Too Much of a Good Thing

A couple of weekends ago I ran a few sessions of the Great Dungeon and at one point I found myself with ten players at the table. Now, I DMed a long-running campaign with a group that size, but that was a long time ago and I was a little out of practice managing so many players.

For the Great Dungeon session I was using the excellent Dwarven Forge terrain along with miniatures, but it was quickly becoming a slog to lay out the dungeon, move all the PC figures, and set up monsters. I will sometimes lay out the dungeon ahead of time for smaller set pieces, but the area the PCs were exploring is so large that this approach was impractical.

I have a pretty good organizational system for the tiles and minis which normally allows me to build the dungeon as the delve progresses. But with such an enormous group it was just too much. After about 20 minutes I had to switch over to theater of the mind mode. You‘ve got to know when to cut bait, and this was definitely the time.

So the good news was we didn't miss a beat going old school. The 5e system is abstract enough to support a purely narrative style of play. The props and such might have been manageable if I had laid down the floor plan ahead of time.

The experience does make me wonder, where is the break point for using physical components? For me, it's probably somewhere north of eight players. Ideally, components aid gameplay by helping everyone visualize the action and by acting as a convenient mechanism to record otherwise complex game information. Think of how a peg board works in cribbage—you could track the very same information numerically with a scratch pad, but it would be tedious, more prone to error, and less fun. I find that with more than eight players miniatures begin to detract from the game: they require too much time to manipulate and start making the game harder to track. Is this Bill’s elf? Which orc did Susan hit last round?

At the other end of the range, I suspect physical components become less valuable with smaller groups. With only two or three players, miniatures and such aren’t usually necessary and maybe theater of the mind is a better choice for small parties.