So what are the sizes of the groups that DMs run. This question was brought to mind from the thread concerning game dates. I run one campaign for 8 people--average ages from 18-50. Another group has 4 people in it ages 18-50. The final group has 5 people ages 13-18. I run the campaigns on a three week rotating schedule for about five hours a Friday night. One campaign has been running for about 8 years with the characters low level epic. The other two have only recently started, about a year old.
I run a game where my players are all in their 20's. I'm the oldest person there and I'm 31. There are currently five players and I may be adding up to three in the next few months. We play every other week and the game has been going on for almost a year now.
My last campaign was 5-6 players (fluctuating)--between 18 and 31. My next campaign is going to be a little tighter, and will likely have 4 players--possibly, possibly 5 if the stars align. _________________ <a target="_self" href="http://rpgblog2.blogspot.com/"><u><br /></u></a>
My current game has 6 regular players, ages 22-45. We'll occasionally get one-timers and there are a few who play every once in a while. The regulars I play as NPCs if they can't make a particular session, the others just stay offscreen.
I actually really like playing with the younger folks; I get to show them how we played in the "good old days" (it's an AD&D 1E game) and they get to remind me how damned old I am.
That, and they keep me in touch with what the youngsters are doing today. Apparently there's this "wow!" thing that's in with the hep crowd...
In the last few years I have run stable groups of from 2-6 players (with groups of 2-3 having the option to play more then one character if they wish. My current group consists of 4 players each with 1 PC, and 2 more at least semi-permeanent (but less powerful) NPC followers, for a group size of 6 characters on an average week.
My campaigns (five currently) have between 4 and 6 players. I have one player who is 18, all the others are roughly between 30 and 50 years old, with the majority being in the mid 40s.
I have acronyms for the gaming groups, The acronyms are descriptive of what we play and where (and would have no relevance unless you lived in macon and knew the folks I knew).
SMG (Stephanie/Miller Group) - 7 regular gamers, and sometimes one of the hosts daughter (age 6-8, you'd be surprised how good she is). 30-39 for the normal group. (Two different Dms running Greyhawk)
LWG (Lake Wildwood Group) - 8 regular gamers (age 22-39) with a few kids joining the game occasionally - 8-12 Years old. (my 3.5/4E Saltmarsh, my 3.5 ebberon, another guy's 3.5 ebberon, and we also play Shadowrun (3E and 4E), All Flesh Must be Eaten, and cyberpunk)
MFG (Macon Friday Group) - 7 regular gamers (aged 24-39) with a few kids joining us at least once so far (different kids from LWG, but same age range). (My RtToEE 4E game, and soon another guy's Scales of War 4E Game)
A4EG (Atlanta 4E Group)- 7 regular gamer - though we may be losing one soon because of work schedule aged 22-39 (4E running though the Shadowfell Adventure Modules)
All of those number include DM and players, because we do hand off who is DMing to avoid DM burnout.
My young son (10) has just rolled a character up and we're going to start a game, playing when we can, on our own at the moment.
That's great! That's is exactly how I started in the hobby, playing with my father. He then let me play with his group a few times and then I got my best friend to play basic D&D and the rest is history.
My group has 3 players (maybe a 4th soon) and myself as DM playing 6 characters. Two of us are in our 30s the other two 20s. Most of them are new (to me) to the hobby started playing 3.5. It's fun for a 'old timer' like me to show them how much fun and how well written the classic modules are. One of them looked at the back of the module and asked, "What's TSR?". They also had no idea who Gary Gygax was.
I will use Mikel's abbreviations, as we share many gaming friends. Most of my games rotate every few weeks:
SMG- 7 Gamers, I am the DM. However, this group is an add-hoc, one shot where I am normally a gamer. The DM was unavailable when the group met. Set in the Wild Coast.
GH- 9 gamers (several come and go), but this can easily go over a dozen. This is a long running campaign going back over 8 years. The high point of this game was 17 players. 16 died in one game in Maure Castle, with the worst set of die rolls I have ever seen. Set in gran March (SUPRISE!!!)
HC- a dozen gamers- this is a home brew campaign, where Mikel is a co DM, and it is on Hiatus. however, it is a compeletely different group of gamers.
All told, I think I have about 20 to 25 available different gamers at any one time.
Well, when I was actively gaming in the RPGA, there was a pool of active gamers to draw from that was about 20 to 30 players (there were three or four times that inactive. The game tables (by regulation, were 4-6 players. We usually tried to have a full table of six.
Now I am in a L5R group that meets every other Saturday and is six players. The age range, IIRC, is about 22 to 35. (With me being the top end of that.)
And if WoW counts for anything (where I do adventuring groups with live voice connections), parties are also typically 4-6 players.
I think that range (4-6) seems to be about the sweet spot for palyability.
I have acronyms for the gaming groups, The acronyms are descriptive of what we play and where (and would have no relevance unless you lived in macon and knew the folks I knew).
LWG (Lake Wildwood Group) - 8 regular gamers (age 22-39) with a few kids joining the game occasionally - 8-12 Years old. (my 3.5/4E Saltmarsh, my 3.5 ebberon, another guy's 3.5 ebberon, and we also play Shadowrun (3E and 4E), All Flesh Must be Eaten, and cyberpunk)
Lake Wildwood! No kidding. Small world. I had a friend who used to live over on Will Scarlet Way. He didn't game though his little brother was in our group in Athens. Me and some friends from Macon State College back in the mid 80's (It was Macon Junior then) used to game almost every night one Summer when one of the guys had a job just watching the office and answering the phones at the college's downtown center. It was the first GH campaign I had run since middle school and the only one where I actually had players in the City of GH.
That group was just 3 players and me DMing.
Then when I went off to college in Athens me and my roommate took turns DMing each other in kind of a shared GH campaign, although another roommate had a game set in Thieves World. All that was 1st edition with some homebrew rules. Once I graduated we started playing more Traveller and a homebrewed postapocalyptic game.
I didn't play for D&D for quite a few years until I ran my first 3e campaign in a homebrew world with 4 players.
The last game I ran was a 3.5 GH campaign set in the Wild Coast with 2 players, before they moved back east. We're about to start that back up online using Skype and RPTools MapTool with a switch to 4e rules.
The group I currently game with has eight regular 1e players, and an extended group of about 15 other folks who game about 2-4 times per year during our "large group/Wrath of Con" sessions. _________________ Allan Grohe<br />https://www.greyhawkonline.com/grodog/greyhawk.html<br />https://grodog.blogspot.com/
isnt a little odd a group of , lets say, 2 fighting dwarfs, 1 elven mage, 3 human whatever, 1 halfling thief, 2 gnome something, 1 another race...
isnt that strange? lots of diferent guys walking together?
My next game of RtToEE (granted we're no where near the temple) is supposed to be: one Dwarven Swordmage from parts indeterminate (likely Ulek), a Dragonborn wizard from west of the Celestial Empire, two Eladrin from Celene (Star Pact Warlock and a Bow Ranger), a Gnome (Illusionist Wizard), three halflings (Warlord, Ranger[ Slinger], and Rogue), and a human (Cleric of Olidammara multiclassed as rogue) from Verbobonc. One of the things I love best about 4E is adding extra players just means adding an extra monster or two for each player. Its so much easier to scale on the fly than 3.x EVER was.
So far I've just treated them like you would any group like that. Their reception has been similar to what would happen if a mercenary company came through, or a group of friendly foriegn knights. In the current town they are in, a village of 120, they represent a serious drain on the resources of the town, but one that they can recover from. Currently the town's blacksmith is getting together a caravan that he can take to Homlet and sell all the weapons and armor the PCs have gathered and sell it to Burnes and crew. Of course, they will have to escort it, and well, these are dangerous times....
Whoaah! You are one busy gamer, MikelAmroni. That's fantastic, although I'm more than a little envious.
You haven't got access to some sort of time manipulation device by any chance, have you?
Well two of those games (LWG and MFG) are back to back, one Friday, one Saturday. We have a set monthly date.
The A4EG is likely going to be a short run group. We're running through the Shadowfell Modules. One of our LWG group volunteered to run 4E first. I do most of our DnD DMing, so it was nice to be able to play. Its usually set several weekends after the LWG game.
The SMG game is episodic at best, as much as I love it. We play around 8 times a year.
I have several friends who I used to game with who I just don't get the chance to. They are running one game every Weds night, and one they run 1-2 times a month on Saturday nights, and I think one other as well.
As for my wife - I am lucky in that she likes getting together and having fun with gaming. Where she has always been rather unenthusiastic when it comes to 3.x gaming (too complex), she has really come to enjoy 4E a lot. Easier to use, easier to figure out new characters, etc. A lot of that comes from my preparation of her character sheet (I make sure she can find everything quickly, and put as much into her power cards as I can - less book referencing.), but the rest is just how much she enjoys 4E's system. At some point she'll get bored with gaming and I'll have to cut back for a few months, but right now with money tight, gaming is about as low cost as it gets for fun. Between it and SingStar we get to have get togethers for the cost of food for everyone, and have highly memorable parties. Often its Singstar after the game, so that's always fun too.
Lake Wildwood! No kidding. Small world. I had a friend who used to live over on Will Scarlet Way. He didn't game though his little brother was in our group in Athens. Me and some friends from Macon State College back in the mid 80's (It was Macon Junior then) used to game almost every night one Summer when one of the guys had a job just watching the office and answering the phones at the college's downtown center. It was the first GH campaign I had run since middle school and the only one where I actually had players in the City of GH.
The last game I ran was a 3.5 GH campaign set in the Wild Coast with 2 players, before they moved back east. We're about to start that back up online using Skype and RPTools MapTool with a switch to 4e rules.
How is RPtools? it looks pretty good. What kind of learning curve is there?
And where are you these days? I know you've said it before, but ya got me curious (and well, I have NO clue which thread that was in ).
How is RPtools? it looks pretty good. What kind of learning curve is there?
And where are you these days? I know you've said it before, but ya got me curious (and well, I have NO clue which thread that was in ).
I like it. I'm lazy so we're just going to use it straight up like you would a battlemat, without all the bells and whistles. I'm going to just have a map for each encounter, but with a little work you can do the whole dungeon using fog of war and other mapping features.
I'm in eastern Washington these days. Olympia, down at the bottom of Puget Sound.
I try to keep my groups around 6 max. I am currently playing a human cleric of the Raven Queen in a 4th edition game. Our group's youngest member is 16, me being the oldest at 37.
Trever age 28 plays: Human Ranger
Daniel age 29 plays: Dwarf Cleric of Kord
Natalie age 16 plays: Half-Elf Fighter
Matthew age 22 plays: Dragonborn Warlock (Infernal Pact)
Jim age 37 plays: Human Cleric of The Raven Queen
Raymundo age 17 plays: Human Paladin of Kord
Jon age 30 is our Dungeon Master (crafty and devious)
So far this game has been fun, we're all almost 3rd level in a home brew PoL type of setting (these guys can't appreciate GH too much)
We have the same group minus the younger players for 3.5 Eberron game and its allot more interesting. It has Trever as DM. When we pick that game back up again after this one I hope I can drag the other two players into it. I think they will enjoy it despite the older system (which is still my favorite)
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