As a longtime exponent for playing "modern" D&D editions with fewer than 5 PCs, I was thrilled to crack open HotDQ and see that the suggested party size is 4. YES! Its easier to track 4 players, easier to get a group of 4 together, and FASTER to play a game with 4 players. Hopefully all future published adventures assume 4 players instead of larger groups. I enjoy playing classic editions with as many as 7, but given the more complicated PCs of 3e on, 4 is the new sweet spot. For the curious, Phandelver suggests 4 to 5, but I am much happier with an explicit 4 player baseline.
I prefer 5. For one thing, it's handy to have a tie breaker when the party can't agree which way to go.
Given how quickly 5e runs compared to 3/3.5/4 I'm not sure it really matters all that much.
I'm running 5 and would have happily added a 6th.
The plus side is, of course, that it's completely possible to scale to whatever group size you do have.
The speed of play is very nice, I could easily see 4-6 but yes, 4 is probably my ideal as well.
PS: The thread title reads like one of those click-bait article titles like "You won't BELIEVE what this mother does with this cucumber!"
I do prefer 4 players over 5 in both this edition and the last. The "core roles" are covered with 4 players and the fifth guy sometimes feels a little redundant.
As for a tie-breaker, we don't need one - we don't have disagreements as to the direction the party will go and thus don't need to vote on things.
spelley wrote:
"we don't have disagreements as to the direction the party will go"
I have never seen, been told of, nor even heard rumours of a party that never disagreed on which way to go. Well done, you are completely unique.
DemoMonkey wrote:
Rght. Well, for everyone who isn't Iserith then, a tie breaker can be very handy.
I have always found conversational dynamics in general - and RPGs as a subset of that - always work better with odd numbers of people over 1 than with even numbers. I have no idea why that is so, just that I have always found it to be true. And to me, that's more important than whether the module is originallydesigned for 4 or 5 players.
Now, that's not to say I'm not INTERESTED in how tight the design is on # of players. Will 5 players find the adventure a walkover? Will 3 players find it a wipe? Did they test it with a varying number of characters and pick the midpoint?
I don't have a prefered number of players at the table other than "as many as can make it to the session", so I really don't care much how many players official modules are built assuming will be present - so long as the adventure clearly tells me how many characters it is intended for somewhere easy to find (the cover, the blurb on the back cover, or the start of the introduction for example).
As for the "party doesn't disagree about which way to go", I have experienced that as well... though never in a way that I view as positive (I was going to go into detail, but that ended up being five paragraphs in length, so I deleted it) - always been more of "let's just skip the part where we all disagree but he refuses to let the game progress until he gets his way anyways and go along with what he picked so we can keep playing" thing.
...but that's definitely another thread, and would likely be titled "The worst sort of problem player is the one that is such a problem that other players end up feeling it is their responsibility to be the problem player's friend because without being included in gaming sessions the problem player would have precisely zero social interaction because the problem player is an insufferable jerk" - see, even trying to summarize becomes a rant (and yes, my players know my dislike of their insistence at this player's continued inclusion... geek social fallacies can be insurmountable when you don't want to lose your whole roster of enjoyable players and they'll leave if you tell a jerk they feel responsible for to stop being a jerk or get out).
For some reason I've always been partial to odd numbers, and I like the role overlap you can get with 5. It's a biased opinion though.
frothsof wrote:
I have played Old school AD&D with groups as large as 11 p.c.'s in the past (1990's). Ya, it was just epic. We were a real force of murder hobo's. I do prefer groups no larger than 6. Four seems to be the ideal number for 5e. P.S. I thought this was an edition war thread at first when I read the title. 
First I would rethink the title of this thread.
I have played with a groups of 1 all the way up to 9 players at a FLGS since 5E has been released and I would say that this edition works well with each extreme.
For me this has been the quickest edition to play through no matter the size.
But I honestly enjoy the 5-6 number range.
4 is ideal for me. But in gneral I'm comfortable from 3 to 6.
At Gencon all the games were ran with 6 players and I have to say I was very impresesd with how smoothly and quickly they ran even at that number.
I personaly prefer 5, allowing space for the four "Traditional" styles in a party along with one wild card.
Just played in a game for the adventure league with 7 players at the table, 3 of them were kids brand new to D&D, and honestly it went waaaay smoother than I thought it would. I will say 5 is my typical favorite number to run for but this game seems to make it pretty easy to handle larger numbers.
I think four is perfect.
I'm equally good with 4 or 5. 6 is the maximum I feel comfortable with and 3, while acceptable, isn't nearly as fun as 4 or 5.
Hooray for context, right? 
I aim for 6 in an ongoing campaign so if people can't make it the game goes on anyway
Disagreements are easy. Charisma rolls. Highest chooses.
Four is good if you are playing the Basic rules and want one of each class but five is also good if you want an extra tank.
Four is good for forming a defensive square. Five is good for quincunx formation with the squishy in the middle.
I think everybody is right.
I have the most fun with groups of 1-3, but I usually shoot for 5-6. I prefer the game be resilient enough to handle 2 - 3 people missing a session.