State of the Campaign, Episode II

[copied from my original Facebook Notes, circa Jan 2010]

I’ve opened up my game to adding more players. Recently, we’ve had a few players drop out of my game for personal reasons. That leaves me with a core group of 3 guys plus another guy that is usually 50/50 on showing up. I prefer to run games with more than the “Standard 4” characters for a few reasons, which I’ll discuss now.

First, I’ve come to realize that I run some brutal encounters. This started years ago in my high school campaign. Back in the 2nd Edition days, the only real evidence you had in how the toughness of a monster was in their XP. More XP meant a tougher bad guy. In an effort to increase the dramatic tension of the encounter, I made the fights tougher. I increased the number of bad guys or simply inserted stronger bad guys. The players were forced to sweat more, thus increasing the dramatic tension of the scene. To offset some of the likelihood of a character death, I gave the characters more power, be it better abilities or more magic items or whatever. However, this led to a vicious circle where I increased the power of the bad guys to overcome the power of the PCs which had been increased to overcome the power of the bad guys. In the end, some characters died, but not as many as you might think. I don’t feel that the players disliked this style of play, but I could be wrong. And I’ve only had one TPK (that I can recall), but I planned the TPK in order for a different, bigger dramatic scene to play out (and the players were brought back to life, so it wasn’t really a TPK, right?).

Now, with Pathfinder and 3rd Edition, most monsters are rated for their relative challenge to a group of characters. Yet I still find myself under enthused when the characters blast their way through an encounter that the Rules state as being “challenging”. Granted, Pathfinder characters are supposedly higher in power than 3/3.5E PCs. And I bump that even further with higher ability scores, an extra feat, and double standard treasure. So while Pathfinder does make it easier to make a more balanced encounter, I still find myself ratcheting up the difficulty in order to increase the tension and drama.

All of this finally leads me to my first point: with more characters, the chance of some unlucky dice rolls causing a TPK is smaller. The smaller the group of characters, the easier it is for a bad session to go horribly wrong. With more PCs, odds are that they will overcome with fewer actual casualties. I can design more difficult encounters while knowing that the group can absorb the punishment. The “Economy of Actions” in D&D is a big topic in recent versions, and more PCs means more actions, generally leading to a better outcome.

Secondly, one of my favorite parts of D&D is the social aspect of the game. I enjoy my time hanging out with a group of people, sharing a common interest. The more people I can include into this mix, the better it will be. At one point I was playing in 3 games (before I started DM-ing) and a few months ago I dropped out of one of the games because it was getting to be too hectic with my family schedule. But given enough time in the day, I would definitely choose to spend some of it with my friends, playing D&D.

Thirdly, having more characters means having more options as a DM. I will have more angles to work as I plan plot arcs and storylines. I always ask my players to come up with some sort of backstory, and I pour over these, looking for ideas on motivation and surprise plot elements to be used in the future of the campaign. The game feels more dynamic to me when I can toss tidbits of info into the game that help tie the characters to the world around them.

So, in short, I like bigger groups. I like playing with 5 or 6 players. And I only have 4 currently. So, if you know of anybody that wants to join up, shoot me a line.