete disaster. I've also run a Rolemaster game with six players, where they all started bringing their own entourages along and we were basically fighting 40 on 40 battles that took an entire gaming session to resolve. That was more than a little out of hand. The worst was a Vampire: The Requiem game I was in with 7 players. That game was not designed for that big of a group, and ran a lot worse than my AD&D with 11 players.
Zersch 04-05-07, 11:20 PM	The largest D&D game I've ever played in was 8 people. The largest D&D game I've ever DM'ed was with 10 people. The largest group I've ever played in was a Shadowrun game of about 12 people. The largest group I've ever DM'ed was a Shadowrun game and I had 32 people at my table. Good times.
Imatash 04-06-07, 02:50 PM	I DM for four groups: The first and second are one large party that split based in ME. One group has 7 PCs plus one DMPC/part time PC. It has another player whose character died and he had to change shifts so he left but another player from Uni days came back home. The second part of this group has 4 PCs and 2 henchmen. They have met up twice for large scale battles and we bring in an assistant DM or two. The Third group has 5 PCs based in DL. The Fourth group has 5 PCs, 1 NPC (from a guy who quit) and 1 DMPC/PC part time player that is currently playing AoW. We have made some adaptions of game mechanics, rolling dam with the attack dice, use of dry erase boards for initiative and spells, etc But otherwise all groups have been playing for several years and it has been a blast! Previously, the third group had peaked out at 10 but a few really didn't get the concept and quit shortly after that. The group turned Evil and I ended up closing that campaign. Imatash Imatash
Dalmaris_cerebromancer 04-06-07, 03:06 PM	10 it was a Fantasy war campainge that I was DMing and not playing and we split up offten to preform differnent missions. But when the war started and we were level 15 the party stayed together and had a great stratagy. The 3 fighters and 2 barbarians formed around the 2 clerics and 1 mage protecting them. The 2 rouges did what they wanted because we could not fiqure out what to do with them. The wizard had a extended levitate on so when a spell was ready he could rise up over the fighters and cast it and then retreat back down. The 2 clerics were harder to figure out how they were going to heal everyone. The clerics had 5 wands of cure serious wounds each. The answer was 2 pairs ghost touch gauntlets. The clerics where ethereal and used Gauntlets to cast healing spells on friends. The party killed about half the demon army. There was 1 belor that was hard for the party.
Tichondrus 04-06-07, 03:19 PM	Mine was madness... 15 players, one DM.... I still remember their bloodthirsty eyes.... *cowers* Now for real, there was at least 1 character of each alignment. There were at least 2 chaotic neutral characters, one paladin, a neutral good cleric, a legal good cleric, a legal evil warrior, some mages, and some more stuff, you couldn't expect me to remember so many characters. We 'played' for 8 hours in wich we barely started teh adventure and then promised eah others to enver do such madness again. As a sidenote, the paladin got killed by the part :D
Bruunwald 04-06-07, 03:39 PM	My girlfriend in high school would boast about her friends and the crazy and exciting games they would play. Having been almost exclusively a DM since about the age of 11, I was eager to join in and be a player myself for once. Finally, after a good year-and-a-half of blather, they got around to putting their bongs down and organizing a game. I say "organizing" in the most loose possible interpretation of that word. There were probably about nine or ten of us; myself, my girlfriend, some guy she used to have a crush on whose character was supposedly "married" to her character, a guy who was Beavis before Beavis & Butthead ever existed, a girl who had never played before who would one day be Beavis' girlfriend (if you can imagine that), one very warmongering dude who spent the entire time trying to convince us all to play Paladium instead, two guys I can't even remember now, and the two guys fighting the entire time over who was going to be the DM. Up until the moment we all sat down, I thought playing with a bunch of people might be fun. I had always played in groups of five or less (counting the DM), usually about three players and a DM. I can't even call what happened a game, in any real sense. The squabbling was immediate. The newbie couldn't learn anything from anyone, the DM most in charge was a TPK junkie who nerfed the characters to death without so much as a die roll, my girlfriend started blabbing with her stoner pals and wouldn't stop. I waited for an opening to do anything, and when it came, found myself interrupted three times in a row, on my turn, so that to this day, I still don't have a clue if my character even survived the first encounter. What a disaster. Anyway, we got together again about a week later, and this time, most of the stoners left early, I took over as GM for an ad hoc modern type game of my own invention, and the remaining five of us had a great time. Since then, most of our games have averaged three to five players. I will NEVER play with more than five players and a DM again. It's too messy. And loud. And people just seem to lose several tens of IQ points when they get into large groups.
Shadowhowler 04-06-07, 07:34 PM	Hm... The largest table game I was involved in had 11 players. It was allright, a good 50/50 mix of RP and Combat, I prefer more RP to combat, but the game was filled with friends, happened every saterday like clockwork, went on for 2 years, and was great for those reasons. That was a 2e game. Largest 3.5 game I have been in was 7. The avarage size of my gaming groups tend to be 4-6. I Ran a LARP back in the day, saw over 100 players at it's hight, and I played in one had just under 200. The largest D&D game I've ever played in was 8 people. The largest D&D game I've ever DM'ed was with 10 people. The largest group I've ever played in was a Shadowrun game of about 12 people. The largest group I've ever DM'ed was a Shadowrun game and I had 32 people at my table. Good times. I can not imagen 32 players in a table game... how did that not turn out to be a nightmare for you???
Zersch 04-06-07, 10:06 PM	I can not imagen 32 players in a table game... how did that not turn out to be a nightmare for you??? Two things. Patience and preparation. I ran that game for three years. It was a blast. Also, Shadowrun combat lasts forever, so there was a lot of roleplaying. Although, the last year, I did bring another DM. That had all my players on pins and needles.
celtredleg 04-06-07, 10:55 PM	Largest DnD--11 prople. Largest game--Rolemaster, 17 people. We where in the persian gulf, and out in the middle of nowhere, so there was not many entertainment possibilitys, and how can you say no in a situation like that. I like 4-6 when I can get it. But like other things I take what I can get.
Ringmereth 04-07-07, 02:49 AM	I'm pretty sure a game I participated in a year or two ago hit 10 or 11 players for one DM. A lot of those players were relatively inexperienced, and combat was hellish. A strict time limit was imposed after the first combat rounds took a good 30-40 minutes. Not really an experience I'd recommend. Five players is pretty optimal in my book.