Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Yeah... so I created a club at my local library, and I was expecting maybe 3-5 people. Instead, I got 12, and I don't know how to run battle and social interaction efficiently! Please, any help would be amazing!
D&D doesn't scale well to that many people. You can do it, but it's going to be chaotic without careful people management, and combat is going to have a lot of dead time for everyone.
If you have people who are up to GMing, I suggest splitting into 2-3 groups.
What jl8e said.
DnD is not a large scale game(which I've learned the hard way). It takes hours to get halfway through your initiative, and major combats are living heck. Nobody gets anything done, and it requires incredible assertation over the players. One chatty troublemaker can derail everything.
Split them into groups. Find others who are willing to DM, put up a board with each of the DM's campaign/adventure synopsis, and let people decide what they want to play. Don't try to DM all of them. Nobody will enjoy it as much.
He doesn't have much besides the skin on his bones. Me: I'll take the skin on his bones, then.
"You see a gigantic, monstrous praying mantis burst from out of the ground. It sprays a stream of acid from it's mouth at one soldier, dissolving him instantly, then it turns and chomps another soldier in half with it's- "
"When are we gonna take a snack break?"
Encounter balance with 12 players is whacky.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/dmg-2024/creating-adventures#XPBudgetperCharacter
For a party of four at level one, a high difficulty encounter would be a 400 xp monster. That's one ogre. CR2
For a party of twelve at level one, a high difficult encounter would be 1200xp monster. That's a helmed horror. CR4
The problem then becomes those higher CR monsters can easily kill a PC in a single hit before the party kills it.
The other thing the encounter budget does NOT take into account is Action Economy, so if the Helmed Horror goes first and focuses all attacks on one PC, they could probably kill that PC. But if the helmed horror goes last, it will probably die before it gets a turn.
Even with a party of 4, multi enemy encounters are tougher. even if the XP adds up to something that sounds "moderate".
If you run encounters against a party fo 12, you're going ot have to make all encounters have lots of low XP monsters and interleave the monsters initiatives with the players so at elast some monsters get a chance to attack before they're killed. You'll also have to be careful about spreading out yhour attacks. If several monsters focus fire one PC, you could quickly kill the PC. It's goign to be tough.
I actually played in a group of 12 campaign for a little while. It was indeed crazy. The other thing that will happen is combat turns will be excruciatingly slow. When I dm, I try to keep my players snappy, but sometimes the monsters move or someone goes to zero hp, and their plans change, so they have to stop and think what to do. multiply that by twelve, and you're looking at maybe one turn of combat in an hour?
Social interactions? forgetaboutit.
I highly recommend you find a way to split this group into smaller parties. Maybe ask the 12 and see if you can find 2 dm's in there?
Also, if you really don't have any other DMs, you could try running for two groups on alternate weeks, though that's a lot of work for you. (If you try running the same scenario for both, you will likely get mixed up.)
Yeah, my club has quite a few chatty troublemakers. ):< Thanks for the advice, guys. Just one thing. I am teaching new people who have almost never seen dice. Some can't tell a d6 from a d20. They are learning, but none of them are ready to be a Dungeon Master, and some might not want to. So I don't know how to split the group into three when I don't have other DMs.
I'd definitely split them in smaller groups as i would never run a campaign with 12 players anymore, nowadays i prefer to run with 3-5 max.
The challenge will be to train new DM to help run them.
Then we're definitely talking about multiple groups under you. Probably two, unless you have a lot of free time. Six people per group is still a lot, especially if they're new to it and will spend a lot of time figuring out what to do, but it's doable. (I have six people in my game, and they do have plenty of experience, and combat still takes forever.)
The good news is that, given that people generally have lives, splitting them up probably won't be a problem. The other good news is that there'll be several drops.
The other thing I'd suggest is making it clear to them that if they miss a session, they won't lose out. Don't make it complicated or a big deal. Just accept that characters will spend some time sort of hanging out in the background, and let them level up and get loot as if they'd been there all the time.
Thanks! Something else I have been doing is splitting the group in half just for combat. So let's say 12 goblins come out. One group would get 6 goblins, and the other would get the remaining 6. Each group would attack simultaneously with their own different initiative rounds. It's been working pretty well!
How many days do you have to work with to make schedule? If you can manage two days, or split morning and afternoon sessions on the same day, you can run the game adventure league style. This allows you to use the same play space in parallel, where the consequences of one group can become visible to the other.
So say the morning group is tasked to clear a goblin camp and then hunkers down for the day, and the afternoon group is tasked to hunt down goblin patrol groups who were returning to the camp. If the morning group fails, the goblins form hunting parties and actively chase down the afternoon party during their session. If the afternoon party fails, the morning party's next session starts with fighting a Troll that the Goblins set loose to attack the party.
The hard part is being looser with the narrative, and always having to think up chains or pairs of related tasks that the two parties can work through. And instead of planned grand narratives, things are a semi-sandbox with more modular quests. its entirely possible for the quests to go in separate directions for a bit, but should always converge with an interrelated goal or a return to the home town. And leaving notes or gear/material they found for the other group should be encouraged. This gives both groups a meta context of what the other group is doing, and help each other with. "If you guys find griffon feathers, I could use them" and "can you leave us 50 gold because we need to go shopping". Or if Afternoon group used up all the Ooze bombs, Morning group might decide today's session should be to hunt oozes and restock.
And you can help this even further by having both groups share a Bastion or Custom Guildhall, with a list of things they need to obtain to upgrade, as an always present secondary objective and resource management element. Just don't make them compete for generated benefits.... let each group take advantage of whats there.
I...did not think of that. I think I'm going to try it out! Wow, where did you come up with that amazing tactic? Though I don't have time to do two sessions with two parties in one day, I can certainly play with one group on Mondays and another on Saturdays! THANK YOU!