Accepting the 20 Player Standard

[Sham]

I've always made a distinction between campaign and campaign world. It seems most DMs mean campaign world when they say campaign. My definition of campaign is some horrible notion I developed over the years. When I say campaign, I'm talking about the story line of Level 1 through finish (voluntary or forced PC retirement) for a particular group of players. For example, I'm developing Campaign 7 right now, which happens to take place in the same world as Campaigns 4-6.

I really need to stop thinking in these terms

I've run the same campaign world using different rules, so that has also provided for me a distinction from one campaign to another.

As far as the text in the OD&D rules, I envision a scenario akin to what grodog posted, that there was often a co-DM in Kuntz. Clearly the "from four to fifty players" bit is the number of people adventuring in said campaign world, as noted by Falconer.

My largest single sitting sessions probably topped out at 8 or 9 back in the early 80's. I know certain players prefer small parties, while others can flourish in large or small parties. I prefer 5 players, I'll play with as few as 2, and I wouldn't be opposed to playing with 10-12 provided the players were OK with much longer intervals between actions.

[AxeMental]

I always thought campaign ment the group of players with PCs playing together under 1 DM advancing in levels with or without any DM created "plots" that tie it together. Each DM could have their own campaign or they could share a campaign with another DM to some extent (ie players keeping the same PCs and world setting). Campaign is useful in destinguishing from 1-2 shot sessions that don't tie into later game sessions much (usually with multiple DMs).

As for "world" and "campaign world" I think there the same thing (the DMs setting and global concept.

[JoseFreitas]

Here in Lisbon there used to be a gaming club (CJS), which at its heyday had up to 300 members who were active, and dues paying. We used to have a large ground floor flat in downtown Lisbon, jeez... it probably costs some 10.00$ to rent nowadays, we had three medium to very large gaming rooms, two smallish ones, one room that served as a store and two small offices, plus a kitchen running as a sort of bar. The owner gave it to the club dfor free because he was a fan and a big friend of the club manager, with the proviso that we should get out in one year from the date he notified us... which he did finally in 92. He was a very rich guy with more things on his hand than he could handle and the club manager did him a bug favor, so he allowed the club there for almost 8 years. SAfter it left, it moved to a smaller apartment with only two gaming rooms, and slowly declined until it closed down in 96.

In any case, there was a large campaign of AD&D going on (I was a player) and since pretty much everybody showed up at the club for a few hours at least on saturdays and sundays, the game was pretty interesting. There were two DMs.

The party at the table generally consisted of up to 10 players. But when the game went to the cities or places where other PCs were, they'd hop in, have their say and so on. It wouldn't be a rare event for someone to try to go get another player who was playing Diplomacy or Machiavelli to come to the table and decide something. There was a network of PCs where they had houses in the major town of the campaign and would visit each other to learn spells, trade magic items and so on (on one occasion to steal from them...). Phone calls wera also a constant ("Say, that idiot magic user that João plays is in town and wants your PC to teach him the Fly spell. Will you do it? How much are you charging?") etc... There were at one point more than 40 different PCs in the game with about 30 something players. They used the Schwarze Auge game setting, Aventuria, and Havena was the main town.

In my own game I've rarely had more than 6 players at the table and nowadays 4 or 5 is more common. But at one time, even though I gamed with about 6 people at the same time, I had about 12 players and some 30 PCs in the campaign.

[Matthew]

Whilst perusing the EnWorld Gygax Q&A thread I came across this interesting comment:

Oh, one more question: The original rules talked about games using up to 20 players -- not a common thing these days! With that in mind, I can see why folks had treasure division agreements, callers and such. Did you run many games of this size? What was it like?

For about six months the typical number of players in an adventure session in my basement was 18-22 persons packed in. That was when I asked Rob Kuntz to serve as my co-DM. Getting marching order was very important. Of course most activity was dungeon crawling, so actions were just done in order around the table. Be ready or lose your chance! Stick with the party or else something very nasty is likely to befall your character away from the group. The sessions were fun but somewhat chaotic, lacked most roleplay, and surely didn't allow for a lot of one-on-one time player and DM.

I DMed a con tournament with 100 entrants, and i managed 20 in each group. I took time to check individual actions there, as it was an outdoor adventure. Each session ran four hours, and a bit. I was surely tired when that was concluded, but to the best of my knowledge all the participants had a good time of it, even those on the teams that didn't finish in the top spot.

So it seem the "twenty player standard" may have been quite a short lived occurrence.

[JimLotFP]

In Vaasa a couple years back I had 9 players showing up every week for my AD&D game. There were 8 players (now 7) for my BFRPG game every week in my current campaign but 5-6 of them showing up was probably average.

I'm currently developing a new campaign and my goal is within six months of it starting to have a pool of 20 players who each participate at least once a month, with a per-game group of about 6 people at the table (these are all player numbers, not including me).

[Flight Commander Solitude]

I played in a demo at a convention once that had, IIRC, about 40 players. We were broken up into two groups, and each group had a lieutenant referee, who reported to the main referee. Everything was kinda chaotic, but it was very fun!

But usually in our gaming groups we had 2-6 players. I always wanted to try DMing a huge group (8-12 people would have been great!), but it never gelled.

[ScottyG]

Gary’s group did have its 20+ member party sessions, but I don’t think that’s what the quote is referring to. I don’t think the current typical ‘one DM for one party that stays together for the duration of the campaign’ model was considered. I think that it was assumed that there would be multiple factions within the campaign. Parties would form and dissolve, rivalries would exist, etc. So you might run a party of 20, 4-6, or just 1 at any given session, but you would have up to 20 players interacting with your campaign world on an ongoing basis.

[geneweigel]

I had 30 people playing once when I was a teenager. It was anomaly because there was some distant relative from out of town who was "cute" who had to try out this D&D. Well it spread through the grapevine that he was coming to play D&D next all these girls were asking me to make characters and then every local guy that I sometimes played with wanted to play because of all the girls that were coming to the game.

It was the worst game ever which I usually pin to the numbers but lack of enthusiasm for play by the majority was the real reason. Anyway, that guy (a cousin's cousin's cousin) was one of the finest players that I've ever known hands down. He asked me very honest questions about the combat and wanted to know the differences between classes. He took a PHB (this was pre-UA) and the next day decided to play a monk, The game was so loud and annoying that I'm surprised they even got as far as they did. It was a cavern of dervishes that worshipped a fake "living god" Amon-Ra who was a Type III demon and he had an illusory chamber of treasure which they took money by the bucketful while the "god" was in a trance. Nobody cared or understood why they were there in the first place at that point and the mob decided to leave with their treasure and then decided to wrap up before leaving. That guy was the only one who wanted to fight the fake "Amon-Ra" but the mob mentality shot him down. Anyway they never finished it, nobody ever checked their treasure until a few years later when someone said they had a character who was unbelievably rich and tried to make it seem like it wasn't from that adventure but I still had the marching order... I'M SUCH A BASTARD!

[Stormcrow]

Gary’s group did have its 20+ member party sessions, but I don’t think that’s what the quote is referring to. I don’t think the current typical ‘one DM for one party that stays together for the duration of the campaign’ model was considered. I think that it was assumed that there would be multiple factions within the campaign. Parties would form and dissolve, rivalries would exist, etc. So you might run a party of 20, 4-6, or just 1 at any given session, but you would have up to 20 players interacting with your campaign world on an ongoing basis.

No, Gary was talking about 20 people all packed in his basement at once. The D&D rules mention a campaign supporting up to 50 players simultaneously, and this is what you're talking about. But it seems Gary felt that 20 players all playing at once was unsustainable and less desirable—and I don't blame him!

To have 20 players all playing at once, the position of party caller is essential. Many of the participants will be waiting their turn to do something, which will only happen during encounters or if there is a room to explore.

[Edgewaters]

My question is, do you dismiss this as a freak occurrence, stemming from the freshness of the dungeon concept, the charisma and genius of Gary Gygax, the gaming friends he had already gathered about him? Or do you also strive for that?

I think it was a freak occurrence, but not for those reasons. You ask who has the patience to spend an hour a day doing preparation work and then several more hours playing. For you, and all the rest of us, that is in addition to day jobs. For Gary it was a sort of day job, or at least, the wellspring of a succesful business enterprise. I think he was just writing from his experience of what was ideal, not necessarily what's practical for most people.

If computers and video games hadn't come along, things might be different - bigger rpg market, more people working in the industry, bigger social phenomena (might have had things like rpg cafes rather than internet cafes, who knows), etc.