How to Run a Game (Part 6) - Keeping players occupied

My most recent experiences running games have been at the high school gaming club I established and as an alternative to school sports. These two forms of play are a very unusual niche style, combining elements of one-shot play and campaign play. 

The gaming club operates with half-hour sessions at lunch-times, and it has about 20 players involved. If I had all of these players playing at the same time, especially in a game like D&D, it might take a quick player 30 seconds to describe what their character is doing (a sentence to describe their intention, some rolling of dice, some interpretation of those dice, and a sentence of event description so everyone else can hear how the die roll has changed the storyline. At 30 seconds for 20 players, a single player will spend half a minute on their turn and have to wait nine-and-a-half minutes until their next turn. That's a maximum of 3 actions per player per lunch break, and many high-school students will get bored and distracted during that time. Things go even slower in combat, and a player might only get one or two actions per lunch break.

So we break the group of twenty students into four groups of five. These groups share a communal world, and impact one another On Mondays we give a general recap of the previous weeks events, and explain to all the students any repercussions from a specific group's actions that might have impacted the wider world. On each of the other weekdays, each group plays a session. Let's say it takes us a couple of minutes to sort things out at the start of a session, and a couple of minutes to pack things up at the end. That drops a half hour session to 25 minutes, giving every player roughly 5 minutes of "screen time" where they are acting or reacting to events around them... and leaves 20 minutes of observing. If players are working in a pair they get 10 minutes of shared "screen time" and 15 minutes of observing. This naturally encourages players to work together, because they get more chance to guide the story (for their cluster of five students anyway). We'll get back to that shortly...

The sport group is also about 20 students, although quite often a few of them are away. It's a block of time just under 2 hours (let's call it 2 hours for simplicity), so it's also shorter than many traditional gaming sessions would be, but roughly the timeframe of an action movie. We've got two teachers who contribute to this, which would allow us to divide the group into two groups of 10. If we were to divide the focus evenly between players, that's 10% screen time per player. 12 minutes in the spotlight, 108 minutes waiting for your turn. Working in pairs that goes to 24 minutes sharing the spotlight and 96 minutes waiting for others. Thankfully, we've got a couple of enthusiastic students who've stepped up to the duties of running games, That means subtract a player and add a narrator. Suddenly, with three groups of about six players, everyone gets 20 minutes "screen time" in the spotlight by themselves, or 40 minutes as a shared spotlight pair.

So we're aiming for the size of a typical home group, and the generally accepted sweet-spot for a group size in a roleplaying game (typically 4 to 6 players). Most convention games I've seen advertised have specifically requested groups of five players, but will run with four, and depending on the person running the game may be capable of adding a sixth.

Why does this work? I don't specifically know, but can tell you what I've seen. 

As a teacher, and as a long-time narrator and facilitator of gaming experiences, there often needs to be a critical mass of engagement before a natural flow starts to develop. If there aren't enough people contributing to the experience, it can be an uphill battle to keep things moving. If we go back to the three-way tension between the narrator, the players, and the rules, then the narrator ends up doing a lot of the work to keep things flowing. This is especially true in traditional gaming set-ups where most of the players feel like they need to be "entertained by the Dungeon Master". Don't get me wrong, if the players are willing to take some of the slack and help with their own additions to the session, these sessions can really allow the contributors to shine and take charge of the story for themselves. Conversely, if you've got a lot of players things can go one of two ways. If too many people are trying to contribute to the story at once they all end up pulling in all sorts of directions and the story becomes a shambled mess that starts lacking coherence, or just ends up with players at odds and added tnesions within the group. If the contributions are focused to a small part of the group at a time, then the rest of the group will suffer from an inertia and will struggle to get going when their turn to contribute does come. 

New narrators in the hobby will often gauge their abilities by how many players they have in their groups...

"I ran a game with five players"... "Yeah, well I ran a game with seven"... "You two are amateurs, I once ran a game with eleven players"

However, the question needs to be raised about how many of those players actually engaged with the session, and for how long. Were the majority of players bored, playing on their phones, or engaged in side discussions that had nothing to do with the game? Was the party split? Are you really running a game for three players, and the rest of the people in attendance are just sitting around socializing with friends? There's nothing wrong with having extra people sitting around and observing; after all, one of the big things in gaming over the past 15 years has been the rise of the gameplay podcast as a concept, where thousands of spectators regularly sit around and watch people play. 

It can be hard for the person running the game to see that players might be losing engagement. Honestly, I know that I was one of those people who always wanted to add one more player into a game, or allow my players to bring one more player into the game when they are having fun with the campaign. I never considered the idea that each extra player would reduce the screen time of the existing members of the group, and would bring their own agendas and aims into the session. 

Sometimes when new players want to come in, you just have to learn to say "NO". As the person running the game, you have to know your limits, and play to your strengths. If I am playing in a game, I'd rather a small game where I can keep track of the action and feel like I've got a significant part to play in the story, rather than be a small one among many just waiting for my turn to make a small incremental difference in the grand scheme of things.