Monday, February 17, 2025
How Big Is Your Gaming Group?
As a follow-up to last week's poll – which is still ongoing, by the way – I'm curious as to how many people with whom you presently play roleplaying games. This time, there are more options, since I want a more refined sense of just how big most readers' regular gaming groups are. As usual, feel free to use the comments to clarify or expand upon your answers, since that's also useful data. In the event that you play with more than one group of people, go ahead and use your largest group as the basis for your answer.
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My regular Sunday evening group, which has been going continuously every week since 2007, is 12 persons currently, though in the past we've had as many as 16 before some moved away. GMing duties rotate semi-annually, among 6 of us who are willing to fill the referees seat.
ReplyDeleteI run 3 groups with 5-7 players each. Sometimes we have guests and crossovers. Should I vote by each group or the whole? I think in total we have 14 individual players with a couple in multiple campaigns.
ReplyDeleteWe have a hybrid arrangement with two players joining the DM in person and two more online via Facetime. Our 5th player is away on medical leave so one of those in attendance controls his character for now. The party is approaching the plateau on the Isle of Dread (X1) after a parley with the Rakasta camp.
ReplyDeleteI would love to hear some session journals from The Plateau. Forty years ago we completely muffed the Isle of Dread adventures and (I) never revisited the setting.
DeleteSure, I'll ask for a volunteer to write a summary after we next play on Feb 23, and post here when convenient. I understand your sentiment, that's why we are replaying the oldies now. At this age, we can really appreciate them. So far, the party has explored and mapped the southern half of the island. That included parley and trade with the village of Tanaroa, where the village zombie master gave the PCs a good scare, retrieving pearls from the lair of the sea snakes after surviving some poisonous bites - close call - and avoiding the rock baboons. They also had dangerous random encounters with giant crab spiders, a wereboar, and some giant bees. A few horses died along the way and the cleric has been busy.
DeleteMy current group is a little flexible, as our schedules can be erratic and one member lives at the other end of the country, but it's around five stable members.
ReplyDeleteWe have three "regular" GMs, although I count myself in there and perhaps I shouldn't as I've had to step back from running games.
I put 5-6 as that is how many people that tend to be in a session at a time, but in total we around 9-10 in the group in total.
ReplyDeleteBetween games right now, so I voted based on the one that wrapped up over the weekend. Even that was after some waffling. It was a PbP game and one of the players rolled initiative in the big climactic battle and then ghosted us, throwing the whole fight into the toilet in terms of balance. I guess I count the guy as playing but it wrecked the whole arc for me, at least.
ReplyDeletedepending on who is available, my group has somewhere between 6-8 people.
ReplyDeleteI envy all of you. My only current game is a type of correspondence one-on-one hybrid via email. It is more storytelling and creative improv than dice and crayons. Real Life requires travel among two politically turbulent regions/hemispheres, so when I can spend some hours of game time it has to be a local chess club. Everyone knows the rules.
ReplyDeleteThe regular gaming group is 7 including the DM (usually me). We had 9 yesterday, though.
ReplyDeleteMy group, which has been meeting weekly for over 30 years, currently has 10 members. Most any week we'll have 7 or 8 players at the table. One of our regular GMs has a two weeks on/two weeks off schedule, so we always have two games going on. We also have a couple of folks who only show up for specific campaigns and one guy we see twice a year for weekend long sessions.
ReplyDeleteI have five groups that meet regularly, at least as of a month ago, with four, five, six (really four regulars), six, and nine (4-7 meet). Most effectively meet bi-weekly.
ReplyDeleteHmm... the poll choices don't quite work for me... I have two groups, one at 5 and one at 7... The 7 is slightly oversubscribed so I voted 5-6 which is my sweet spot.
ReplyDeleteIt's 5-6, but there's rotations and overlaps so 3-5 might be more accurate on a per-session basis.
ReplyDeleteMy "adult" group has 4 of us, aged 45-60. We've varied from 3 to 7 people through the last 18 years. My "kids" group (my teens and their friends, that I run for) is 6 teens and I.
ReplyDeleteMe (49 years old) as the GM, and five friends (ages 44 to 50)
ReplyDeleteWe've had a group of 9 or 10 for quite a while, all playing online. We've recently split into a 6 4 different parties which has worked well, whether the timelines match up again and we rejoin as a big party again remains to be seen. I used to DM a group of 12 in AD&D back in the day, that was wild!
ReplyDeleteI'm currently in three groups. One has 4 players + the GM. The other two both has 3 players + GM.
ReplyDeleteI've gotten used to this but for a long time this painful for me. I have spent the vast majority of my time in the hobby gaming with relatively large groups, averaging about 7-8 players + GM. We've had as many as 10-12 in a few campaigns.
I miss those big groups. It adds so much to the campaign to a wide variety of characters, player approaches, stories, etc. Small groups are (for me) very difficult to run for because eventually I run out of material much quicker.
Funny thing the English language: 'group' is not the clearest word to use here. l have given 6 as my answer, which is how many I have in my game (including me as ref) at the moment. But that game is at a club which meets weekly. We usually have 4 tables/games running at anyone time, 5-7 in each. Games run for 2 months at a time and people tend to alternate reffing and playing. As a rough estimate, let's say 25 regularish people, of those 8 ref regularly and another 5 or so occasionally. But another spanner in the works, there are a couple of folks who only play at club, but ref personal games elsewhere
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ReplyDeleteMy present group is only three -- me and my wife and son -- though as recently as four years ago I had a group of seven.
ReplyDeleteYou guys make me so sad! My smallest gaming group at the moment has thirty two active members, with weekly sessions; obviously there are two other groups. I guess some people aren't cut out for _real RPGing_, but as long as you're having fun, whatever!
ReplyDelete;)
We have to date 116 current weekly players with 1 Master DM and 11 Co DMs. This is a 38 year old game campaign game of epic scale played at a fire hall. 12 amazing wars were fought over each lasting 2 months of gaming across 10 game tables full of hand made terrain and kit bashed fantasy armies over 25000 minatures were used. Detailed army histories and tactics were crested each of the 7 hand made leather tomes are over 500 pages each.
ReplyDeleteIt is a one of a kind find and having 4 professional chefs/players cooking for us is simply unreal. We just had a lobster clam bake with over 80 lobsters and 400 class devoured.
We have raised over 2 million dollars for charity over time and have even traveled to Egypt, England and Manchuria to play as a group.
We created and publish out own high quality hone ruled players hand book that had commissioned art work by Easley, DAT, Otus and Frazetta.
If you are interested in joining us at our gaming tables a spot will be saved for you are your friends. Said no one ever. Wishing you all the very best gaming with smiles and fun. Excitement thrills and laughs. May the gaming gods send you all thier blessings. Be well, be safe and shop smart. Shop S Mart. In the immortal words of our long time player Ted, "Great googly zing zang that's like 20 nat 20s in a row!"
Up to Covid was 6-8 regurlarly but since mainly solo.
ReplyDeleteMy last regular group was 5 players and a DM, a fun 5e group I had to leave because of a work schedule change. We played on Roll20 which was fine but prefer in person groups.
ReplyDeleteCurrently me and two friends from work have been meeting irregularly. It hasn't taken off, everyone wants to DM and all have different system preferences.
My preference is small groups. 2-3 players and a DM. One of my favorite campaigns was just me and the DM with guest appearances by a few other players.
My current group started at 5, and had two guys drop out, so it's down to 3. All of us have taken turns running games.
ReplyDeleteI already snarked, and feel a bit of remorse about it. So, FWIW, my explanation of my vote goes like: We have five members in our gaming group. Fairly often one person can't make the session -- we game face-to-face, being a bunch of wine moms(tm) -- but we usually cancel if we'd be down two . So I put down for "5-6 people" when I voted, even if it feels like a bit of a stretch.
ReplyDeleteW/r/t a recent thread, our group has regularly had recurring henchmen/hangers-on as secondary characters, who are played by players (not the GM) whenever possible, like when it doesn't make sense for their regular PC to be involved in a particular scene/scenario/session but does for the side-character to be. Otherwise the GM runs them. I think it's been great -- honestly some of them are at least as memorable and/or entertaining as the Official "player characters".
I don't have experience with much larger (double-digit) groups, and mixed experience with much smaller ones; I guess, at this point in my (gaming) life, I really do feel like this is the gravy spot.
I currently GM two groups - one with five people in it, and one with four (although both had six when they started). Over 45 years of playing, the groups I've been in have almost always had 4-6 members. I have played with as few as two and as many as eight, but very rarely.
ReplyDeleteMy current group includes the three of us that have been RPGing together since 1981. The group also includes three others that we have been RPGing with for over thirty years. Only one is new (6 or so years). We are spread from Hastings to Glasgow.
ReplyDeleteFour players + DM in my weeknight game, 3 players and GM in my Sunday game, and me DMing an intermittent game with a pool of 5 players right now, but not all of them make it to a given session.
ReplyDeleteCurrent tabls is 5 - 6, but I'm part of a larger self-organized community where table sizes and players per campaign vary by interest + GM comfort level, from 4 to... I think the currr t VtM game is at 8 or 9.
ReplyDelete