I have a pretty sizeable group of friends who like to hang out and play RPGs together. We’ve done a handful of games, ranging from crunchy stuff through rules-lite games. But one common theme is that our games can go pretty slow. We’re a group of 7 most of the time, which means 6 players + 1 GM, which is can make stuff very slow. Iterations of D&D all suffer from this, and it gets really bad in games like Dark Heresey for us. But even tropey, free-form games like Blades in the Dark and most stuff on the Apocalypse engine feel sluggish, since they’re so tightly based on the Player-GM feedback cycle.
The only types of games that I’ve found play quickly with a large group are the light, beer & pretzels games like Everyone Is John, Paranoia, but those don’t extend well beyond 1 session. I also like the higher-stakes, longer-form RPGs where the players can shape the world at scale.
Are there games that can support both longer-term campaigns AND large groups, or am I looking for the impossible here?
Thank you for the detailed reply! I’ve never played any of the Mork Borg games. I’ll give the site a look.
It might have just been the games I tried, but I had problems with big parties when playing both Atma and Monster of the Week. The usual player-GM loop of a player suggesting something and me changing the scenario in response got a little frustrating when there were 5-6 things happening in between each player’s action. In the moment I could split the party up a bit and cut between them, but that led to these long periods of downtime in between turns. I might just need more experience running these kinds of campaigns.
Scene cuts are a normal thing for us. We often split up quite a bit. It does take learning how to balance out how to cut back and forth. It’s like watching a TV show, you have to know when to raisr the suspense and at the perfect moment when people want more swap to the other thing to leave that suspense in the air.
Often we cut when someone needs to make a roll. We say the move, call for the roll and then cut to the next player. That gives the player a moment to find their dice, roll, see the result and think about what might happen.
Practice and try things. See what keeps the tension high and action and storytelling flowing. I’m sure you can get it!