How many is a good number of runners in a game? I really like how easy it is to add and remove runners (aka. write them into and out of the story) if somebody new shows up to play or somebody can't make it to a session, but there is a point where the game starts getting unmanageable because of how many people are playing.

In my opinion:

Too Few Runners - 2 or less
Too Many Runners - 7 or more
Just the right amount - 4 or 5

What do you guys think?

min is 3
good is 4-5/6
starting to be too many at 5/7

depends on what we are doing... the various campaigns will make different numbers for the high end...

If I get to hand-pick them, I´ll provide for two runners. Else: What he said.

I played 2 runners once, and it was a really, really good campaign. It forces a different sort of campaign though, like a team of partners.

3-4 is a good "team" size.

Hmm, I seem to be the odd man on this. My Min is 4, I like my tables between 6-8, and 10 is where it gets too much unless I have a co-gm and some really interesting ideas on using a team of that size for anything.

For me, 2 is too small, 4 is just right and 6 or more get really problematic for me assuming this is campaign play. I've run for tables of 12 at conventions (not GenCon) and it was a freaking blast. Actually, I take that back. During the 2007 SRM Scramble, we had tables of players fighting other tables of players, so me and one other GM (BishopMcQ, IIRC) did run a table of 12 for a little bit....

I used to like midsize tables of 4-6 runners but I have to admit that I've recently revised that. My ideal number is 2-4, depending on my mood and the sort of players I’m running with.

The biggest reason for me revolves around this concept I've been mulling over where I organize my plots to give each player an opportunity for meaningful interaction in every scene. This can be difficult to do but it seems to lead to very high player satisfaction because people are never struck with a sense that they haven’t really done anything all game.

Under this theory ever player gets about 2 hours of “screen time� per every 6 hour game. If a Shadowrun game is an ongoing TV show, each player has a roughly equal contribution to the drama of a given episode.

As the number of players goes up, my ability to work them into every scene goes down and people get neglected. It’s much harder to give 8 people something useful to do in a scene than it is to give 2 people. In smaller groups people can spend 5 or 10 minutes describing what their character is doing or getting into a deep IC debate with an NPC or a fellow player. With more players that become unwieldy and I find myself having to cut them off so that other players can jump in and interact as well. It’s frustrating to both parties since I love watching players run with a situation and players like… playing.

I’d also point out that 6-7 400bp players is a shit ton of Kill. Making interesting combat for that many people is difficult and scaling becomes a pain in the ass. I hate having to drop some retardedly overpowered critter into a fight, or 200 grunts just to make them sweat a little. A realistic response to that much firepower often means that combat starts looking more like a Warhammer 40k game and less like a gritty street game. But I’ll be the first to admit that I’m probably not coming up with the best solutions.

I guess it all comes down to time. With 6+ people we spend most of the game just trying to figure out what everyone is doing and less time talking about how their doing it, or getting into why.

Finally, I really like 2 players because it’s basically you can develop an entertaining “buddy cop movie� dynamic while actually having the time for players to develop whatever wonky SR relationship they desire. The small number means that characters have to rely and interact with each other more and it also means that I don’t have to scale the combat through the roof just to make them piss themselves. At the same time they’re still 400 bp characters and can still accomplish some really cool stuff all on their own.

If I really wanted to run a huge fucking game of 6+ players, I would undoubtedly run it with lower powered characters. Maybe even as low as 300 bp. A street gang scenario seems ideal for a game with massive amounts of players.

Of course all that said, I think 4 players is still fun to run. It helps eliminate NPC's that exist solely to fill gaps in player skill sets and people still get a reasonable amount of interaction per scene.

For me: 2 players, 1 GM. Lots of interaction, and NPCs play a significant role.

I could see running a game for 2 player, but... It would need to be tailored to the two characters and the characters would need to work together. I could see this working with a Face/Shaman/Sneak and a Samurai with Skillwires, plus either a really good mook, hacker contact, or modest hacking skills between the two of them.

My ideal is 3-5 players, depending on the group. If the group is mostly newbies, then I don't mind having a larger group. Still, 7 is the absolute max for me.

-paws

I prefer 5 people, as that way we have all the skill sets covered with room for at least one person to fuck up and not be where they are needed. I tend to play with newbies or erratic people because that is who I have to work with. That being said, the group generally refuses to play with less than 3 people because social interaction is a big part of why we play. As for a maximum.... I don't really have one I guess, I once ran a fairly successful game(it was DnD, but I think I could pull it off in SR) of 16 people for about 3 months. It did get annoying after awhile, but that was largely due to players trying to pull one over on me (we were all like 16/17 at the time) than it did the amount of people. I ran a couple more sessions, they did something stupid and all got arrested and I forced them into the countries arena combat system(which I had talked about a lot even before I decided to trim down and no one payed attention to). Once they got arrested, failed to escape(I let them have an honest try, but they fucked it up), and were shunted into the Games system, I told them OOC that everyone that survived the games got to keep playing, if your character died then I was sorry and I would let you know when I opened up another game. It worked fairly well, we had a successful year-ish campaign with the surviving players.

Chris

Too few? Zero. Because with one I can put together great games. That said, my favorite is 5-6. Too many? We've had as many as 13 Players and 19 Runners in one epic Mob vs Yakuza war back in the day and yeah, too many, but at even 9 Runners (and 6 Players) we all, including me, the GM for the series of games, had a blast doing it. Now long term, more than the seven or eight games we had that many together for, it would have gotten to be too much. Yeah, 5-6 Runners, 5 Players, that's optimal.


Isshia

Our group is seven people but if at least 4 has time, then it's game on. Gathering the group to "the dungeon" is still in big parts a social event and quite a few times the gaming wasn't priority Most commonly one can't make it to the game so five runners and a GM is the most typical... not sure of the optimal. Back in the days the group was only 3 folks but over the years the group has changed all but two of the players.
So 3 minimum, 4-7 ideal, 8+ too much.

SR is interesting in this regard because, like that 'other' 4E game, it has archetypes that make the game significantly easier, and that - for the most part - don't support doubling-up on roles.

In most RPG systems, I've found that 2-3 players is too few, while 6-7 is too many. I admit if my local group was more into in-depth RP then 2-3 would be more do-able.

D&D tends to support 4-man parties pretty well (trap-disarmer, front-liner, healer, spell-chucker), and adding more people just adds redundancy (the good kind). A well constructed party gets exponentially more powerful as you add more members, though, so more than 5 and you're looking at it being hard to challenge the players without obliterating them. This seems less true in 4E, but time will tell.

In SR you also have 4 basic food groups (spell-chucker, fire-support, face, tech-whiz), and again, more people just means more redundancy and more synergy. Roles are more easily combined in SR though; it would be reasonable to have a 2-man party with a combat mage and a face / hacker, covering to some degree all the roles a team 'needs.' Adding more people doesn't make combat as much of a breeze as it does in D&D too, so SR is slightly mor flexible in that regard.

Still, for pretty much any RPG, I find the sweet spot to be 4 players, though I'm willing to see 3 to 6 at the table. 7 is too many.

I think the big difference is that SR actually has mechanics for players helping each other out on tests. That super rigger could always use a hand overhauling The Ride. The hacker can always use someone to do his scut work and the mage could always use a hacker to help him research formulae or what not.

D&D... not so much. I have a couple ranks of disable device, can I help the thief disable the trap? Sure... if he dies.

Sounds like the tipping point for "Too Many" is 7 or there abouts.

D&D 4th edition differs from 3rd, in that, among other changes, those very mechanics are incorporated into the game.

Well hell it's about time

There are teamwork testing in DnD4...and all you need to do is get a 10 or better and you give the guy you are helping +2. Very similar to SR4.

Anyways, 4-6 total (including the GM) is my sweet spot. Anymore than that and we are not comfortably fitting round the main table (a converted pool table). Now back in high school, I ran a couple long standing solo campaigns with different friends. One of them lasted close to 2 years. Granted, we each had 2 or 3 characters being controlled.

I have done the larger group once, but that was with two DMs. It was kinda fun, but it only lasted a couple months, which was plenty, imo.

Not just fourth, same thing in 3.x, unless the skills are too far separated. Which makes sense of course.


Isshia

I am most comfortable with 4 or 5. we are playing 6 at the moment and it gets tough to keep everyone in line sometimes. maybe as I get more organized as a GM I maybe able to handle a little more. I would like to try a 2 or 3 player group sometime.

That's another good point. The higher the number of players I have the more prepartion I need to have a fun game (where no one feels like the GM has forgotten about their character).

While the above is true for any RPG, it may be easiest to see to in SR. At least it was in the older editions, I haven't GMed 4th, just played it breifly, so I can't say if it still holds true or not.

Anyway, the manner in which SR is set up makes it very easy for the GM to include bits and bytes for everyone. I usually spend about 45 minutes on the details for any given session, certainly no more than that once I have a good background established and that is a good deal shorter than I need for the same level of detail in any other game system. I could easily provide a good game on five minutes of set up time, but for the type of detail my Players expect (and I myself feel comfortable with) it takes about 45 or so for a three to six hour session.


Isshia

I have a very loose GMing style (I prefer to set a few pieces on the table and let the players drive it from there. In other words I like to make shit up as we go). I also don't play at a table with a dedicated hacker so that makes things MUCH easier (it's hard enough for me to keep track of the real world and astral).

I think I like 4th because it's fairly conducive to that style. Dice pools certainly seem smaller and fiddling with dice pool modifiers seems a little easier to manage. But I never GMed SR3 tabletop so I can't really say (I don't recall SR3 being all that much harder, it just wasn't as... coherent IMO).

I think your right though, it's a nature of the game, not necessarily the rules. D&D doesn't exactly discourage the "Okay we go into the first 10 by 10 room" style of play. In contrast a Shadowrun rarely starts like that, unless they're in prison. At the same time it's reasonable to start a game with "Your fixer calls you with some work" so it's pretty easy to dive right in and let the plot unfold.

Hm... I have a table of 6+ right now so I'm finding it's taking a couple hours of leisurely plotting to keep things well rounded and challenging.

Yeah, dice pools for 3rd and back seem MUCH smaller. There's a thread over in the main forum right now that talks about a soak pool that goes over 100. For our Prime Runners we had dice pools for hackers that got really out there, but even really out there wasn't more than a quarter of the mentioned 100+. Very often, for our grim and gritty games, if you could put together a dice pool over 12 for a roll you were a huge threat. Yeah, I know the mechanic is different in 4th, but dear god, thank Zeus there are dice rolling progis. It'd take an hour just to roll a couple of rounds of combat out.


Isshia

Ive noticed that throught my RP'ing career (D&D 2nd ed, 3.5, Fallout PnP, and Shadowrun 4th) the best group size is four. I've run games for one person (I'm actually starting one in a day or two) and I've run 12 man games. Four is ideal, but I will go up to 5, and as low as one. One person games allow for a much more intimate experience, and usually we have multiple people watching the game, so it becomes like a movie. Two 'Runners is fun; you can get into some crazy shit with just two guys. It's hard to make a campaign for three people, just because the skillsets usually don't match up to make a good covering of skills.

Really, I like my players to make their characters and then I tailor a campaign around them. That is what is fun for me. So, in the end, it doesn't make a huge difference when it comes to amount of people. It just means everyone gets less time to do stuff.

I just ran a 4 runner table with 300 bp and those dice pools are SMALL. My players were visibly upset that the biggest dice pool they could scrape together was 9.

It was fantastic.

It's like the street level game we are getting ready to do now. One hundred point (3rd edition style) builds, no starting (unmodified) attribute or skill above five, not more than Y90k starting resources, it's to the point that we have one guy who is toying with the idea of a human with no skill in magic, and no cyber or bioware; a skill monkey. THAT is such a rare animal in Shadowrun that the idea of seeing it done in our game actually has me grinning.

Isshia

Don't get me wrong, I still love running your "normal" 400 bp game (I like big explosions like everyone else) but 300 bp really seems to make people focus on how utterly average their character is in comparison the rest of the world. A handful of mook guards are a viable threat again and a mob of street people can easily overwhelm them. At the same time they're just

Blue Planet is a hard sci-fi setting so there isn't any magic, I also capped weapon avail at 4, cyber at 8 (with case by case exceptions for things like cerebral boosters and the occasional cyberspur), and left most other things open for purchase (if they want to blow money on a rating 6 survival kit I'm all for it). I uh... basically forced them to buy skills and we ended up with a bunch of well rounded characters with a focused but diverse skill set.

I also liked having lower power characters because it meant each character was more important in combat. We only have two guys with an extra IP so it's important that EVERYONE do something useful in combat. No more shall I hear "Hide behind the damage troll!" as the rigger sends in his 20 LMG totting drones and the aforementioned troll lays down a wall of lead.

Fave number players: 4 + GM
Minimum: 2 +GM (not into one on one, really)
Max: 6 + GM (and I wouldn't enjoy it as much)

I like 3-4, because it lets you focus a bit more on the individual characters. But I have had a game with 9 players, and it was a hell of a lot of fun. Chaotic, noisy, and just plain nuts, but it was cool. It has to be for a special type of game I think though. It's not something I'd want to do on a regular basis though.

3 players. It forces the players to think outside the box to solve problems that their skills don't address, and their outside-of-the-box thinking forces the Gm to be on her toes.

Peter

There should be no more or less than 1 runner per player and there might be as many players as possible. You may just have to adjust the gm staff. 1 gm per 6 players works best but Ive already gmed a sixteen player single-master game without any complications.

P&P: 4-5 + GM's good. I've done up to 8, but everything slows down a tad too much. I've always preferred to have 3 or more players, one or two players just seems to limit the great diversity of skills and archetypes that you find in SR - IMO.

But i'm just launching an online campaign, and its a lot different....Generally speaking the live IRC sessions will mostly be 3-5 players, but because people are scattered over time zones, using email as well opens it up, so probably around 8-10 runners in total in the campaign. Keeping time lines synchronized is going to be the biggest pain