Quote from: Opaopajr on April 14, 2023, 05:18:22 AM
How to handle an unexpected large party? Be honest and declare that you need to pare down to your more comfortable numbers -- to adequately give them the attention them and their characters deserve  -- and ask who wants to learn the art of being a GM!  This way you are breaking up the mob into multiple tables of fun AND you can explain it through the adage: "feed someone a fish, fed for a day; teach someone to fish, fed for life."

When you explain through examples, like sports have team limits for reasons of manageability and someone to vie against, similarly other game events have limits based on the host's powers of engagement. 'Divide the work, make easier the task,' 'teach others to pay it forward,' and all those bromide axioms.

The hobby needs more GMs and active players. That is drawn from interest and then training their powers up to their capacity. But draw from interest first! Passion to be creative on one's off time is important for a treasure of a GM. Passion leads to curiosity, leads to self-learning, leads to refinement through self-practice and advice-seeking, etc.

Speaking honestly about your human limits, and your invitation to assist new GMs to start their own tables, allows you to fumble through your first few big tables by grounding their expectations more. Everyone outside primary grades understands you can't have everyone in the team on the field at the same time and the game make much sense. But there will be those who see the potential and get the itch to host new worlds of imagination! 

Great advice. Thank you!

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on April 14, 2023, 07:50:26 AM

Quote from: Mishihari on April 14, 2023, 12:31:23 AM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on April 10, 2023, 11:59:14 AM
- Whatever you pick, it must use side vs side initiative or something similar.  3E or 5E style cyclic initiative is a combat killer once you go over 6-8 players, and in some cases can bite even in that range.

I'm going to quibble with this bit.  All three of the large games  I mentioned above used individual initiative and ran just fine.  I won't deny it can help if you're not used to running a large group, but it's not essential.

If you can and will enforce your 20 seconds or less, and all the players are fully on board with that, yes.  That's not easy to do with some groups.  Side-by-side initiative in any even moderately complex system will run the same combat in 60% or less of the time.  40% of the time is not at all uncommon.  More importantly, side-by-side scales linearly with the number of players, while cyclic scales exponentially.  When you hit the point (and there is a point with every group) where people start to lose attention because of how long it takes to get back to them, then you've hit a wall that can easily send your pace into a death spiral.  For someone learning how to run large groups, that's a ticking bomb you don't need.

Note that if you can just toss any initiative mechanics completely out of the game, and go around the table really fast, this will be less of an issue.  But I'd argue that's not really cyclic in the way people normally mean, as the characters are having no effect on who goes when.

Thinking back, I think some of the particulars about the system and methods helped a lot with keeping things moving in the games I ran.  We were playing 1e and 2E with some house rules, and timing mattered a lot with spells taking a certain number of segments to cast and interruption results varying depending on when you got hit.  We did a count up system with weapon speed and separate iterative attacks, so everyone had to pay attention to know when it was their turn.  And I move pretty fast, I'd say about halfway between normal speech an an auctioneer.  If you missed your turn, you got to go when you realized you were missed, no retcon, and if you somehow didn't speak up through the whole round, you're SOL.  Anyway, everyone typically stayed engaged, a typical action was about 5 sec real time, and it was fun.  I can believe that switching from individual initiative will speed things up, but it loses a lot of other things.  I think I'd sooner give up my battlemats.

Hi all,

Thought I'd give you a report of what happened.

I settled on Heroic Fantasy a (black hack derivative).  I bought the one-shot A Most Potent Brew, which a pretty straight forward and railroad type adventure. If you have read it, I changed the ale house to a cider house. I made up 7 pre gen characters because some people already told me that wanted to create a character.  Since some kids were coming, printed out a map of the adventure, cut into segments so I could lay them out as they encountered each room. I used minis just to keep track of everyone. I used props like doors and such from Heroquest.

Eight people showed up; four of them were 13 year olds, only two of them had played a rpg before.

All but two of them ended up wanting to make their characters. I went with it and let them do it. I already had blank sheets printed out at the table just in case. In order to explain the classes, I had a picture for each one that demonstrated what they did (example: the rogue was hiding in the shadows waiting for a monster to strike). The barbarian was a picture of a raging Viking warrior. I explained the classes but the pictures really helped.

It took a bit for them to get into making their decisions and strategies but eventually they did. I dropped the torch usage die and some other things that was too much for them at the time. I let them do the big things like looking for traps, solving puzzles, fighting, listening and so forth.

They seemed to enjoy (I think). Honestly, it was hard for me to know because I was in the thick of making sure who wanted to go next and want they wanted to do.  It was exhausting for me. They did ask if I wanted to schedule the next session. I said that we should figure out who wants to keep playing and then go from there.

Initiative wise, if they failed their DEX roll, they went after the monsters. It will still a burden to keep them knowing if they were in group A or B.

Overall, I think it went well. It wasn't overly fun for me though. It was a lot of work. Maybe the more accustomed to the rules they get, the easier it would be. I cannot imagine how hard it would be to DM 5e to a new group like that.