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[Hat]

I've had a request from a member of my regular group to consider running another SR campaign.  One of my hesitations for considering it is that we'd have either 7 or 8 players with at least 6 there on any given week.  The campaign idea is heavy magic (lots of spirits, adepts, casters, magical places of interest, etc.) and I could define characters to be magic types which might help.  The sheer # of PCs though concerns me especially trying to keep everyone involved and how long combats would take.  Multiple bound spirits per caster both sides could easily make for 15+ folks per side per combat.

Any suggestions for how to handle this or potentially to streamline combats for large #s?

With a sweep of his...

Hat

[Darrian Wolffe]

First rule is to talk to your group and point out your concerns.  A Gentleman's Agreement to keep bound spirits to a mutually-acceptable level will go a LONG way towards helping this out.

Once you've done that, talk about time limits on turns and emphasize that people need to have their dice pools already in hand by the time their turn comes up.  Not letting people take a long time to think about what they're doing (they should have been considering that while other people were doing stuff) helps keep combat time down.

Think about asking them if they have anyone who'd like to GM.  Make that person a GM's assistant - they can have a support PC (like an AD&D healbot), but their main job is to help you run NPCs during combat, and to do rules lookups while you keep the game moving.

Finally, LIMIT CHARACTER ABILITY.  The bigger the dice pools and the more stuff they CAN do, the longer it'll take.  Running a combat where everyone has 20+ dice pools, 2-3 specialties, and 3 IP all the time will take a while - no way around it.  Running a combat where PCs can only have a single spirit active, a 12-dice pool, 1 specialty each, and 2 IPs at most is way easier.  Talk about this with your group as well - some players think that being powerful is a God-given right and the GM isn't allowed to limit what they can do.  Those players are objectively wrong.

[Hat]

Definitely some good points, and the assistant GM for combats could help with things.  Limiting character abilities / options may also work, though the story I'm thinking of is more epic in scale - stop the remnants of Aztechnology from bringing the horrors into the world and magically nuking Denver as part of the process.  May still be possible to run the story at a lower power level, I'd just need to figure out how I'd want to approach it.

One of the other things I've thought of is to do a hybrid approach for combat - get general intentions and tactics, make some dice rolls and narrate what happens through sections of it, giving the PCs an opportunity to adjust depending on how things are going.  My group has a lot of experience with the Amber DRPG, so it wouldn't be out of the question for them.  More to think about.

With a sweep of his...

Hat