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Running a large party inDungeons & Dragonscan become cumbersome quite easily,especially for newer Dungeon Masters (DM). Too many people speaking at the same time, combat can get bogged down, and the players may not feel like they’re getting their chance to shine.
Cutting down the party sizes, whilestill including everyone, is a surefire way to make sure everyone has fun, and you don’t lose your mind behind the screen. It may seem like you’re doing twice as much at first, but once you get rolling, thestories start to tell themselvesand yourparties will thank you for being such a great DM.
Give Players The Chance To Be A Star
After setting a date, getting everyone in the same place at the same time, sitting out the snacks, and having six people in a party, you’re able to already begin to feel drained. Not to mention, you have to run a combat, and try to get each player to have a moment.
Bysplitting your duties and having multiple, smaller parties, you’re able to much more easily balance combat, let your party feel like they have more agency within the world and, not to mention, it’s just easier for a party of three to make it to game night.
As a DM, you’ll watch your players blossom before your eyes as they have more time to speak, roleplay their characters, and communicate more effectively with each other. This doesn’t mean that you’ll never have the parties team up once in a while. You can still set dates for them tocollaborate against powerful boss fights or world events.
Managing Your Time And Getting The Most Out Of It
Splitting a party of six or more into two groups sounds daunting at first, but when you realize you canaccomplish the same, if not more, in the same amount of time, you will wonder why you didn’t do this sooner. You can still set your sessions for one day a week if it works better for you. Just have one group for an hour or two, then meet up with the next. Instead of having a five-hour mega-session with a huge group, you can do smaller sessions with fewer people.
Prepping may seem like doubling up on your work as well, but having a smaller party means less work for you. Combat balancing becomes easier, a dungeon-crawl lasts an entire session (or more), and roleplaying can become more in-depth with more focus on the conversations and character building. You’ll be spending the same amount of time on your campaign,but accomplishing more.
Not to say that large parties are bad, but once you get six people talking at the same time, it can really derail quickly, and soon your D&D roleplaying becomes a conversation about Prince versus Michael Jackson and you haven’t played at all.
Sometimes less is more. Before you create a ton of different dungeons, battle maps, and crazy monsters, remember that it isup to your party where they go and what happens. While it’s intimidating at first, prepare afew basic outlines of dungeons. That way, when the party decides instead to go into a basement instead of the forest cave you spent forever on, you canadapt it to the moment.
Parallel Storylines Create Interesting Opportunities
Creating a living, breathing world is one of the toughest things a DM sets out to accomplish. However, by having multiple parties in your campaign, they can set up and add depth to the world simply by existing.Cause and effect can be a powerful tool, and you may not even realize it’s happening.
If one of your parties decides to rob a local mayor of his gold,this creates a dynamic event in your world that affects the other parties. If they then go through that town after the mayor has been robbed, the roads may be unkempt and the locals ragged. That wasn’t the mayor’s gold, but the town’s gold.
On the other hand, if one of your parties saves a weary traveler out on the road from bandits, they can turn out to be a traveling salesman that the other parties encounter and are able to barter with. By creating a cause-and-effect relationship between your parties, it allows youto do less prep and more world-buildingjust by using the parties' actions.
Fun Competition Between Parties
This isnot a video game where the same NPC hands out a quest multiple times. This is a living fantasy world that you and your party get immersed in. On the flip side of having the parties come together and fight against big bad evil guys, you can add some fun competition between them and see who comes out on top.
If a local city needs help combating a group of ravenous orcs outside their city walls, which party will complete it quickly or more creatively? Will one of your parties show up to find an orc camp destroyed and burned by the other party? They could even compete against each other for different territories or resources.
Of course, you’ll want tokeep the competition light and fun, as getting too serious and rewarding the winning party too much could be less enjoyable for the others. Little things like drinking competitions or small quests add to the thrill and there could even be fun storytelling opportunities that arise from their rivals.
Competitions
Crafting Challenge
Give both parties an amount of time to craft an item: armor, potion, trinket. Rate how useful or unique the item is.
Treasure Hunt
Give each party a treasure map with riddles, puzzles, and monsters to defeat to find a hidden treasure. The party to do it the quickest wins.
Drinking Contest
An oldie but a goodie. Simply line the parties up at a table, and see who can drink the most alcohol with some classic constitution checks.
Play To The Strengths And Weaknesses Of Each Party
Many parties in D&D love the excitement of combat and just want to kill monsters. While others enjoy the character development and roleplaying of the game. By having multiple parties, you cantailor the experience for each type of playstyle. Have the combat-hungry warriors in one party, while you have the charismatic bards and paladins in the other.
This allows you to flex your DMing skills and create encounters foreach party based on their strengths and weaknesses. It can also help spread out the types of sessions you have so you don’t get drowned in combat or roleplay for weeks at a time.
One group may be asked to find a powerful relic through stealth and infiltration, while another could be responsible for defending a city from an onslaught of enemies.This doubles down on player agency and lets everyone feel like they are needed.
