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Large Player Groups
21 Plays14 days ago
Running a game with a large table can feel like wrangling a small army—but it can also be hugely rewarding if you know how to manage the challenges. In this episode, Mark and Ben talk about the hurdles that come with oversized groups: scheduling nightmares, spotlight imbalance, scaling encounters, and keeping everyone engaged. From coaching player discipline to clever encounter design, we’ll share tips for keeping the game moving, making sure quieter voices don’t get lost, and balancing the chaos of extra characters. Plus, we’ll talk about the surprising benefits—like bigger stories, wild synergies, and the joy of bringing all your friends to the same table.
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Transcript
Introduction with a Humorous Twist
00:00:00
Speaker
<unk>rius green j University of Notre Dame. Ibrahim Moizos, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Jack Marius Tacxeratrix, Michigan State University.
00:00:12
Speaker
The Isaiah T. Billings Clyde, Coastal Carolina University. The Jasper Probing Crux III, South Carolina State University. Lioz Maxwell Jr., East Carolina University.
00:00:27
Speaker
Jamaris Jamar, Jamaris and Lamar, University of Middle Tennessee. The Devoin Shower Handle, University of Southern Mississippi. Hingle McCringleberry, Penn State University.
00:00:40
Speaker
Le Carpetron Duke Marriott, Florida Atlantic University.
00:00:59
Speaker
iss now but go
00:01:22
Speaker
mort lehman but can falls community college and I'm joined here by Ben Dyer, University of Washington. That's right.
Managing Large Player Groups
00:01:30
Speaker
We're at the Tabletop Tune Up, guys. Hey, welcome back.
00:01:32
Speaker
Good to see you again, Mark. We have all kinds of fun stuff coming out today. We do. As you know with that intro, there was a lot of names mentioned there. Sure were. I think that's kind of a little hint about what we're going to be talking about.
00:01:45
Speaker
I think it's also in the title, so I think we told him already, but you know, why don't you unfold that for us here? We're going to talk about large player groups today. We are going to be talking about large player groups. You know, sometimes sometimes we have a hard time saying no to people, don't we, Ben?
00:01:57
Speaker
You know, when you got too many friends or, well, too many people you can't say no to. mean, what are you going to do? You're going to play D&D. It's interesting, right? Like in a game of chess, there's already kind of a limit on how many players you can have. You can only have two.
00:02:13
Speaker
Role-playing games, you have any number you want to say yes to. And yeah people have got all kinds of strategies for dealing with that. And we've tried a few. Folks, I'm going to just be straight up before we even start, though.
00:02:26
Speaker
I tend to try to keep my numbers limited. But... There have been times where it's just happened. And we got a lot of people and you just make do. And you can still have fun. And some people really enjoy these large groups.
00:02:41
Speaker
And so we want want to address that with those players. There's a lot of really cool things that happen when you get into larger groups. You can do some cool stuff. But before we kind of...
00:02:53
Speaker
tee that up, right? This is something that's going to produce a lot of challenges too. So can you talk a little bit about like, when we talk about a large group, how large are we talking here? are we talking like 50 people? no I just consider anything with six more.
00:03:07
Speaker
Six or more. that's That's kind of where I'm at. What's the largest group you think you've ever run? i have run games with eight and that's usually like a small one or two shot kind of adventure.
00:03:21
Speaker
But as far as a long campaign, Six players. Yeah, I think I've done eight player games as well, and it is a lot to keep track of. And I think a little of it depends on the system too, right? Like the crunchier the system, obviously, the more time it takes to work your way through somebody's turn. So there are certain systems that I think will help you in that respect. But even then, interestingly, though, you can some of the same challenges come up if you're talking about even smaller games, like a four or five person game, but maybe one of the players has...
00:03:52
Speaker
the ability to summon creatures or automatons or essentially multiply how many characters are on the field. Yeah. In Shadowrun, you had these riggers that would have a whole bunch of bots that could swarm out there.
00:04:04
Speaker
Same kind of problem. And the problem is like, number one, there's clutter on the table. You got a lot of things to keep track of, right? But also that person is taking a long, long turn as they got a role for all these summon things.
00:04:23
Speaker
They'll be like, well, for my Air Force, I'm doing this. And for my Marines, I'm doing that. And for my Army, I'm doing the other thing. And then here's what my Navy. And by the time they're done with all that stuff, everybody else in the room is like, oh, my God, you just took like four turns.
00:04:34
Speaker
Yeah. ah These are just problematic characters. So if you're going to have a large group, let's try to limit those. Let's try to get summoners in those types of classes.
00:04:46
Speaker
Just make those off limits. it It'll save you a lot of headache. Yeah, depending on what kind of game you're playing. Some games are smart about that and they might say, you know, instead of the character's regular action, they can use one of these surrogates. They can use a bot. They can use an automaton.
00:05:01
Speaker
And then that's the action that they get that turn rather than their own character. So There's a lot of different things that could happen, but let's actually talk about some of the challenges. Mark, we have five different challenges today we're going to talk about when we talk about large player groups.
00:05:16
Speaker
So let's start with challenge one.
Scheduling and Quorum Strategies
00:05:18
Speaker
Scheduling. It's a challenge for all games, right? You know, you start adding more players in. We are now exponentially making scheduling a real difficulty thing.
00:05:29
Speaker
So more players is more missed sessions. If you're having a hard time scheduling four, it's not easier when you do six. So couple things to think about. Number one, think about what your minimum quorum size is and just expect that if you've got a party of six or seven, then a lot of the time you might be playing with five or six, right?
00:05:51
Speaker
um We had rules where we said, look, look, if one person can't make it Well, then we're going to just go anyway and you know, that person will sort of play like an NPC a little bit. That character will.
00:06:02
Speaker
Other times we would say, well, if we've got two people missing, then we're going to cancel the game that day. And then you do what you could and people would know and they try to give you a good predictable schedule. So. you know, it's going to depend on what your players are like. Some players might want to say like, I don't ever want to play if not everybody's available.
00:06:19
Speaker
Other players might be like, yep, that's just the cost of doing business. I'll try to be there most of the time. And then you can go from there. Life happens. So, you know, You can kind of think about this as you're setting up your your game or your campaign and and try to run something that's a little bit akin to like an adventure company, or I think they call them like West Marches kind of games.
00:06:40
Speaker
When I talk about adventure company, that was something we ran many years ago where the characters were all part of this adventuring company. Like it was a motley group of people. There could have been maybe 30 people in this whole company, but only like six or seven went out to adventure at a time. So you would get to the game and you would just pick your character that you wanted to play.
00:07:01
Speaker
and And that's how you just kind of filled up the ranks. An adventuring company, yeah, it's like this big kind of troop. And, you know, maybe the adventuring company has 20 people in it. But of course, you're only having six to eight players, let's say. So they can mix and match who's available this time, who's available next time.
00:07:17
Speaker
The players might have one or two characters that they've made. They could they could have had multiple characters. That way you can kind of get that party balance. You could say, oh, I'm going to grab you know my you know healer character to kind of go along with this group because they don't have one. so You know, in my head, the model for this is like the team books and comics, right? Like the X-Men and the Avengers.
00:07:37
Speaker
There's always somebody hanging around the mansion ah you know when when the other group is going on. They actually did this in comics at one point. The Avengers are ah fantastic parallel to it, Ben.
00:07:48
Speaker
Yeah. They even had like ah an X-Men blue and an X-Men gold team at one point, and they had two different comics running. The X-Men glut of comics. Oh my gosh. Okay. So other things you can do, things within this kind of concept, right? You can do adventuring companies. You can check out that West Marches concept that's out there.
00:08:06
Speaker
Design sessions though, that are short run, that are all kind of located around the same area so that if you do need to hot swap characters in and out, you can. It's not the worst thing in the world.
00:08:17
Speaker
The other thing you can do is having players are using multiple characters, as we've said, that helps you mix and match. And then, you know, the third thing is, and I hate to say it, but don't run large groups.
00:08:29
Speaker
You got to manage with what you can, but there are limits and and this is kind of why we don't like to do it. Hey, we're talking about it. So let's scratch that part off. Let's continue on to challenge number two. right. What's challenge number two?
Understanding Player Dynamics
00:08:40
Speaker
More players equals more personalities.
00:08:42
Speaker
That's a lot of people at the table. You've run a lot of games that had players that didn't know each other before they sat down to play, right? Like a lot of these kind of yeah getting started kinds of games. So what kinds of things you see happen if you've got a large group and you've got a lot of personalities there?
00:08:57
Speaker
Well, you know, shy players might get lost in the mix. Others might have personality clashes. You just got to think about, is this the right mix of people to pull this off? I mean, you we all have friends that you you know maybe you wouldn't want that friend to meet that other friend.
00:09:15
Speaker
They just clash. Think about that. that also isn't just about personalities. It's also about the kinds of games people like to play too. We've talked in the past about how getting players together. Sometimes there's some players that really like these kinds of narrative games where they get a really good into character there's other players that like more of the sort of crunchy mechanical game with lots of switches and levers and things that they can do in the rules.
00:09:39
Speaker
And, you know, if you get a large group together, it's pretty likely you're going to get people with dissimilar game styles to play together. And so a lot of this, as far as like what I talked about and what you're just talked about, can be kind of solved with a session zero, Ben. We could get to know how those personalities interact.
00:09:58
Speaker
They could kind of talk about the types of games they enjoy playing together. Getting that kind of advanced intelligence lets you plan more carefully. Frankly, it lets the players let get to know each other and they can kind of decide like, oh, you know, at that session zero, I met this person. I don't think I want to play with that guy.
00:10:14
Speaker
And they can make those decisions for themselves. One thing you can do though, after you've gotten the game started is you can use low stakes, initial encounters to help people build rapport, to give people a jumping off point that's not super critical.
00:10:29
Speaker
They're going to play their characters the way that they've been envisioning it. They're going to get to see what the other players are doing. And if you do some kind of low stakes softball encounters to start, then you're going to start to know what these players are trying to do before you put them in a situation where they feel high pressure and they get really stressed about it.
00:10:47
Speaker
And then that gives them a chance to adjust to each other. And that also gives you a chance to adjust to what they're bringing you in the game. gives you a chance as a GM to kind of watch them and see who the louder people are, who the quieter people are, and allows you to make those adjustments. And I'm not joking.
00:11:03
Speaker
You could move seating. I'm serious. I love that you do this, actually. So you've actually had people move around. You've been like, you, go over there. i don't think you get to sit next to that person.
00:11:14
Speaker
ah did I did. had a couple of players who had very dynamic personalities, and they were sitting next to each other, and they were just – the two of them were just – like pinballs just between the two of them.
00:11:26
Speaker
Right. But by putting them on the of the table, it now like that ball had to travel through a few other players to get to the other one. It allowed everybody get more involved.
00:11:37
Speaker
So um think about mixing up that table a little bit just to, so those, also those quieter people, you want the quieter people near you so that you could engage them as much as possible.
00:11:49
Speaker
In some sense, what you're saying is like bringing the quieter people closer to the GM seat is probably smart. Yeah, exactly. This is actually getting us into our challenge three, I think, which is really interesting, which is how to engage large groups.
Player Discipline and Readiness
00:12:02
Speaker
The problem with engaging large groups is like, if your attention is divided when you got four people, let's say it's 25%, you know, ah for each of the four people you got there.
00:12:13
Speaker
Well, if you've got eight, it's a lot less now, right? It's like 12 and a half or something. Yeah, that's tough. I mean, people are not going to have enough attention. They're going to possibly get bored. They're going to, you know, maybe you not feel like they're getting enough screen time and so on.
00:12:27
Speaker
So what are some things we can do at this point? You really have to have a good sit down with your players and just really talk about player discipline. ah Players need to be ready.
00:12:39
Speaker
They need to be ready on their turn. Not like dishing through the book, trying to find that. They should have found that spell they were going to cast by the time it gets to them. I mean, when I'm in a large group, I have no patience for that. When people are still haven't decided what they're going to do Get it together. People get it together. Sometimes, sometimes you've done this where you'll actually, if somebody's kind of looking through the book, if they're trying to, you'll actually skip that person for a minute and say, oh yeah you know what?
00:13:06
Speaker
I'm going go to this other person whose turn is next and we'll come back to you, you know? And boy, missing a spot in your initiative order. That is no joke. Players will get really responsive to that. Yeah. I don't have time for that. Like we got, if you got six players, you know, everybody's moment is limited. If you were spent that time talking to somebody else or, you know surfing the internet or whatever you were doing, i that's your, that's on you, not me.
00:13:32
Speaker
So, um, ah player, and players, had you have a lot more responsibility in this search group. And think accordingly, like you as a GM, you're going to have to coach the players and kind of make sure that, look, if we're all going to do this game, if there's going this many people, then we've got to agree to some good hygiene here. We've got to do some more disciplined kind of play and yeah really, you know, be ready and be attentive and be listening to other people. And not not interrupting as I just interrupted you.
00:13:59
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. Don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. Interrupting is when you get this large amount of people, it it can be interrupting. You're taking away from somebody else's time.
00:14:10
Speaker
Yeah. Well, and also they can kind of take each other off on tangents as well. I mean, that's one of the big things I see a lot when I played large boisterous groups is they, everybody their moment.
00:14:22
Speaker
They all start building off each other, you know, and it's not like they're conveniently waiting and taking turns like in, you know, yeah kindergarten or whatever. So another thing to think about is that you've kind of coached your players and all this, you know, etiquette and stuff.
00:14:38
Speaker
Time management. Ben, what you tell us a little bit about the challenge of managing a clock with six, seven players. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about time management a little bit when we've talked about encounters and running the game and stuff like that. and And a lot of that is about how people are using the time that they have. You've talked about having people be disciplined.
00:15:00
Speaker
And in a certain sense, like what everybody's looking for in these games is they're looking for that moment where their character gets to shine, where they get to do a cool thing. So one of the things I would do is I'd say, be very careful about how you want to give everybody ah moment to shine. And sometimes in a game, that's going to be, going to have a very large group. And sometimes that's going to be characters doing things that aren't combat related. And we'll talk more about that in a minute.
00:15:24
Speaker
And sometimes it's going to be about people having a moment to shine maybe as a group. Like you could have a couple people who are collaborating on something. you know When we talk about balancing large parties and scaling challenges in a moment, we'll talk about how to distribute challenge to people in ways that can be shared or that let them do things that they wouldn't normally get to do. But the core idea here is make sure that you're thinking about how each player, each and every player in this game is going to have a moment for their character to do something cool.
00:15:53
Speaker
I do find that players are a little forgiving. They're they're willing to kind of roll with it if they don't get a lot of time, as long as they got something. But I'll give you a horror story. I did have a game where I was playing this game and it was a champions game.
00:16:07
Speaker
And there was one character who had a relatively slower speed, which meant they acted less often. And the course of a four hour game, they got to act like I think three or four times maybe. And that's because everybody else was whizzing around and doing things. Wow. The flash over there is just running around circles. Yeah.
00:16:24
Speaker
And so they didn't get as much screen time and it was really the person expressed some disappointment to me afterward. And I thought, you know what? He's right. And then I redesigned the way I play that game.
00:16:35
Speaker
So after that experience of that Champions game, I changed the way that I actually ran Champions games. And a big part of that was making sure I didn't have characters with wildly different speed numbers, which give them a lot more or a lot fewer actions.
00:16:49
Speaker
This is kind of hitting on our next challenge, which is balancing the parties, right?
Balancing Party Composition
00:16:53
Speaker
That's right. That leads into this concept of like, how do we... We've talked about balancing parties before. And the idea here is that you don't want to have one character being head and shoulders significantly more powerful or more than the other characters in the group.
00:17:07
Speaker
Because that's going to be really challenging for you when it comes to encounter design and lots of other things. So i won't we won't rehash that. But the key here idea is that obviously the more... players you have in this group, the more balancing of that kind that you're going to have to do This is more about the variety of characters people we're talking about.
00:17:25
Speaker
This is so you don't end up with a group of six players, none of which have any sort of intelligence ah and added up to anything remarkable. Yeah, no, we've had that happen before and it's it's no fun as a GM.
00:17:38
Speaker
No, but like having the variety of characters allows the GM though to to kind of have really fun encounters. Give yourself a bit more prep time than usually would so you can make good plans and you can help balance things out in play.
00:17:52
Speaker
Be ready with the kinds of adjustments that we make in play to help people get balanced. And we've talked in the past about how that might be maybe giving somebody special items or giving them certain advantages to to help them kind of close that gap.
00:18:05
Speaker
And then the other thing is, make use of a lot of other kinds of challenges, right? Like not everything is combat. And if you've got like a very combat effective character and other character that you're trying to give them something, maybe they are better when it comes to social challenges or skill challenges, or maybe they're the underwater native person and you're going to throw them into an ocean setting and then they'll be more effective. So there's a lot of things you can do to help characters make the most of what they're doing outside of the usual sort of hit points and damage.
00:18:36
Speaker
I know we're going to talk a little bit about the benefits, but I feel like we could just throw one of the benefits right in here as we're talking about what you're talking about. On a GM side, having that many players, that many characters, there's really not any encounter that you can't throw at them.
00:18:52
Speaker
You know, with that many, if you've balanced it right, you don't have to think about, oh somebody's going to have that kind of covered. You know, you got that many players, you got that many characters, You should be able to throw just about anything at them and somebody should be able to cover it.
00:19:06
Speaker
So that's kind of ah there's a freedom in that. In a D&D party, you might have multiple spell casters. In a superhero game, you're going to have the magic character and the technology character and the super strong character and all those kinds of things.
00:19:20
Speaker
So there's a bit of freedom in that as a GM. Just, you know, you don't have to think too much about like, oh, I can't throw this at them. Somebody does not have a good, you know, skill in this, whatever.
00:19:32
Speaker
Somebody will have it. And now let's talk about our last challenge. We've talked about scheduling. We've talked about player personalities. We've talked about how to engage larger groups and now how to balance large parties. I think maybe one of the most challenging things that you're kind of queuing into is challenges.
00:19:49
Speaker
How do we scale challenges for very much larger groups?
Scaling In-Game Challenges
00:19:52
Speaker
And I think there's a few different things here, but just to kind of get our arms around this, this isn't just that players are bringing kind of more DPS, more damage per second into your in your game. It's also that they're going to have a lot of synergies. They're going to have a lot of things they can do in combination. They're going to have a lot of unexpected things they might do.
00:20:07
Speaker
So the real question here is how do we challenge a large party? Yeah, that's that is that is the challenge. And that's something i I could be honest with you. that's That was a real tough thing, even when I ran a group of six.
00:20:20
Speaker
Like, you could you could just strengthen them all, add a little bit more or hit points to the creatures. You could, you know, more durability, give them a little bit more time because they're going to burn through some of these monsters pretty fast.
00:20:35
Speaker
I definitely think that having minion groups and expendable enemies and other things like that, then by the time for the more effective enemies and the backline enemies to get off their special attacks and the other things that they do that are unique and interesting, I think that's kind of one thing you can do.
00:20:51
Speaker
And also to diversify those groups too. Like, yeah, like you want to have some spell casters mixed in with a group of kobolds or something like that. Don't just have one type you need of, you got so much variety coming at you from the player side. You need to kind of match that energy on the GM side.
00:21:10
Speaker
One way of thinking about that is ah creating challenges that are not just about what's going on in the combat space too, right? so What if you're in a situation where the town or the forest that you're in is on fire? Or you've got some ah subterranean dungeon, let's say, where there's occasionally fire fires that shoot up from you know vents in the floor or something like that. like You could do all kinds of stuff that makes the environment or the area that the players are in challenging in ways that they have to actually attend to They can't just...
00:21:38
Speaker
Ignore it. And if you can do that, then maybe there's going to be fewer players going after your foes and monsters and enemies. And there's going to a few more that are attending to what's going on in the environment and trying to fix other problems.
00:21:52
Speaker
And what a great thing for like a superhero game. You know, honestly, like you're, you're fighting, say somebody like Magneto and he's now toppling a building. You know, some of the players have to hold the building up while the others are occupying the big bad boss. You know, these are these are things that are cinematic.
00:22:11
Speaker
They're a lot of fun and you got a lot of players, got a lot of characters and Get them working. Put them to use. Let them divide up a little bit and conquer these different problems that you're throwing at them.
00:22:25
Speaker
I actually have a really good example of this. And, you know, we took a minute ago to beat up on champions a little bit for having some very different screen time expectations. But here's a case over the summer, where we played a Gen Con, a champions game where we got to actually do this thing that you're talking about and really make the environment come alive and be really interesting. And what this was, is this is ah an encounter on a bridge. And there were some bad guys that were basically beating up the bridge and, you know, going after civilians and you know, this person actually had built a bridge model where sections of it that were the surface of the bridge, the roadway, were going to collapse.
00:22:59
Speaker
And so as we're playing this game, sections of this bridge are collapsing. And so our heroes had to kind of divide their time between attacking the villains that are doing this and saving the civilians that were about to fall off these bridges. and And it was really cool because it was really this kind of multivariable problem. Can we do things to even hold the bridge up?
00:23:20
Speaker
That was another kind of thing we tried. Yeah. And these are some things you can do with a large group. So, I mean, this is again, another benefit. Let's say there's like a few tools I want to talk about though.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah. You have one I haven't heard of. um It's kind of an old one called Cobalt Calculator. It's for D&D. They actually have kind of rolled that into D&D Beyond, I think, like the calculator. the But it's very similar. it's you You put in the the amount of characters you have.
00:23:50
Speaker
You can calculate what what could be a difficult. I would say if you got some pretty savvy players, you could even think of it as a little underserved and go a little harder at the players. Yeah.
00:24:04
Speaker
and You're going to figure this out as you go, right? And i would say like, go small in encounters first, go small in challenge. You'd rather have your players beat up something and you make a little note to yourself. Okay, that's what they can handle there.
00:24:15
Speaker
Next time I'm going to do this next encounter, I'll make sure that the there's another spell cast where I'll make sure that the environment is more like this or that. You know, sometimes with small groups, you can have what I call, you know, a diced famine where they're just not hitting things when you got three or four players. And it's, boy, it can be a long night when that starts happening.
00:24:36
Speaker
That is not a problem with a group of six or seven players. There might be one or two people who have a bad night of dice rolling. They can't all roll bad. Friends, if your players in a group of eight all roll bad some evening, let us know.
00:24:50
Speaker
We'd love to hear that in our comments or if you want to send an email to us at tabletoptuneup at gmail.com. Great, great segue there. Thank you. Let's talk about a little quick about some of the benefits.
Epic Storytelling with Large Groups
00:25:01
Speaker
Now, we we sprinkled in a few benefits as we've been going along, but there's a couple other benefits to playing with a large group of people.
00:25:08
Speaker
Ben, what what is your favorite benefit of playing with a large group of people? I'll say this. i think you get to see stuff that's really just amazing, epic stuff happening on a scale and you know with a ah ah kind of complexity that you just never get to see otherwise.
00:25:24
Speaker
It's a whole squad of superheroes going out and doing a thing. It's a huge collaborative effort of your science fiction people overthrowing the empire or whatever. It's an entire squad of your best heroes taking out a dragon. you know And having...
00:25:40
Speaker
that larger group means you've got more people that are sort of sharing in the fun of that and that feel like they're a part of a big, important thing. And so you can actually scale the story in ways that maybe you couldn't before.
00:25:52
Speaker
Oh, that's great. No, i I get you, man. I can totally see that. I mean, I just envisioning in my mind, Avengers Endgame, you know, on your left. Yeah. It's just another player just got invited to the game.
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah. Talk about a large game, right? Like when you finally get all those people to show up, something, I mean, a little little sort of side note there, right? If you think about that kind of portal scene in Avengers Endgame where all those characters show up,
00:26:16
Speaker
Try to imagine that that's a player group of maybe six or eight people, all of whom have like three or four characters. yeah let's just cut back like Everybody comes through the portal at this point. All four of your characters come through the portal now.
00:26:28
Speaker
That was like when everybody got back from summer break at school and they're all like there to play it in your game. um yeah And here's the thing, guys, with a large group of people, you get to play with your friends. Like they're all people that are, you know, they should be a part of your friend group.
00:26:42
Speaker
That's right. Nobody left behind. Nobody left behind. And it the more the merrier, guys. that's That's a lot of fun. That's kind of what we're here for. you know All that being said, I enjoy a smaller, more intimate group.
00:26:55
Speaker
But you know what? After talking with you a little bit about this, I kind of want to play a big group one day. it Just like a one shot. Just how many people can they get at the table? Yeah. Well, do make it a one shot. But in the meantime, there's ah something else happening now.
00:27:15
Speaker
Time our tune-up segment. That's right. I got the tune-up today. And I actually had a tune-up. I wanted to ask Ben a question because I'm not a big watcher of online streaming games.
Learning from Online Gaming Streams
00:27:27
Speaker
Ben, what do you learn? What do you get from watching online streaming games? Ah, it's a great question. And I think there's a few different things. So number one, if they're talented people,
00:27:39
Speaker
you get entertainment. I think everybody's aware of Critical Role and they're aware the strengths of that cast as voice actors, as humorous, and so forth.
00:27:49
Speaker
um And they're sort of the value of their relationships. They've been doing this for a long time. Can I jump in real quick? Since we're talking about large parties, I just saw that they announced the cast for the next season of Critical Role.
00:28:00
Speaker
And it's huge. It's like, it is literally Endgame Avengers. Like they're all... Yeah. So it's funny that we're doing this this today's segment on that. But Ben, you were saying, I'm sorry, to mean cut you Yeah, no, no. I think that's that's an interesting point is we're about to see a large group in an online streaming game. So it is kind of both of those topics today.
00:28:22
Speaker
So number one, I think you can get a lot of really sort of entertainment value out of it. i think you also get ah window into how games work. are kind of expected to be played. So when I'm learning a new game system, if I can find a live play podcast that's any he good, I will try to listen to that and kind of get the vibe of this thing.
00:28:41
Speaker
When are they asking for skill checks? What kind of difficulty is there? How many villains are they throwing around at a given time? What happens when people get hit? Do they get dropped and it's a highly dangerous system or...
00:28:52
Speaker
What do they do to mitigate those challenges and risks? How do players strategize in this game? And so that gives you a little bit of a sense as a GM of what is it that this game is about? How does it function?
00:29:03
Speaker
And a lot of times these are people who, if they're doing live play, they're doing a game that they didn't just sort of start with. But sometimes that can be instructive too. If they did just start with it, then you know you're going to watch them make mistakes and you'd be like, going to make sure I don't do that.
00:29:17
Speaker
So I think watching live play videos, you get the entertainment value. You get the sort of the window into how the ah system is kind of intended to work. I'd say the only downside is it can and take a long time. Like minimally, any session is going to probably be about two or three hours if you're watching an online game.
00:29:35
Speaker
And that can that can be a lot of time. What's the biggest like misconception about online play? Because i've I've actually sat at the table with some people when I used to run those.
00:29:48
Speaker
games years ago where I'd have random people and a lot of them had watched critical role. And this is like our first time playing D and d and it was not critical role.
Reality vs. Online Game Misconceptions
00:29:58
Speaker
Like, so tell me a little bit about like, what is one of the bigger misconceptions about online play?
00:30:05
Speaker
This is what some people call the Matt Mercer effect is that people, when they come to their home games or they join people at the local game store, They're not quite aware that we're not in a controlled setting with lots of miniatures around, lots of other things going on, lots of of cameras and lights and people who are disciplined at knowing when to stop talking, when to start talking.
00:30:27
Speaker
Yeah. Their GMs are probably not as prepared. Yeah, and they're not digressing over like how their week was or what something that happened in the news. Yeah, there's not a lot of focus in most games that I've been at. mean, there we can be focused. When they're they best, they're focused.
00:30:44
Speaker
But the reality is these are social things. Social stuff happens. Most of the games I think I've ever played, everybody show up at the table. Let's say they said, hey we're going to start playing at 6. Well, people would show up.
00:30:56
Speaker
Maybe one or two people would late. People would be, you know... chatting about whatever. And then by the time you get to about 620, that's when people are actually starting to get turned around toward playing game. That's when you're starting to do the recap.
00:31:09
Speaker
And by the way, GMs, you're going to have to break that at some point. You're going have to be like, all right, enough chibber jabber. Let's get to our session recap. On that note, a look at our episode on rituals. One of our very early podcasts, we talked about rituals.
00:31:25
Speaker
Rituals are a great way to break those conversations and get everybody ready to play. And on that note...
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:31:33
Speaker
Let's do our end control here, Ben. What do we like to say we're wrapping up an episode?
00:31:38
Speaker
We like to say we're going to back in a couple of weeks with a brand new topic for you. We'll chop it up and we'd love to hear from you in the meantime. If you've got things you'd like to tune up, things you'd like to talk about, email us again at tabletoptuneup at gmail.com.
00:31:51
Speaker
And we'll see you in a couple of weeks, but until then, keep those dice rolling.
00:32:41
Speaker
in the story sun
00:33:23
Speaker
fix Turning every lane, plotting to the sickest of tricks So if your RPG's a mess, just give them a call They'll turn it into great, it's the best game of them all Do-no, we'll level up your fun Do-no, the quest has now begun Do-no, we'll show you how it's done It's time for your tune-up, the game needs a tune-up