D&D 5E What's the largest number of PCs you've had in a session?

[shesheyan]

Prefer 4. More than 5 starts to be a problem for me. Too many channels of communication possible between me and the players, and player with players.

 

[Bloodstone Press]

The largest I ever DMed was about 8 people, I think, back in 2e. Didn't care for it, and it didn't last too long. I prefer 3-4. I'll do 5, but more than that is too much.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

When I went to University of Florida in the early 90s we had an on campus gaming club that met and played all day on a Saturday. Eventually a 14 or 15 player game of WEGs Star Wars happened.

We made it play OK by dividing into two sets of PCs, one set who did the ship combat and another who did the groundwork. The GM kept a good balance of swapping between both groups every half hour or so, and when you weren't on camera you could go get food , chat in the hallway, play MTG, or whatever.

It wasn't ideal, but it was fun enough to focus on something small. I played a Yehat (custom race taken from Star Control) fighter pilot.

 

[Cadence]

One campaign I played in in the early 80's (middle school for me) was run by the owner of a local record/comic/game/book store. It had 8-20 people each night, some using B/X, some OD&D, some AD&D. Mostly a dungeon crawl, but once in a while folks could do something character building. It was a major event to make it to 2nd level.

 

[Oofta]

I prefer games with 4-5 people, but they always seem to grow to 6 (my hard limit) because people want to invite friends and family.

My wife is currently running a game for nephews and spouses - so 8 people all told. It's a bit much, especially because it's all online.

My biggest recommendation is to not worry about giving everyone screen time every session, but try to switch who gets the spotlight from session to session. In addition (and whether this works for you is going to vary) I will send emails and have conversations off-line with people to flesh out their PC.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm considering running two separate groups through Storm King's Thunder at the same time and they would cross paths a few times, but pretty much end up playing the campaign in parallel. The combined sessions would end up with 7-8 players though. Ugh, that's a lot. I prefer 3 in a group. 4 max.

So, for anyone who's run a large party...what are the secrets? How does each character get a fair amount of screen time?

Your post badly mixes up players - as in the real people at the table - and PCs, the characters in the fiction. This is quite relevant if-when a DM allows a player to run more than one PC simultaneously in a party.

So, for your combined sessions do you mean 7 or 8 players sitting at the table (which gets unwieldy fast) or do you mean 7 or 8 PCs being run by a smaller number of players (which is trivially easy)? Are there real-world players common to both groups?

I usually have 4 or 5 players at the table but between second characters, adventuring NPCs, and other add-ons the average party size I run is closer to 8-10.

The biggest session I've ever run as part of an ongoing campaign (as opposed to a one-off) was something like 10 players and upward of 25 PCs plus at least 10 adventuring NPCs: multiple parties had a long-standing common home base, many PCs had been retired there, and the base came under attack at a time when most of the active groups were at base during downtime. All hands on deck!

Not something I'll soon want to do again, but it was fun to try once.

 

[Jack Hooligan]

Sorry, if there was confusion.

one player = one character.

Party A has four characters, Party B has two or three. Some sessions...hopefully not too many...will have both parties together, so potentially seven characters (seven people). This will all be on Zoom.

 

[Grazzt]

Way back in our 1e days (mid 80's) we had two DMs (me + one other) and ran 15 players (meaning 15 characters plus various NPCs/hirelings/etc) through various quests for the parts to the Rod of Seven Parts (the original 1e artifact, not that module/boxed set that came later). We played like 12+ hours straight, overnight.

 

[Quickleaf]

BD&D = 1 player (childhood)
AD&D 2e = 1 to 10 players, but usually 2-3 (childhood & high school)
3e = 4-6 players (college)
4e = 5-8 players (grad school)
5e = 3-6 players

 

[billd91]

I think the most I've regularly DMed for would be 10 PCs/players in 1e AD&D, though I think if you include NPCs with the main PCs, we hit 11 in 3e (though with 7 players). Playing with 10 players was definitely the harder of the two and I don't really recommend it.