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.)