Wednesday, November 18, 2020

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.

26 comments:

  1. Something like this is indeed needed, if for no other reason than to promote that patience, tolerance and open-mindedness which you associate with gaming. At times our hobby seems in danger of succumbing to the opposite of these virtues.

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    1. A regret of mine is that I was never a member of a gaming club during my youth. Though they existed in various places, I never thought to join, because I had a stable group of friends at home and didn't think it necessary. That was an opportunity missed, I think.

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  2. Ive DMed for up to 14 players in one session in the 3.x days. I found the players got distracted when their characters were waiting to act. I'm sure it's worse now with smart phones. OTOH having a large POOL of players for the campaign would be an advantage.

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    1. I realize that it's easier said than done, but smartphones and other technology ought to be banned or at least limited at the table. It's bad enough how distracted people are by such things in everyday life; bringing them to the game is even more frustrating.

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  3. My sweet spot in the 80s was 6-8 players. My observations of what has driven smaller groups:

    - Big one - as gaming got more acceptable, more folks found fellow gamers through their social circles so less need of a club and more playing at home where huge groups may not be so viable.

    - Combat systems started getting more complex, slowing down play with too many players. Note also that hirelings and henchmen started going away also.

    - Game session time probably has dropped. In the 80s we regularly played 8-10 hours or more. The 4 hour session that D&D 3.x sort of promotes makes it harder to fit in the action for more players. With my 2 hour Roll20 sessions, a big complex fight isn't even going to be resolved in one session.

    I do miss the days of the games clubs. My gaming really took off when I joined MIT's game club in 1979 (as a high school kid). One of the things I miss from that era is the "multiverse" where PCs could migrate from one GM's campaign to another. It's not so feasible with campaigns that tie the characters more into the setting, but yet it had a certain charm and meant that ideas mixed across campaigns more easily. My college (Rensselaer) game club featured completely separate campaigns with little crossover - except the folks who played Cold Iron, most of whom played in at least two Cold Iron campaigns if not three or four (Cold Iron was a home brew system developed by a club member). Of course the only way to learn about the game was to play in one of the campaigns, and then if you wanted to run it, the easiest source of players was folks from the other campaigns.

    Frank

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  4. There is a distinction to be made between the number of players in a campaign and the number of players in as single game session. Notably the OD&D rulebook uses the phrase "in a single campaign"; I think it is talking about the overall number of players in a campaign, who will not necessarily all play together. The referee will run different game sessions for different groups of players, but all part of the same campaign. There are plenty of stories about Gary running games early on with a small number of players, even 1:1 games for Robilar, Gronan or Tenser. The "Magician's Ring" is one example that Gary wrote about in 1975: it's just Lessnard the Magician (a single player) with three hired retainers exploring the original Castle Greyhawk.

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    1. That's a very good point.

      Obviously, I don't think there was ever any expectation that there'd be 20 players in a party at one time, but neither do I think anyone envisaged that there'd only be three or four players in total.

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    2. "The referee will run different game sessions for different groups of players, but all part of the same campaign."
      This is the point. Understanding this is a sine qua non condition for maintaining a campaign with a large number of players who inevitably come and go.

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  5. As soon as the game was primarily marketed toward people not in control of their own scheduling (children), the envisioned group size necessarily changed.

    When I see the older discussion, I see discussion between adults used to meeting in large groups on regular schedules to pursue a hobby - bowling leagues, fraternal orders, war gaming societies, etc. Very 1960s Midwest.

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    1. These are both excellent points, particularly the bit about the shift in marketing towards children.

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  6. I come from the opposite end of the spectrum; my original gaming group was three or four counting the DM. Sometimes we even played one-on-one, as long as we were gaming we didn't care. We just didn't know many other people interested in playing, and were limited in distance to how far we could ride our bikes. We never had the experience of learning from older gamers, we dove headlong on our own.

    One thing that came out of it was that we all tended to play more than one character at a time and kept a stable of characters to draw from. Between that and hirelings we delved through many adventures. To this day I still don't think anything of running more than one character at a time, though these days my gaming groups are large enough that I almost never do.

    My sweet spot for the table is five or six players. The largest I've run for is eight and at that point I start to understand why early groups used callers. There's usually not a big difference between players at my table vs players in the whole campaign, though as I think back I can think of some lean times when I could have set up a campaign that worked more like an open table.

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  7. I am running an OSR campaign right now online and I can only handle five players. Even 5 is a little tough. The technology is not yet at the point where more than one person can talk at once. I almost have to do a roll call for some decisions.

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    1. I agree that the technology isn't quite there yet. What I have observed in my own games, though, is that the caller has re-emerged as a role for one of the players, who speaks on behalf of the whole group. It's fascinating to see this re-invention of an old aspect of gaming.

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    2. I am finding the the most confident player is taking the lead and making decisions for the group. I have to stop sometimes and ask the quieter players what they want to do. So sort of like a caller.

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  8. We pretty regularly get 8-9 people in my GURPS Dungeon Fantasy group these days. The last two sessions had only 6 people and 4 people - and those are really low for us. We've had 11 in one session, I think, and we're got roughly 13 people who are playing at least a few bi-weekly sessions a year . . . all run using Zoom and Roll20. Having that many players slows down decision making, but honestly, it's really fun when almost the whole group makes it.

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  9. My experience was similar to Tom's above. I rarely had more than two friends at a time to play in my games, and similarly when they ran, it was me and maybe one other player. It was often just the DM and one player, who played an entire party of characters (and the DM's characters sometimes tagged along in a sort of support role -- no, we never made them what's more recently been called a DM-PC, they were always there to support, not to lead the way or solve the mysteries).

    Over the past few years, my West Marches campaign has seen lots of players come and go. And every session the number who show up varies. There's a dedicated core, plus a few people who show up when they can, and people who try it out for a session or two then drop it. I'd have to count how many players have been in the game, but I'm sure it's around thirty.

    Recently, there are between five and eight players in any particular session. Luckily, we run Classic D&D so combat doesn't get bogged down. One of the players just wrapped up a short 5E game with the same player pool, and similar numbers of people each session, and combat is SLOW! Very easy to get distracted, open another tab on the browser, or pull out your phone, or whatever, while waiting your turn.

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  10. As 80s kids we had a lot of control over our free time --- we didn't even have to say where we'd be after school as long as we were home for dinner --- so we could always get a group up, though two was as common as 10. Late in college when my impoverished, depressed cohort staged a 1e campaign, none of us would willingly have missed a session. But these days...I have no idea how to find a game or gather players consistently. People have too many other activities.

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    1. This is exactly my experience (altho my last game had 7 players). but getting them to commit to a time is like pulling teeth

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  11. A while ago, David Wesely was interviewed and it was posted as a podcast. His description of how he ran the Braustein was strangely familiar. Many of the element he described echoed what I had to do to run a boffer LARP event.

    I think the key is a set of mechanics that are self-executing in part coupled with a fair amount of first person roleplaying. For example two players can take a copy of SJ game melee, fight it out and report the result back to the head referee. Also the "bad guys" will need to be run by players.

    With a bunch of that in place I could run a session for 20 or people easily.

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  12. I think the largest campaign I took part in had something like 45 active players. And almost all moves were one-on-one, unless a players teamed up in the game in a cooperative venture. It was what a wargamer interpreted a campaign to be. Independent "generals" playing in a common setting, often in opposition to each other. The gamemaster providing both the setting and support materials that might be exploited by the individual players.

    It was fairly standard in the RPG version of these games to start each player off with at least one objective, for the same reason that large LARPS do this: to start the player interactions. after that the fun bit is even the gamemaster doesn't know what will happen (although they have the duty of feeding fun stuff into the furnace to fuel the fire).

    But they almost always grew out of a place with a large group of available players, such as a university or wargames club. It really does help to have the players readily available to play sessions.

    [It's lots of fun. I just wish I was better at running small groups of players; I have difficulty handling less than six at the table and prefer a dozen or more (the games I truly fondly remember had 18 or so players <grin> - but I have a very different GMing style from most and prefer to push interaction amongst the players rather than call and response from myself. I see myself as the stage director, facilitating play. Not the director or author.]

    On the other hand when you are investigating a dungeon it is natural to form up in a mutually supportive party. Because here it is less about competition between the players (in the form of their characters) and more competition against the gamemaster (in the form of the dungeon). You can easily extend that style of play to non-dungeons, but it's still very much players versus the gamemaster. Still the big advantage is that it's a lot easier to organise such a group, especially if you are not in an area with a surplus of people wanting to play.

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  13. My preference is to run in game shops, and it's always been my experience that when people see you playing classic D&D in a game shop, they want to join. So it doesn't take long for my campaigns to swell up to some eight to ten players in size (that number of regulars was pretty typical for me pre-pandemic, when I was still running Barrowmaze in Karameikos).

    God I miss that. Online play, no matter the party size, just can't approximate that "game club" feel.

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  14. I fished together a bunch of surveys that were out there - it seemed to point to a fairly consistent ~5 players as a typical table. Interestingly, the earlier generation of surveys asked 'how many in your group' as you point out here - but the more recent ones only ask about a table. Perhaps tables are filled through 'looking for group' sites?

    I wrote some of this up here:
    https://seedofworlds.blogspot.com/2020/10/table-of-5-is-consensus-group-size.html

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  15. I started out playing in small groups as well. These days, I have been running a campaign with a pool of 20-ish players. Each session, anywhere from 3 to 7 players are present but I find more than 5 hard to navigate online. With the player base I have, I find the campaign is much more like those ones from the early days of the hobby than any I have run before.

    My experience with the campaign has me agreeing with both points. It is rare that there are not enough players for a session. All of these people interacting has seen so many unexpected things happen as they scheme together, clash, or compete with one another. Everyone is coming from such different places gaming-wise that it definitely has me being more open-minded and patient with everyone.

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  16. It's clear that some groups were huge, but Lee Gold typically would cap her Neocarn dungeon expeditions at 8 players, in about '75. Ken St. Andre wrote in the '70s for T&T that the shouting makes it so that "two or three players with up to four characters apiece is ideal." I can only envy the Refs with access to large groups of reliable players today, but anyway it seems to me that personal taste is a large factor and maybe always has been.

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  17. I think the large number of players as stated in the ODD rulebook is testimny to D&D still being seen as a rulesystem to run a wargames campaign rather than a roleplaying campaign. In a wargaming campaign not everyone should be present all the time. Adventures are foremost military expeditions, and any sword for hire (or even entire warbands) are useful (remember ODD also advocated one player running a complete warband with mercenaries etc.)

    The shift towards smaller groups happened with the shift from D&D being seen as wargaming campaign to a story-driven campaign. It's a shift that is not always explicitly mentioned in the rulebooks, but it did happen. Running an interesting story is more difficult for a large group of players than running a wargaming campaign, and it also requires more continuity among the player group.

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