Game WISH 79: Ideal Cast Size

This week's Game WISH asks:

What do you think is the best cast size for the games you�ve played? What are the factors that go into your answer: genre, play group, gaming system, etc.?

In face to face play, I find a party of four players plus the GM to be the optimal number for just about any genre that I regularly play.

If four is the optimum, I find anything from two to six is perfectly playable. I've played in lengthy campaigns with just two player characters, which can work very well provided both PCs have a sufficiently wide range of abilities. For example, in the Kalyr campaign I GMed, using GURPS, the two PCs were a powerful telepath and a multi-skilled soldier of fortune type. Between the two of them they could handle most situations I threw at them, although they relied heavily on a pair of NPC combat grunts in fight scenes. The campaign may well have benefited from third PC as a combat specialist.

My practical upper limit is six; I strongly dislike large FtF parties of seven or eight PCs, something I've experienced in quite a few convention-style one-shots. I find there are two big problems with a group of that size: First, it's hard to ensure that everybody gets enough spotlight time in a session, and second, combat seems to take forever.

On the third tentacle, the optimum number for one-shots is probably the size the scenario was written for. As a GM I find it hard to retool on the fly a scenario I'd written for six 75-point GURPS characters when find I've got to run it for only three, especially when it's hard to make up any balanced party from three out of the six pre-generated PCs I'd prepared! The last two games I GMed had five and three players respectively; both exactly the number I'd expected.

For online games things are somewhat different; since games often split into multiple semi-independent threads, the number of PCs has less to do with group dynamics and more to do with the number of PCs the GM can handle. In many cases this allows much larger casts than are practical in face to face gaming. For example, I've currently got nine players in my Kalyr PbeM. There's one party of six, one party of two, and one lone wolf. I'm playing in two games on Dreamlyrics with large casts; one, STD, has a large number of one- or two-player threads, while the other, EOH, currently has one huge ensemble thread with a lot of inter-PC interaction, something that's easier in a big game.