Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[AlienMasters]

Hi fellow savages!

I'm going to be running a three session long foray into an as yet undecided Savage setting. Usually my game group is four or sometimes five players. But for this particular run there are seven that want to play. Four of the seven are veterans with Savage Words, and two more have a couple Savage sessions under their belt, so I'm not worried about ramping everybody up. I've run a very successful and longstanding eight player campaign in years past, and have learned a few tricks for keeping large groups engaged. But that was not with Savage Worlds, where the smaller skillbase and pool of novice edges may result in more homogenous starting characters.

And therein lies the rub. My concern is that I will end up with a player or two that feels like a fifth wheel - completely redundant and/or useless. It seems like in some settings this might be more difficult than in others. And I was thinking maybe starting off at Seasoned or higher will give a wider range of possible characters.

Does anyone have particular success with a certain setting with larger groups? Or general advice with running Savage Worlds in larger groups?

Thanks!
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[Rohan]

I would suggest going with Wellstone City. It's a modern setting that doesn't take much to get into and it's familiar territory for people. Plus, I've run it in larger groups and it's pretty easy to keep the action going and everyone in the group engaged.

But, if Modern isn't your genre of choice, I'd start looking at some of the fantasy settings, and I'm not going to be much help on those.
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[razorwise]

Hello!

What can I offer about GMing for large groups? Make certain to give each character some spotlight time, an opportunity to shine. Therefore, it's essential to have a firm handle on each character (cheat sheets help on this), so you can make certain to develop situations tailor made for different folks. This gets easier over time, but if you're running a three session arc, you better hit the ground running. I wouldn't sweat it too much. If you've run large groups in other systems, most of those skills are transferable.

Ranking up characters is not necessarily going to bake in variety unless you encourage everyone to decide on a niche during chargen to avoid a lot of stepping on toes. If you have it as a collaborative and not a competitive process, you'll have complementary builds rather than multiple folks taking the same type of character.

Now, I'll present two of our settings which work well with large groups:

RunePunk has a lot of diversity with the various permutations of racial edges and character types present. It's very easy to build radically different characters from the jump. (Plus you can bring in characters from any other setting with great ease. Ta-da! More variety!)

Iron Dynasty, with its robust permutations, offers a lot of choice when it comes to character builds as well. (As I've mentioned elsewhere, I can think of three different ways to create unique ninja right off the top of my head.) In both cases, it was an overarching goal to provide plenty of options for character design so each player could carve his individual niche (as I've seen this problem emerge when you have a large number of players at the table).

I'll add, we have a goodly number of support products for each line.

Pinnacle products I'd highly recommend would include Deadlands and Weird War Two. The high plains and the fields of battle can easily accommodate larger groups. Another great one, oft overlooked, is Tour of Darkness, one of my personal faves.

On the other hand, I would discourage such settings as Realms of Cthulhu. Horror requires intimacy and it's hard to do that well with such a large group. It can be pulled off, but would not be something I'd personally want to do with great regularity.

Regards,

Sean
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[TheLoremaster]

I would suggest either 50 Fathoms or Pirates of the Spanish Main. All the PCs would be members of a ship's crew, either under the command of an NPC captain or one of the PCs could fill that roll. I'd also second Tour of Darkness, or even Weird War II, but I'd definitely recommend that one of the PCs take a command role, either NCO or Officer. Military games aren't as much fun when you don't have any say in your missions, IME.

Good luck!
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"Your GM is metagaming ... and wrong!"

[jpk]

As far as giving everyone their moment and keeping the group a little diverse, you may want to pay at least as much attention to their Hindrances as their skills.

Even if one player really has a broad but somewhat redundant skill set, he can usually be helpful with cooperative rolls, and his Hindrances may well set the game on fire...possibly literally if he has Delusions (Major: Everything must burn)!

[Timon]

I cannot claim a lot of experience running large SW groups - my (large) group only transitioned two sessions ago. What I would say is that if you are able to run a large table in another system, you will find running the same table is much, much faster in SW, particularly as you have experienced players, so through lots of material at them.

My philosophy is that character differentiation grows over time and particularly under pressure. I recommend starting them at a flat run with something challenging that forces them to use a range of skills under pressure. They should be asking: how to do we escape/survive, why is this happening, where are we?

One possibility is a steadily more challenging/damaging environment combined with an immediate threat: zombie survival when your tour bus breaks down far from town in sub-zero temperatures, sinkiing ship and something weird moving in the rising water, leaky spaceship under heavy fire, running through the forest without gear and hostile soldiers at your heels...etc.

[ValhallaGH]

[Tavis]

I've run Evernight for a group of 8 and am currently running Rippers, which at it's peak was also a group of 8.

I'll back up what's been said before - it doesn't matter whether the characters have 'niche protection' - as long as they all get their 'screen time'.

Somtimes that might mean 'splitting the party' - In Evernight I had two characters that had started out with essentially the same job - Tank. They went about it in two different ways (one wore plate mail, the other went Beserk) but they were both intended to soak up blows on the front line. By the end of the campaign they'd spread out their roles a little, which made life easier, but at the start I would often give the group reasons to be in two different places at once - and so within the 'sub-party' each member had their own niche.

Not sure if that's the best way for everyone to to it, but it worked for us.
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Currently Playing:

SWD: 50 Fathoms (GM)

[Jordan Peacock]

Attendance & Explanations:
When I've run with large groups, a big factor I had to contend with was that we'd inevitably have someone absent at any given session. Therefore, I had to figure out the best way to handle and/or explain those absences.

The easiest time I had of it was when I was running a "Savage Ghostbusters" campaign. Every session was its own self-contained mission (even though there was continuity across adventures), and most of the PCs were college students who were "busting ghosts" for additional income - so it didn't seem a stretch at all that we'd have quite a bit of variance in team makeup from mission to mission.

I've pondered that if I were to run a campaign based on Stargate, or perhaps a "Star Trek" style setup where the PCs get to visit the Planet of the Week with a varied "away team," I could accomplish much the same thing. (And if a threat arose that affected the entire ship ... well, so-and-so the absent hero is somewhere else on the ship, bravely fighting the alien menace off-camera.)

Back into more specific Savage Worlds settings, as has already been previously noted, Pirates RPG could work for that. You could have the PCs all be members of a ship's crew, and if a big ship battle is going on and a player is absent, we can still have someone roll the dice for that absent player's critical ship skill (e.g., ship's navigator, cannon operator). If the ship gets sunk while that player was away, well, we'll just hand-wave that nobody knows what happened to him, and he can conveniently pop up again the next time the player actually attends a game.

For some campaigns, the occasional absence has to be hand-waved - if there's no good reason for the PC to be absent, I've experimented with letting that PC be controlled by another player, dropping the PC to NPC status, or just vaguely hand-waving why the PC isn't quite as active this time around, but it just becomes more of an issue when it's happening each and every given session (which tends to happen when I have larger groups).


Finding Niches for Everyone in Large Groups:
Although Savage Worlds isn't class-based, so there's the potential of everyone investing heavily in the same generally-useful skills, I find in practice that my players tend to diversify greatly. For one thing, there are far more Edges than anyone can hope to grab at Novice level. For another, even in the realm of skills, there are still "Knowledge Skills" that, if chosen well, can open up new possibilities.

For instance, in a modern setting such as War of the Dead or Zombie Run, out of the basic skill sets, you could have the group's "spokesperson" (Charisma, Persuasion, Streetwise, Notice), the "scout" (Thief Edge and relevant skills - Climbing and Stealth coming in particularly handy), the "woodsman" (Survival can be especially valuable since you can't always rely on scavenging), the "McGyver" (Repair, McGyver Edge, etc.), the "leader of Extras" (Command Edge, Knowledge {Battle}, and assorted combat skills to back it up), the "doc" (Healing skill, plus Healer if plus your usual assortment of people specializing in various styles of combat.

But then, throw in relevant Knowledge Skills, and there are a number of new niches that could be handy in a modern/post-apocalyptic setting. Knowledge (Demolitions) opens up lots of destructive possibilities, if the heroes stumble across a weapons cache. Knowledge (Chemistry) could be handy to justify making Molotov cocktails and such out of chemicals from the janitor's closet. Knowledge (Medicine) would justify being front and center in any attempt to fight the infection. Knowledge (Computers), (Electronics), or (Security Systems) might seem a bit limited, given the likely collapse of the power grid, but a creative player could still find something to do with them.

Plus, it also depends upon how the GM handles the area of Common Knowledge, and how generous he is when it comes to allowing players to use "professional skills" when they might come into play. E.g., I'm not going to require that a PC who is a "heavy metal rocker" invest in "Knowledge: Guitar" in order to play well, on the rare occasion it's relevant. I'd call it Common Knowledge (Spirit roll) or just treat it as a trapping of a Persuasion check. From personal experience, though, the trappings can make for a pretty memorable character, even if he doesn't technically have any really unique skills written down on his sheet that nobody else could tackle.

After all, it's not just WHAT your character can do, but HOW your character does it that can make a hero memorable.

(Note: Another nice thing about either Zombie Run or War of the Dead for handling large groups is that player absence can be more readily handled when the PCs are traveling with a group of survivors, often in the company of large numbers of Extras. That makes it a little easier for a PC to fall into the background or step into the fore as needed, depending upon a player's attendance, without the GM having to struggle over big hand-wavy excuses.)


Encourage Backstories:
As others have touched on, a great way to make sure everyone is involved and active is to be familiar with their character sheets, to find excuses to work in someone's oft-ignored Hindrance, or that rarely-used skill or Edge, or simply to dive into someone's character backstory and have some element from it make a cameo appearance (if nothing else, telling the players, "Yes, I actually read your backstory write-ups!").

With an especially large group, however, I also want to make sure that the players have tools at their disposal so they can take the initiative in varied ways, without having to wait for the GM to toss in a car chase or a bomb disposal or a computer virus or whatever it is that can ONLY be dealt with via one PC's specialist skill.

I've found that this seems to work better if I get my players to put some thought into their backstories, perhaps even giving them a bit of a "writing assignment" to print off a short summary of where the PC came from ... or just send me an email giving me the highlights. Personal goals, names of potential plot-hook NPCs, places of interest ... I can get a lot from a back-story if the player goes to the trouble, but more importantly, I think it helps the player to get a better feel for what his character might be doing and what his personal motivations might be, other than just rolling the dice when a particular skill check comes up.

Two characters could well have the exact same starting stats, but with a different backstory, they can turn out to be two very different characters, fulfilling different roles.

...

Oh yes, and I'll also throw in an obligatory shameless plug for Wonderland No More which, in my humble opinion, has a pretty wide range of character archetypes and weird Wonderlandish races, to the point where it would be impossible to exhaust them all with one PC group.
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[GranFalloon]

I was running 50 Fathoms for a painfully large group for a while. It worked pretty well. We ruled that if a player wasn't present, his character was an extra that couldn't die. Since each Savage Tale could be squeezed into one gaming session, it basically meant some folks happened to go ashore to go adventuring, everyone else stayed on the ship. If they fought at sea, their characters could fight, but weren't as awesome as usual.

Necessary Evil might work well, too.

[jpk]

As far as attendance and explanations go, my general gaming group has always run with the same guidelines: just ignore it.

If someone's missing, they're just missing. Don't try to explain it, don't try to cover it up, don't highlight...just move on.

If you think of a campaign as a serial story, just pretend someone had a continuity error and totally forgot a character for a given installment. It actually happened all the time, both in print and movie house serials.

But, that's what we do. I know there are probably at least three people out there that I just sent to the hospital with panic attacks, so it's not necessarily for everyone.

[77IM]

We usually come up with a humorous explanation. Like, the absent player's character has severe diarrhea and can't adventure today.

-- 77IM
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Stuff I made: Arcane Abilities · Talent Edge · Savage Fading Suns · Savage Wuxia!

[AlienMasters]

Awesome, thanks for the input and ideas everyone! Lots of good nuggets here, and a couple settings I will have to add to my collection.

One thing I like to scale up with the size of the group is the game lethality, because going into a combat aware that a PC or three died in the last session really buys a lot of investment into game for everyone in my group. So I wouldn't use a setting/genre with heroic you-can't-die-easily rules for this particular upcoming mini-campaign.

[Virgobrown72]

Wellstone city, but with rule tweeks to make it like the Matrix...



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"Anything smaller is just fiddly, and fiddly is not one of SvgW's three Fs..."

[Rohan]

[Timon]

Glad to help, run them ragged

Jordan's points about variable attendance is a very good one. Actually the logistics of choosing a mutually acceptable date/time can be very time-consuming so I automated it with a group date-choosing tool. It is a Dutch tool but has an English interface. It collects availability info from players, helps you choose a date and then mails all the participants; it took a load off my mind.

You will have players that are "core", committed to the game, and players that are along for the ride. I made a table rule: I will run if three of my four "core" players are present, the ones most committed to the game.

[Sitting Duck]

[amerigoV]

I like the idea of a military themed adventure since it is limited scope. For a large group, the old Party Caller is a good idea. That person can also be the Sgt of the group. Some WWII, Tour of Darkness, or even Necropolis would work nicely (or play troops in Deadlands or an actual posse).
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