Hey

So a couple of students where I teach high school asked if I would start a D&D club.  I said yes and put out an announcement.  I have 17 students who want to play and I am the only one with DMing experience and all of them want to play PCs.  The club is to meet one day a week after school.  Any idea how I can get this to work?

(1) With a school club, you would probably do well to adopt much of the organization of Adventurer's League to help streamline and simplify the structure of play.

(2) You need more people to help with DMing. Now, that doesn't mean anyone has to commit to whole campaigns. Try to get a stack of published one-shots ready to go and incentivize the players to participate in a weekly DM rotation. If that seems like a stretch, then break it down into smaller encounters. If all of the players get some experience behind the screen then a couple of them might find that they enjoy it and ask for more.

(3) Talk to other faculty to see if you can make D&D relevant to their education. The students could participate in writing competitions to earn credit in language and government/history classes. Players enjoy writing backstories, and DMs enjoy world building. 

Basically, run it like a class. Build a curriculum, and increase engagement over time.

With 17, you're realistically talking 4, or maybe 3 big, tables.  What I'd recommend is break the students into those tables, assign a DM rotation, and give them 1 shot encounters they can finish up in a club meet (club meets for 3-4 hours right?  I've seen D&D clubs meet for 1-2 hours and they're frankly best for war stories and coordinating games outside of school).  So each week tables will have different DMs.  Maybe after the rotation, some campaign or world building could rise from the experiment.

You'd sort of be the floater advisory DM sort of traveling to the tables checking in the that the games are going well, sort of like a chess club proctor.  

Since this is a school activity, you can probably do a session 0 with everybody so the whole club plays to the same school standards in regards to all the content areas community standards may be raised.  

I don't think you could integrate a 17 member extracurricular formally into their respective curricular studies.  However, if it turns out students are inspired in the reading/writing or social studies classes by the D&D club, cool.

Another option, requiring more legwork but may make folks a lot happier, would be to check your local game stores, seeing if they're AL affiliates and see if any of they got anyone interested in engaging a school aged group as DMs as school volunteers (I'm sure you school has some sort of vetting protocol, but I know a lot of gamer types do welcome opportunities to channel their hobby into "community service" and I think the more responsible adults who get involved with their local schools the better).  Some stores may even welcome an opportunity to get them while they're young be an ambassador to the hobby to a new audience (and relatedly some schools have varying degrees of rules re: commercial interests engaging a school sanctioned extracurricular, but this seems like a reasonable interaction most likely).  Another possibility, who knows, maybe you got AL affiliates and/or at least experienced DMs who are actually in your PTA or PTA "Dad's Club" who would much rather run D&D than show the same movie night program for the umpteenth time.   I mean a lot of parents became or returning to GMing and tabletop over the. past two years, so the odds are higher than they used to.  Good luck.  

Midnight had some good ideas about splitting them up and you floating between tables.

I'd second the idea for keeping them to one-shots. That way, if you have, say only one kid show up from a particular table (everyone else is absent or had something else that week), that one kid can float in at another table. If not one-shots, maybe establish that during the session 0, that there may be times that people need to move from one table to another owing to attendance issues, so everyone don't worry too much about it if Bob the fighter is at table 2 this week and table 3 the next. I realize that may mean people aren't as into the story, but they should be able to adjust.

I would go with the Adventurer's League adventures, but here's the twist: make it so everyone has to DM. For every X adventures play play, you have to be the GM once. Or, rotate every week.

That way you have 2 tables of 5 players and 1 GM and 1 table of  4 players and 1 GM. This is the most fair way to avoid selfish players forcing people to be forever DMs.

Yeah, there is no realistic way to run a group of 17 players with 1 DM.

So maths for you. Let's say you run a combat with one monster per PC. The number of monsters may not always be that high, but other times it will be higher, so let's use 17 monsters as an example run. So 34 characters in this fight.

Say a person takes 10 seconds to take their turn. That's really being conservative, by the time they've described what they're going to do, the DM tells them what to roll, they roll, the DM describes the result, the DM manages to get the attention of the next person, etc, 10 seconds is very short. Add on to that thenfact that they're teenagers so they're going to bicker, debate, mock each other etc and you'll be lucky if it's under a minute, but let's run with 10 seconds.

That means to do a round, that's 34×10=340 seconds or just under 6 minutes to do a round. For every 10 seconds of interaction, each person has to sit around for five and a half minutes doing nothing. It's tough when there's a party of 5.

You could do player by committee. 3 players control one character. If they get into it though  you could have problems because they'll take longer to decide than individual players would, and you would run into similar problems as before - they'll spend minutes debating rather than playing.

You could do simultaneously play, similar to Diplomacy. You describe what the monsters do. You give them, say, a minute to decide what their character does. Run a random initiative each round - perhaps you pull names out of a hat, You then have them tell you what their character does, resolve it, then move onto the next name. You'd probably want either bulletnspige enemies so players are less likely to lose their go if they get picked last ("Sorry, that one is already dead") or give them the option to switch targets in that case. I've never tried this format so while it sounds like it could work, be aware that it might not.

Others have suggested having players be DMs for small groups. I'd be concerned that they may not have played before, let alone be good DMs. If they've never played before or don't have the skills to do it well (yet), I'm not sure that putting them in front of their teenaged peers to learn how to DM is the best or kindest thing to do. Obviously, you know the group, whether they can already play or if the students are kinder than most teenagers, maybe it could work. Just something to bear in mind.

I think the best bet is to get help. As someone suggested, other teachers might be a source - it's great for English and maths. While the numbers are simple, this kind of repeatedly manipulating basic numbers is great for forming that foundation that makes higher maths much easier and so really develops their mathematical abilities in general - it's a fun way of doing something that is normally incredibly boring and a grind and therefore normally  impossible to do with kids effectively. Alternatively, you might be able to rope in friends, depending on school rules regarding visitors.

Part of the club activities could be letting the kids split into groups and, using the source books, figuring out how the rules work together till maybe a few of them are confident DMing.

Also, with that many kids, maybe look into running a West Marches style game. For info on what that is, as always, here's Matt Coville:

https://youtu.be/oGAC-gBoX9k

Since it is high school limit the PCs to Players handbook only.  Hold fast to this rule as it will save on costs of hardcopies. And prevent the richer kids from accessing stuff in other books. Further the lesser number of options in play, the easier for you and your dms to run.