We Need Large Groups

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 1:2- or thereabouts.

–Men & Magic, Volume 1 of Dungeons & Dragons (1974)

Players: The more the merrier!

–Metamorphosis Alpha (1976) 

Any number of people can participate in a campaign or scenario, although generally 40 players should be treated as a maximum. Optimum game size (based on the ability of the referee to control and interact effectively) is from three to ten persons.

–Characters and Combat, Book 1 of Traveller (1977) 

When I first took up the hobby of roleplaying, my neighborhood circle of friends consisted of seven people, a number that often increased, such as when one friend's cousin from Minnesota spent the summer with him or when we met up more distant school acquaintances to do something together. Consequently, my earliest experiences of playing RPGs, especially Dungeons & Dragons, include being surrounded by a sizable number of people. I've talked before about the local gaming meet-ups and the the number of participants at most of the games there. Those games were raucous, lively affairs – even anarchic by many measures – but I enjoyed them a lot, which is why I regularly reflect on them on this blog. 

I found myself thinking about this recently, because, due to a concatenation of events, my House of Worms campaign hasn't met for the last couple of weeks. That's highly unusual. There are eight players in the campaign and it's rare that more than a couple of them are unavailable on a given week. That's one of the joys of a large group: there are always enough people to play.  That means more than one might think, since it's only through regular, continuous play that a campaign can be built up and survive for years. And, as a commenter on another post rightly said, long campaigns are "indeed the acme of the hobby." Anything else is, in my opinion, a mere shadow of what the hobby is capable of.

In the past, I used to make all sorts of excuses as to why my groups consisted of only three or four people and some of them might even have been valid explanations rather than facile rationalizations. I can't do that any longer, as it's become increasingly clear that I'd been missing out on the chaotic creative energies that can only be unleashed by a larger group of players. I've had fun with small groups certainly and I'd even argue that, in some contexts – an espionage campaign à la Top Secret, for instance – they make more sense than large ones, but, as a general rule, I think large groups are vital to the success of a RPG campaign. Indeed, I'd go further and suggest that RPGs were created with large groups in mind.

At some point, though, a shift happened and smaller groups became the norm. I'm not quite sure when it happened or why. A quick survey of games from the early '80s, during the height of RPGs' first instance of faddish popularity, reveals that the subject of the size of a gaming group is rarely addressed at all. When it is, such as in, for example, in Tom Moldvay's Basic Rules, there's a certain hedging of bets:

At least two persons are needed to play this game, though the game is most enjoyable when played by a group of four to eight people.

It's a far cry from OD&D's four to fifty players but still skewing toward a size that is large by the standards of later eras, when smaller groups seems to have become more common – at least that was my experience during the later '80s and into the 1990s. 

The other thing I have observed, especially during this year, is that having a large group of people with whom you regularly game, even if it's only virtually, as it is for most of us these days, is a much needed antidote to the social isolation we might otherwise feel. My House of Worms crew, with whom I've spent many hours, have helped keep me on an even kilter and contributed much to my general level of emotional well-being, which is exactly what any worthwhile entertainment does. Further, the presence of so many different people, with different playing styles, ideas, and temperaments has not only made the campaign richer and more varied than it otherwise would be, it's also, I think, made me a more patient, tolerant, and open-minded person. That's no small thing, particularly in an age when so many of us voluntarily wall ourselves off from others and then despair of loneliness. 

Get out there and play with more people and more regularly. It's good for the hobby and it's good for you too.