Short-Handed
Well would you look at that? A definitive answer to the age-old question. But even if an occult bromance is in the offing, we must pause and consider why these eldritch adventurers are grinding so hard for XP. If you know that there are big bad undead coming, it pays to get some practice in fighting big bad undead. I just hope for Jeremy’s sake that he keeps his head down. Poor kid has been killed enough already.
That said, we aren’t here to drop more techno-vampiric foreshadowing. We’re here to talk about small parties, growing pains, and bringing in fresh heroes. And that just so happens to be something I’m dealing with at the moment.
You see, I’ve finally gotten around to running my fellow AAW staffers’ campaign, Rultmoork. It’s a hard-mode dungeon with excellent handouts, animated VTT maps, and all the bells and whistles right in the box. Unfortunately, they couldn’t include players along with the cardboard standees. Of the six players who agreed to show up, only three were actually there on game day.
“Why don’t you make a DMPC who can be our healer / frontliner?” they asked.
“One war cleric coming right up!” I said. And so there was a party of four. That’s all you need to play, and the energy in the room felt pretty darn good. Yet by the same token, there are plenty of cool nerds that I want to game with, and there are technically still three slots open at the table. The question becomes whether I soldier on without adding fresh blood, feature a rotating cast of guest players, or invite God and everybody until we have six solid players.
As I’m pondering my personal stake in this question, I wonder what the rest of you guys think. Do you try to add as many people as possible to a game? Or would you rather have a core few, even if there are three or fewer players?
I recently had to fill a slot in a pre-existing game due to someone having to bow out, and it’s harder than you think every time–sure, the game already has a set time and day, but by the time you need a mid-campaign replacement, chances are you’ve already gone through your usual suspects back when you were putting the thing together in the first place!
Luckily, we had someone that me (and 2/3 of the remaining players) had already played with who was able to join.
My general order of operations if a game needs new players (rather than deciding to continue on with fewer than before) is to start with people I’ve played with / run for before, then ask the players, then go to some of the people I talk to regularly in in the ttrpg channels of some larger discord servers.
I definitely think 3 is a hard minimum party size, but if I was in your situation I’d pose it to the table, and then if they want more players you can always send a pitch with the established date/time to people you want to game with and see who says they can make it consistently
Collective decision-making? In my tightly-controlled ego-trip sandbox? HOW DARE YOU!?
:p
I know, it sounds like crazy talk, but hear me out! What if it’s so crazy… that it just might work?
I’ve run two person games, and even solo adventures, but I tend to cheat for solo adventures and plant NPC party members for the player to recruit to cover skillsets the player character just doesn’t have. A rogue for the paladin, a fighter for the cleric, etc. I try to maintain a four player team most of the time though, and I’ve gone as high as six, but that was a big strain on my ability to maintain equal ‘screentime’ for everyone, and I don’t think I’d do it again.
I sometimes find it odd how we like to talk about, “Unlike video games, you can do anything you can imagine!” But in practice, there really are constraints on what the ol’ meat computer is actually capable of running. :/
depends on the system, DnD and most d20 games are build around 4 so having more players does allow the game to flow smoother less than full group show up with out causing half panic that you have no front liners or healers, something my 5th edition bard had to double as if the cleric or fighter players didn’t show up.
But some like Judge Dredd and the worlds of AD2000 roll pretty well as solo games, especially Rogue Trooper and Dredd itself.
Bit instead of minimun my worry would be what is too many, especially if two or more of the players can’t decide their actions in the minutes before their turn.
I took a “warm body” approach at first, and I’m pretty sure that was wrong. I think it’s better to make friends with folks first, THEN invite them to game. Not have a friendly conversation or two and immediately extend the invite.
I suppose that letting my players invite a friend is the better solution instead of trying to do everything myself.
I’m currently in 3.5e game with just myself and another player, but we are very much punching above our weight class with the power of friendship and Wizard Bullshit™. I am under no illusion that this is representative of players in general.
For the dedicated power gamer, that does sound like a cool challenge. Any especially badass exploits you’d care to share with the class? 🙂
Wizard Bullshit, gets em every* time
Somewhere out there, Swash & Buckle’s ears/head-fins are burning.
Could we still call head-fins “ears?” I mean, they’re ear-shaped sensory organs.
The Occult Party / After-Lifers party emerges! I wonder if Paladin and Woolantula The Searching-For-A-Party would complete the bill.
But what will their actual party name be on the cast page? Hmmm….
The Gothic Party? The Grim & Dark Party? Team Eldritch?
If Occultist’s ‘Player flaw’ is her being a dirty cheater / rule bender, what is Van Helscions?
Honestly? I’m open to suggestions. Homegirl needs some characterization.
Constantly shows up to sessions drunk.
Or “main character” syndrome
She’s hot. Isn’t that enough? /jk
Always late/scheduling conflicts? Not sure how much mileage you could get out of that one, though.
Yeah… We’ve already done that joke a bunch with other characters. It needs to be some kind of “problem player” we haven’t touched on yet.
I feel like Tom’s “main character” syndrome is close, but we kind of got one of those already:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/diva
Could be the player who’s always misremembering rules/getting their editions confused
Perhaps she’s the type who tries to micromanage/play the other party members as well as herself? Wizard’s Drama Queening is very self absorbed, perhaps Van Helscion is ‘-I- AM THE ADVENTURING PARTY’?
A problem player… how about “but it’s what my character would do!”
Take the monster-killing, make it a bit more inflexible, throw in a dash of over-dedication to roleplaying… it fits somewhere in between “paladin that smites first and asks question never” and wizard’s doorstopper personal history
Alternatively, you could go with the old “I have a tortured past… do you ask me about it? Ask me about my weird amulet. I tell you I’m fine, I’m rolling a deception check.”
Or maybe my own personal demon, the Unwelcome Shotcaller. It’s all well and good to know how everyone’s abilities work, but you have to avoid making suggestions (or worse, giving orders) unless they ask, and I will admit to having to bite my tongue. (It’s why I sometimes gravitate towards archetypes where being a party coordinator makes sense! As long as everyone is on board, it can be fun in moderation)
Could be that her player flaw is being the ‘Self-Appointed Leader / Team Mom’ and makes all the party’s decisions & actions for them.
Potential flaws:
– Insistent on victorian/gothic/horror vibe regardless of setting and Edgar Allan Poe thematics.
– Being so overly specialized/fixated in one thing (undead/vampire slaying) that she’s incompetent in anything else a normal adventurer could do. Refuses to do any adventuring without undead foes to fight.
– Obsessed with ‘fluff’ to the extreme. Where wizard is a Roleplayer and Diva in general, Van Helscion writes essay descriptions on what she’s currently wearing or fills her inventory with numerous useless-but-thematic items.
– Hoards a seemingly infinite amount of mundane items/tools/stakes/weapons and other adventure implements under her dress, ‘just in case’… Which she achieves by absolutely ignoring encumbrance rules and not writing down her inventory list
– Never writes down any notes on her possessions, meaning neither she nor the DM have any idea what items she has.
– Spends a lions share of any loot acquired on frivolous purchases or non-combat items, hindering her (and her partys) ability to get equipment upgrades.
– Keeps forgetting to apply modifiers or various class benefits she has to her combats, or forgetting to use her class features.
– She likes to roleplay and wants to do it well, like Wizard does… Only she’s incredibly awkward and bad at it when it’s time for her to speak or come up with words on the spot, or suffers a panic/anxiety attack.
– Choice paralysis makes her take way too long doing her turns and hesitating on every small decision.
– Unable to keep track of any of the story, including her own backstory. E.g. forgetting who her nemesis is, NPC names, the place she’s in, what her current quest is (or crucial details like ‘return the escaped convict ‘ALIVE’)
Well, she did try to start a combat with another PC a few comics ago, didn’t she? Maybe she’s that overly intense RPer who maybe forgets to check in with people before starting big party conflict or generally Starting Shit. You know, the player who’s so focused on staying In Character they forget that other *players* have feelings.
also obligatory “I see this gay and it is the main reason I came down to the Comments section”. Very pleased about the new ship. These are two of my favorite character designs in general. A+
Another flaw, building on the last one and other poster’s: The player who can’t bring themselves to bend their character, even to make an adventure work. Your know, refusing to go into a swamp because it would ruin her dress, even though That’s The Adventure.
It’s sort of the Wizard equivalent of Lawful Stupid–too dedicated to their cool PC to make the game work, or to even realize that they’re being disruptive in a way only they’re enjoying.
Finding a group of people that have the same vibe and enjoy roughly the same things in a TTRPG is complicated enough that I’d rather have a group of three rather than risk the headache of inviting new people.
For some one shots or mini campaign (that could lead into full campaign down the line if the newcomers gel well with the rest of the group), maybe, but not in a long-lasting campaign, especially not an ongoing one (if we’re dealing with a situation like a player no longer being available).
I actually ran Storm King’s Thunder with two players. The trick was that both had two characters each.
That is indeed my fear.
I think that may be smarter than the way I run my six-player mega-dungeon. I’ve learned that having 12 PCs really limits the number of spotlight moments each of ’em gets.
We have a core group of about five who have been playing together for ages… the membership has shifted over the years, and some take time out for kids and travel, or skip a campaign that doesn’t interest them so much, but the core group has been together well over a decade.
So for most campaigns, that’s a pretty stable core… a GM and probably four players. Maybe one fewer if this is a placeholder campaign while someone’s away for an extended period, maybe one more if one of the more peripheral members of the group joins in.
But a general rule with us is that once the campaign cast is set, we don’t play unless everyone is in attendance. If someone can’t make a session, we find something else to do that week, or just give it a miss. If someone is out for an extended period, we’ll find something else to run… one-shots and short campaigns. Those games *might* get down to as few as two player plus GM, but that’s getting below critical mass for most games.
If you have a dedicated group that makes a lot of sense. I worry about holding fast to that rule harming the game though. If I had to skip sessions three or four times in a row, I could imagine the campaign running out of steam.
That’s a danger sometimes — but playing on with people missing doesn’t really work for us. We rarely end a session in a situation where it’s reasonable for a character to spontaneously be absent next session, and we prefer not to have players missing out on bits of the campaign anyway.
In my experience as a DM, big groups are more of a hassle than small groups. Solo or small group, I can always kick in complementary NPCs/DMPCs to round out the skill sets or offer aid with specific challenges that I know will be coming later in the session. Conversely, groups bigger than six tend to self-divide into teams of 3-4 at the table, start up side conversations, and suddenly some genius decides to split the party and now you’re running two sessions simultaneously.
Oof. Yeah man, that all sounds familiar.
I enjoy running the DMPC, but I don’t want to enjoy it too much, you know? This is supposed to be a background character, not a real party member. Perhaps I should make it a point to bring in rando NPCs as periodic “fourth party members?”
There’s always the “Hey, look, I was just answering the posting on the job board, guys. I’m not looking for a long-term party commitment” angle.
–In an unrelated note, did Occultist and Van Helscion just take down the Colossus of Ylourgne (from the CAS 1934 novella and the cover of 1981’s module X2 Castle Amber), or is that just the foot of some other giant-class flesh golem?
>_>
<_< ... Yes.
I cant wait for Gunslinger to once again flub his Party try outs
At least he’s got Orbert!
I have played a lot of games with 2-3 players in them, and a couple of solo games. Through when I GM, I tend to prefer 4. Both because my friends tend to come in groups of four, but mainly because a lot of RPGs are build around the expectation of there being four players. So it is simply easier to balance if you have four people.
But I have had a lot of fun playing and GM´ing for just two players, through it does require the both of them to be more active than they might have to in a four man party.
Aye. The two-man thing does work best when you’ve got experienced players involved. It’s tough for newbies to fill that much screen time.
I have had some good experience playing with just two newbie players, but they need to be people who buy into it and be far more on than they might need to in a bigger group. Where they can share the narrative load.
The main newbies I have had success with, playing with just two players, are those who are already familiar with dungeon crawling games (Such as Gloomhaven or Hero Quest) or people who are already big into being creative and on (Such as theater kids, or just really social people). Through the reasons for my positive experience are vastly different with those two types of people.
As for more, I generally want to keep it at a 4, but can do 5. If forced I think I could handle 6, but I would really rather not. As I think it is too many for what I want to deal with.
while I will probably always enjoy the more “personalized” play of 3 or 4 people (plus a DM), having played in larger and smaller games as both player and DM, I think my personal optimal size is 5 players at a minimum (again, plus the DM), with a leaning on 6 or 7 as even better (my current group has 7 of us and our DM and while it can be chaotic at times, it is just the best feeling when we all come together).
I think the main issue with smaller groups is the “need” to cater the experience to either a lack of balance in the group choices of class (assuming a typically class based system of play), or having to “force” that balance into the decision making process of initial creation of characters in the first place.
Where as with 5 or more players, the decisions to have three rogues and no healers becomes less important and just having “more” can decide the outcome of a standardized encounter than having “the right” choices.
I think anything beyond 8 and a DM gets unwieldly personally, but I also have never played in a group that large before, so that becomes more theory than practice.
Arguably, combat takes forever to complete with more people, but the trade off in roleplay moments more than makes up for it in my opinion.
Six, plus or minus one… and a DM 😉
What system are you playing with seven? I’d think a rules-light experience would flow best there.
D&D 5e.
Rules light would maybe be “better”, but also we all enjoy D&D specifically, so we just go with it 🙂
In college I found that six party members was the tipping point for me. Where combats got difficult to run and balance; where I couldn’t ensure I’d give everyone an opportunity to shine.
I currently play in a group of four, 3 PCs and a GM, and I love it. We’ve been playing forever and we’re all good friends.
I once ran for a party of two. At the player’s request I ran a DMPC / NPC for the group. (The Bard took Leadership and one of the elves they rescued stayed with the group.) But the only reason I did that was because they requested it. IIRC, we wound up dumping one of his mental stats (Int, maybe?) so he was quiet and would only offer up ideas if asked. That way he wouldn’t outshine the party.
Does that 4-person group have character-liked NPCs that accompany and aid the party? Or is it usually three heroes?
The optimal number of players for actually playing is 4, but the optimal number for running the game is 5 because if everyone shows it’s still manageable, but if one or two people no-show you can still run the game with only light to moderate friction.
I too am a believer in overbooking the plane.
I just had to let a player go, since they had apparently underestimated the size of my game and thus double booked. The players left are more than enough thankfully, but I am still down from 4 to three.
As for how many people are necessary, my rule tends to be that if less than half the party can make it, I cancel. Which only means so much when it’s usually a party of three for me.
What, you don’t wanna run solo missions? :3
In my experience, five is usually the best
one or two melee fighters that can use ranged weapons in a pinch
a mage or maybe two depending on the rogue and available magic trinkets
a healer/closein emergency melee fighter with solid divine training
a rogue/ranged weapon/’cheat mage’ using wands and scrolls
With four you always seem to be short on something and six is starting to get too hard to find the time for everyone to get a chance to RP their characters.
Six is workable if everyone can get along around the table but I have no idea how parties of eight or ten do it, maybe talk over each other a lot ? that just causes OOC arguments, in my experience anyway.
Any time I’ve been in a group over six, someone has gotten a knot in their face over something and left, sometimes in the middle of a session.
When running a large group, the kitchen time is your friend. I limit each person to 10 minutes max, put them on hold and then move to the next. Definitely works to keep things from bogging down.
I’ma need the story on that middle-of-session dip. Sounds dramatic AF!
It varied, from the “my character never gets to do anything” to “why does my character always have to fix what the rest of you broke” to arguments over what tactics the party will use, even as simple as marching order.
Playing a semi-militaristic game with serving military members, some of whom may or may not have even played before, is a “you pays your money and you takes your chances” kind of thing at times. Not always, but enough to make it interesting (that’s ‘interesting’ as in the chinese curse 😉 )
There’s always someone who just wants to ‘kill orcs and get treasure’ and sees in-character RP as a waste of time and vice versa.
Those people inevitably become part of groups that want to do the exact opposite.
Sometimes that works ok and other times they take it personally when the others play around their character rather than deal with it IC.
If you haven’t seen a fist fight break out at the table (or broken one up before it starts) can you really say you’re a player ? 😉
Not the worst, but one of the most memorable was a girl who wanted to kill everything that moved and flat out refused to play her character as anything besides herself.
Long story short, drinks were spilled, a table was flipped and two people needed new boy/girlfriends….
This situation is the perfect example to convince tour DM to allow you tonplay your necromancer. Raise some new party memembers.
Necromancers joining parties… What a preposterous idea!
>_>
Being the military for a large part of my DMing career, losing and adding people was an ongoing issue. It also meant that the size of the group varied from three (+DMPCs) and twelve.
I will admit, it’s much easier for me to bring new people into one of my groups. Character background is generated when the character is set up. So I don’t have to try to fit someone’s off the wall, tortured 1/2 whatever into the party. They know where they are from, what social class their family was, how many siblings they have/had and if the parents/sibs are still alive.
If the group is more than third level, I’ll usually start them two levels below the rest of the group. They get the amount of experience the character would have at that level and they get the rest of the setup session to spend that experience on the skills they want. If they want some things to hang their character’s personality on, I’ll give them some hooks from things that happened to the character before they ran into the group. That’s pretty rare that they wanted that though.
As to when players can’t make it, I have their character “hold horses”. The character is still with the group, but just stashed off in a corner somewhere. They don’t get experience and don’t have knowledge of what went down while “indisposed”. And I call them on that if they try to meta it ingame.
Only time the players character is involved is if there is a TPK. The character is also killed, but I give that player the option to run that character as a first level character in the same group as the other’s newly generated characters. Only had that happen once over the last four decades though.
What system are you using? How do you generate those backgrounds? Sounds kind of neat to play within constraints like that.
Homebrew based on SPI’s Dragon Quest and AD&D 1e/2e. Plus everything else that has come into my hands over 40+ years of playing/DMing :).
And the backgrounds are all generated with tables that the groups have developed over the years. My main starting city is a VERY large, multi-racial seaport, so lots of different backgrounds. And a lot of the charts have sub-charts. Like the Military has the standard sub-charts of Navy, Army and Marines (no flying creature air force!) and the Mariner has Coastal shipping, Ocean Mariners and Pirates. Social class runs from the bastard gutter rat to child of one of the upper class. That particular area doesn’t have nobility, so the upper class goes from certain types of merchants (gold, gems, artists) to the Merchant Princes who run the city. Hubby had one character who was from a dwarven mining family, but he was an orphan and adopted by one of the nine ruling families, who were human.
The one time he went home to visit with the rest of the characters in tow, he had to coach them to say they always stayed in nice taverns, never EVER got hurt and were in bed by 9pm every night. His mom was a bit of a hoverer. 🙂
“Do you try to add as many people as possible to a game?”
Because I run a much better system [WARNING SYSTEM GLOAT DETECTED] there is no “core party” nonsense. I just run the game for the Players I have.
No healer? No Problem, people will be inhured, walking wounded, or just die. No meatthugs? No problem, party juts needs to avoid combat as much as possible. No “omni-men” (aka Wizards, Thieves, actually skilled bards, McGyvers, etc) then teh specialist need to stretch themselves a bit more, or really work to avoid problems that they cannot solve with the skills they posses.
To be fair, you can run D&D that way too, but D&D does “work better” when you’re run murder-hobo back-to-the-orc-and-pie-dungeon crawls. Which doesn’t work as well when you’re missing one of the essential 4 wheels of the bus the GM is trying to throw the party under…
I gather that your version of GURPS is highly lethal.
My dad is running a game with many inconsistent players; from what I hear, there are generally a dozen or more players at the table. Anyone who comes to the shop can play, but I guess nobody else is both consistent and willing to DM.
Back in the day my friends and I would play 2 player gestalt campaigns to make up for lack of party members. It was fun, and it worked well for a while.
I also have run a game for a 7 person party. All the players where in different time zones and I didn’t have a consistent work schedule, so basically we just ran with whoever could make it.
These days I go for 5 person parties, and we don’t play with less than 4.
recently a game was showing lack of interest and we considered going Gestalt 2 man again, we spent a while at the planning phase, but at the end of the day there are vital roles that need to be filled in a party, and those roles don’t always play nice with what you would like to play, so we decided to let it drop.
Personally I’ve found that it seems like the ideal number of actual human people at a table is four, including GM. By which I mean, in the sense of each person having enough time to shine and contribute meaningfully.
Of course it seems mechanically the ideal number of *characters* for a lot of games is around 4-5.
The ways to manage this issue would of course vary by game (and of course just because your ideal number of players is originally aimed to be a certain number, doesn’t mean that’s how it winds up working out).
For something like D&D I’d probably try and solve this issue by just giving each PC more skills and maybe some kind of party pet/non-full character NPC to either have a player control or have the GM control if that’s cool with the players. Also likely giving them some kind of healing magical item or just reliable resupplies of healing potions and the like.
(But that’s just one solution of many possible answer. For example you could instead use some kind of Gestalt character rules and just throw more/harder enemies at them but alter how you do xp or just do milestone xp.)
Invite 6 people so you get 4.