For a number of years now, a group of friends assembled from the remainder of the UNL Gamer's Association, a club which had been going for many years to get undergraduate rpg-ers together here on campus and which has, sadly, now passed into the beyond. As tends to happen with groups of friends as time passes, many of us have moved and others have joined. However, a number of my friends are currently split between Omaha and Lincoln, NE, a one hour drive that makes it difficult to get together regularly for a game but leaves it slightly more practical to have an every-other-Sunday game with all of us together. This makes for a fun, reminiscing, meandering game session on a fairly regular occasion but, as I've discovered since becoming the gamemaster for this group, creates a unique and difficult challenge: the group is about twice the size that most rpg's are built for.
The standard gaming group size has a lot of things going for it. First of all, it's the size that they actually build the mechanics of the game to work with. Dungeons and Dragons assumes that you have a group with four players and a GM, and the underlying math of the game as well as the actual game mechanics keep this in mind. Many other RPGs contain some version of these same assumptions. It really just goes back to basic communication theory, where a group larger than 5 people tend to have difficulty maintaining continuous communication without some of the individuals drifting off and establishing their own conversations. We can see this often at our gaming table, and frankly I'm one of the most egregious offenders despite my own efforts to avoid this. Combat in a situation like this can be especially draggy, as players essentially get their combat turn and then have to sit for fifteen minutes before they get to participate in the game again. I don't think anyone can really be blamed for drifting under those conditions, and it's essentially the enemy I have to face when I'm doing my planning for these sessions.
The answers, thus far, have come from a different type of gaming all together. When I plan out combats for these folks my framework tends to be "If I was designing this as a raid encounter in World of Warcraft, what would I do?" The reason is relatively straight forward and involves some of the assumptions and realizations that Blizzard's designers have come to over the course of the last several expansions. Very, very rarely are raid fights designed as a "tank and spank" anymore, as these are essentially boring fights where only the tank actually interacts with the monster being fought while the rest of the group just sits in whatever the safe spot in the room is and mash their buttons until the boss falls down and loot falls out. Now, any kind of fight in a raid, even including the trash pulls before you've even reached the boss, include some mechanic that everyone in the raid must deal with INDIVIDUALLY. Whether it be the always infamous fire/void/poison/poop on the floor that we aren't supposed to stand in, changing terrain, trash adds that show up and have to be dealt with in ever-increasing ways, and so on and so forth. The objective is to make sure that at all times everyone in the raid is DOING SOMETHING. This, while personally fueling my personal anxiety level at all points in the combat (heals, heals, heals, OCRAPIMINTHEFIREMOVEMOVEMOVE) it is infinitely better than the snore-fest tank and spank combats.
This is, I've found, even more important during D&D, if that's possible. The longer the players sit with no part in what's occurring during the fight, the more likely it is that they will drift. If, however, during the middle of the round they're continuously being assaulted by enemies, affected by terrain that is shifting, and/or dealing with surprise attacks, suddenly Chris isn't falling asleep in his chair and Rob maybe puts his computer down to watch intently. I threw a lot of these things into the big arena-style combat I threw at my group last week, where the party was facing an epic scale combat with the lycanthropic leader of a demon-worshiping cult and his water demon servants in an arena that would routinely shoot areas of the floor into the air, forming impromptu towers, drop away into pits, or even fire spear traps up at them. That, paired with the cult leader being built to move around all over the map as well as doing a ton of things that players hate (Hurray, we've got him pinned d-wait? How the hell did he get over there?) and the escalating threat of smaller water monsters being killed and forced to combine into gradually larger and larger threats, led to a very dynamic, very involved combat that the group seemed very enthused about the whole time. I paired this up with a unique, one time mechanic wherein the group was rewarded for using their flashier, more limited attacks to appease the god of strength and combat in whose arena they were fighting and included a mechanic whereby the priest of the aforementioned god could call on his power to refresh the group, a measure that was necessary since I had basically lumped three encounters into one massive fight, and I was pleased with the results. It was a fight that was essentially impossible to balance given the way the rules for the D&D4e system are written, but it all worked out in the end with a good fight and only one party member death (which, given the epic-ness of the encounter, the group seemed fine with.)
Now, the only trouble is figuring out what to do next to improve.
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