Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 28 - Unusual Party Sizes and GM NPCs

Episode Date: July 5, 2020

We'd all love to DM/GM for a 4-person party but it is rare.  More often we'll have 6 players or even 8-9 who want to play in a campaign even if we only start off with 4.  How do you handle these huge parties or small parties of less than 4?  If you have a small party, how do you add capabilities to the party with NPCs?  

ladies and gentlemen thank you for tuning into taking 20 episode 28 jamming unusual party sizes and gm npcs before i get started please head over to www.taking20podcast.com you can listen to old episodes leave me feedback would love to see you there this week's sponsor is Frank and Stein's Korean BBQ Restaurant. Our motto? Fire bad! As GMs, we'd all love to have a standard party of four

for every time that we game. But in my experience, the ratio of players to GMs is not four. It's higher. Way higher. If you GM and you're a quarter way decent at it, if you're active in your local gaming scene, you'll probably have people beating down your door to let you DM for them. I'm recording this at the beginning of a month and I've already had

three people contact me about joining a campaign and I just don't have the time and I don't have the space for it. One of my campaigns has seven players, the other has five, and I'm subbing in as a DM for a five-person online group. Hell, the group I'm playing in just expanded to seven. I'm out of spare time for campaigns at the moment. Unless someone wants to sponsor a Let's Play podcast, if so, hit me up at feedback at taking20podcast.com. I'd love to hear from you because I'd love to run one via Twitch or podcast. So if you're interested in sponsoring, let me know. I've heard people say they don't know what they'd do if they became rich. I know exactly what I would do.

I'd run about five campaigns, all meeting about once per week. I'd put some of them out as a Let's Play podcast, maybe one on Twitch. I'd put together like a broadcast studio for it. Everyone but me would be on video, by the way, because my logic there is they can use my picture to scare rats away from under buildings, so this doesn't need to be seen by many people. Anyway, I've gotten sidetracked a little bit, and I apologize for that. Point being, standard party size of four or even five is kind of rare. I mean, what does Critical Role have? Seven players? A lot of online podcasts and broadcasts

have five or six. It's not unheard of to have four. Glass Cannon has four, but by the same token, that same group runs Androids and Aliens, and I think as of this recording, they have six players. So chances are you're not going to have just four players. So how do you handle these odd party sizes? The good news is, is running five people is not much different than running four. Use your same techniques for DMing five people as you do four and you'll be fine. But let's start with big parties, six to seven players. There's no getting around it. With big parties, you're going to have to prep more.

There will be more customization and it just takes more time to prep enemies to combat a big party. Even if you're using pre-made adventures, pre-made adventures are built for three to five PCs most of the time. So what I want to do is I want to break this down between things you will have to do with large parties versus things that you may have to do. If you run a pre-built adventure, you will have to scale combat up with more creatures, more powerful monsters, to give PCs more of a challenge. You may have to scale the existing monsters up to give them better stats, better items, apply templates to them, give them archetypes, give them class levels. One of the things you will definitely have to do is make sure the monsters use good tactics, because a big party like this has a huge advantage. the monsters use good tactics because a big party like this has a huge advantage. One other thing you can do, and it's rare for someone to praise something about 4th edition D&D, but 4th edition

D&D had this concept known as minions. They're low-level monsters. They're not really a threat to the PCs on their own, but there's a lot of them and they soak up actions and attacks that the party could otherwise use on the big bad evil guy or the monster in the room. Listen, if you just have one big bad go against your party of six or seven, the party will probably win based purely on a concept known as action economy. Action economy is the number of actions that can be taken on each side of combat. Taking Pathfinder 2E for example, a party of four gets three actions per round per person. So four times three, they get 12 actions per round. A party of six gets 18 actions

per round. If there's only one big bad that they're fighting, a six-person party has an 18 to 3 advantage on actions they can take every single round, and that gives the PCs a huge advantage. With D&D 5th edition, a lot of powerful monsters get legendary actions, but even then a party of six will have a huge advantage as it's purely the number of things they can do every round. You may have to add a lot of low-level creatures and scale up your monsters to give them additional actions

to even give them a prayer of combating a six-character party. One of the other things you will have to do with a larger party is to give them more encounters per day. The party simply has so much more resources, so give them encounters that makes them burn those resources. Spells per day, actions per day. that makes them burn those resources. Spells per day, actions per day. If they start using them early, they'll have to consider how they're going to run combat when they run out of those powers and spells later.

Now, shifting gears. If you use a pre-built adventure with a larger party, you may have to make the maps bigger. You might have to change the scale of the map or redraw it in some way. Because otherwise, a six-person party can just take up a big chunk of most rooms. Combat can get crowded, and you can have a lot of players getting bored because there's not a lot they can do with so much flesh in between them and the bad guy.

One of the other things you may have to do, and something I would recommend, is start grooming a potential future DM. If there's any one of your players who's expressed even a modicum of interest at possibly becoming a DM in the future, now's the time. You can give them some extra responsibility so that they're not a full DM with all the responsibilities that you have behind the screen, but you can give them responsibilities like keeping track of initiative and initiative changes, like when a player holds their action or delays or waits for a particular trigger. Have them update the battle map,

so draw extra information on the battle map as things change, adding corpses and so forth. You may have them move player tokens on the map or player miniatures on the map, and check to make sure that the player movement follows the rules of your gaming system. Another thing you can have them do is keep track of ongoing and delayed effects. There's a number of spell effects and a number of abilities that have durations that last multiple rounds. Well, have them keep track of that. Oh, your 10 round ability started in round two, so I'll remember if we get to round 12 that that expires. Have them keep track of spells with changing effects round over round.

There are a number of spell effects, for example, that are prismatic sprays that may change what they do round over round. Have them look up on the table what happens when their player rolls, oh, it's a 4, what's the effect? Oh, it's frost damage this time. Have your potential DM take notes. Have them store those notes in a place where everybody can view them, possibly even edit them collaboratively. All of these things train them to eventually sit behind the screen.

Plus, it takes a little bit of that burden off of you, alleviating some of your responsibility. It's a win-win in a lot of ways. Now, let's talk about some other generic large party tips before we leave this concept. Number one, pay very close attention to your players. With large parties, it is really easy for individual players to get bored, not have a good time, get lost in the shuffle. Try to rectify this.

Ask them to help you. Try to bring them into conversations. Ask them their thoughts on some of the party's choices. Ask them specifically what their character is doing right now. Give more and varied chances at the spotlight with a big party. Vary the types of challenges. If it's just combat, combat, combat, combat, combat over and over again, the same characters are going to shine over and over and over again. Make sure you have social encounters or the ability to use skills like tracking. Give them the ability to train others or some other game mechanic that

is non-combat, but do something to give both your combat and non-combat players the ability to shine. Also, don't let one player hog all of the action. There may be a player who's built for combat, and this is a combat-heavy session. Look for opportunities to give other characters and other players the moment to shine, is all that means. One other thing you need to do with large parties is to tell your players, and make sure you get their buy-in, that combat is going to have to get sped up. Players need to spend their time preparing for their next turn, not looking down at their phone, texting friends, goofing off, that kind of thing. When it's their turn, if there are players who drag everybody down because of their being indecisive, or they're going, well, gosh,

let me look up all the definitions of my 32 spells and figure out exactly which one would be perfect in this moment. Put them on a timer. 60 seconds, 45 seconds, 30 seconds, 15 seconds. Hell, if you want to be draconian, 6 seconds, because that's how long most rounds last. Whatever duration, let the players know that they're going to be put on a clock, and when it is their turn, they need to start saying what they're going to do before the time runs out. If they don't, then they are officially delaying and they can jump in any time between player turns. Maybe Lori missed her turn because she was thinking about what she wanted to do. Matt completes his and as soon as Matt completes his turn, Lori says, I'd like to go now. Effectively, game mechanics, you just delayed and let Matt go first. So now you can let Lori resolve what she wants to do. Three, ask players to roll attack and damage at the same time.

It may not sound like much. It may only speed things up a few seconds here and there, but it really does add up. Think about how many rolls you make with six players in combat. If each player is up a sufficient level where they get two attacks per round, I mean you're talking about a few seconds times 12 rolls just on one round of combat. Another thing I would recommend is that unless your players love and adore shopping and downtime activities, move those to between sessions. Set up an online spreadsheet with loot that players can manage. One of my players who's

extremely organized set up a sheet with calculated loot splits, player item purchase requests on a separate list with their approximate costs, and so forth. They then set up a system where the group voted on which items to buy. And so, so far it's been pretty democratic and generally fair. Another thing you may want to do with a large party is consider outlawing chatter at the table. What do I mean? Non-gaming conversations. Look, we're getting together with friends and I'm all about having fun, catching up, talking about what's going on in the world, which right now is a lot, and what's going on in each other's lives. However, this conversation does grind the game to a halt. My usual solution back when we could do things in person was to have the snacks kept in the kitchen, and that's the designated chatting area.

When you're at the table, you're gaming. If you guys want to chit-chat about something else, go grab some Oreos or something. Because if all that chatter happens at the table, the table gets very loud, it's hard to concentrate, you may have two players that are really focused on what's going on, and one player trying to figure out exactly what spell to cast while two other people are talking about current events. So let's move from large parties to enormous parties, eight or more players. Take all the advice from six to seven players and it may be time to split them into two or more groups. Note, not split the party where all eight people are around the gaming table and only four people are adventuring at a time. No, that's horrible. I mean a four-person group who

meets on Fridays and maybe a completely separate group that meets on Sundays. Two completely different groups. If you want to keep them in the same adventure, I mean, look for ways to modify the adventure so there are two objectives to accomplish and each one works on half of it. Maybe have the parties work for a common noble or adventuring society. Maybe break the two groups apart at times and mix the characters together for further adventuring. Anytime I've had eight or more players, I've really struggled keeping players engaged. Two four to five person parties is much easier to manage than one eight to nine person party. By the way, having two separate groups in the same campaign

is actually one of my DM bucket list items. Neither group knows about the other one from the very beginning. They go through their adventures, they have challenges, setbacks, they each have overarching plots and character arcs with a big bad evil guy manipulating the strings behind it all. They get to the final battle or module or book on a space station or demiplane or wherever it happens to be and one of two things happens. One, they realize there's another group that's working towards the same end. They combine forces

Avengers style to this enormous final battle or two, they discover they've been fighting on opposite sides of the conflict and there's a huge player versus player finale. Someday I'm doing this. I just don't know when I'll be able to get around to it. Suppose your huge group absolutely positively does not want to divide into two. Fine. You're going to have to work to keep people involved and to keep combat moving using some of the tips I included here. Maybe make multiple players responsible for certain aspects of the battle, similar to the DM training I talked about earlier. They may not want to step up, and if that happens, well, you just better be ready to deal with the added complexity yourself. I know it can be nerve-wracking feeling like everyone's waiting on you because you're trying

to keep track of so much behind the screen, but if no player will help and the party is this big, there may not be any getting around that. So let's move over to small parties, two to three players. These are a little bit easier. But with small parties, the party may be missing critical capabilities like healing ability or magic damage or a good ranged character or a good tank. A DM NPC may be necessary in this case. Note I said DM NPC, not a DM PC. Do not be a player in your own game because you have an unfair advantage. There's nothing that'll make players feel more useless than having your DM PC say, I'm going to check that intersection for traps because my spidey sense is tingling. No, it's because you've read the module. There's all of the usual DM NPC precautions here. Don't make the DM NPC the party focus.

It should be there for support, not spotlight. Let your players direct the DM NPC in combat, not you. That way, you don't have to worry about the fact that you know the tactics of the monsters, and you won't be tempted to use your DM NPC to be the smart one. Another thing you could do is let the PCs hire mercenaries for difficult parts of the adventure campaign or to provide these missing capabilities. In these cases, the mercenaries should always be reliable. Now is not the time for you to pull out your, the mercenaries were working for the big bad evil guy all along. No, now's not the time. It's a small party, give them the support they need. Other things you can do is basically implement some house rules, for example, that healing

potions can be taken quickly if the party is missing healing, that kind of thing. Make it a swift action, make it a free action, make it a bonus action to retrieve and drink a potion, something like that. Smaller parties do allow for a more focused game and you can give your players a really tailored experience. That being said, I would at least look for a more focused game and you can give your players a really tailored experience. That being said, I would at least look for a fourth. If you can't find someone who will merge well with a group, then hey, just proceed with a smaller group. Last weird party size to talk about, the solo DM. This is where you're DMing for one player. It's the same rules as small parties and you should make it the ultimate customized campaign.

Talk to the player to find out what type of things they would like to see in the campaign. Make it as close to that as you possibly can. If you want inspiration, look at offline RPG games. Things like Skyrim, Dishonored, the campaign from Titanfall 2. Borrow from some of those ideas. Titanfall 2. Borrow from some of those ideas. Steal ideas from them, like the resting mechanics, or make NPC shops plentiful with lots of resources available for them to purchase. Scale your encounters way back, or allow the PCs to hire mercenaries as we talked about before.

Imagine your campaign is a movie, where the camera is focused on this character and what he or she sees. Focus on describing that. Have fixed and helpful NPCs who can fill in knowledge and information that a PC just simply may not have on their own. Have this NPC provide that same information that the module requires, assuming that one of four people will have knowledge in nature, for example. Finally, if there's only one player, consider allowing that player to run multiple characters. Make sure the player is comfortable running multiple characters, but if so, go hog. Listen, RPGs can be fun whether you have one PC or eight. Communicate your needs to the players and understand the players' needs regardless of what the party size is. Work with them,

give them the spotlight, and everybody have a great time with this hobby that we all love. Please subscribe and please give some feedback to feedback at taking20podcast.com. I'd love to hear from you. Also, if you have any show ideas, please provide it to that same email address. I would love to mention you on a future show. Once again, I want to thank our sponsor, Frankenstein's Korean Barbecue Restaurant. They are now required by a recent lawsuit to tell you that this location

does not serve hot dogs or beer. Thank you so much for listening. This has been Taking 20, Episode 28, GMing Unusual Party Sizes and GM NPCs. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and here's hoping that your next game is your best game.