Wednesday 7 February 2018

Rethinking running a public bi-weekly game

I thought it might be neat to try to run a game in the city at one of the hobby stores where they are boasting 10 player tables (meaning lot's of people are looking to play). However controlling 10 players is insane as well as only getting two hours to play is bad when combat runs with ten people. I thought I would have to go every week, but I recently seen a post where someone is running a table bi-weekly and got to thinking.

Things I would want to bring or do:
Have campaign guides (paper copies) available for $2.00 or so
Have the logo displayed on my steel book holder
Have business cards with the campaign info on them available
Be able to video record, audio record or live stream the game would be nice

If the table was large I could try splitting the players into two parties who are going for the same dungeon, at least to start off and have them competing to see who can get the treasure first. After this they can meet up and see what evolves.

Now as for the game where to start? I could run dungeons to keep things moving for two hour games, since that is the easiest solution. I don't mind the role playing, but with a group over ten it would not be possible. One person would hog the spotlight and more timid players would not get one word out all game with ten people talking (if the table is that high).

Also setting, we know it will be a UPM game and I always start in Ashura. Lately though I have been running a game north of Ashura along the west oceans coast in the Untamed North. I could all together also go to my most beloved place and just straight up run a Ravenloft game. So many ideas, but the one I pick has to be easy for many players in a short time span, so it can't be heavy investigation role playing for sure.

As I was saying earlier combat is an issue. Combat helps with large groups by getting everyone to have a turn and get into the fight, it also helps with a straight forward adventure of kill the things and find the loot, but it can also be the only thing that happens if the number of enemies needed to balance the large party takes all night to defeat. In that case we are having two hour combat games and getting nowhere. The fights would have to be easy and quick with maybe a long boss fight when called for.

As for dungeon exploration, with a large number of people they would surely have the skills to avoid things like pits, chasms and the like, any NPC they met would be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the party and how many people are tying to talk to them that, that would fizzle out as well.

One of the dungeons I have been planning is a large dark souls, darkest dungeon type setting however again if we have a lot of players and one dies, the party will not go back to town they still have nine more party members and will go forward. This could leave someone dead all night as the dungeon picks off PC's who are non-essential for the groups success. This gives more opportunity to kill a PC in a large group instead of the classic four heroes surviving all encounters with one death which is immediately treated.

This all depends on the group size as well, the table might be smaller and then we can just run a game of our choosing, however I am looking forward to a large group and finding ways to run it that everyone can participate and have an interesting game going on as well.

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