6 Lessons I Learnt Running a D&D Party of 9

Running a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) campaign for the recommended party of 3-5 players is hard. Running one for more than 7 players is rarely done, and often ill-advised. Last year, I ran a 6-month campaign for 9 players. Here are some things I learnt along the way that helped me adapt gameplay so it was more fun for players and easier for me to run:

1. Avoid splitting the party

It might be obvious - avoid splitting the party, or the party splitting themselves up. Whilst the characters are “achieving more” by acting in parallel, everyone whose characters aren’t in focus has completely zoned out and is chatting in the background of your game. Not ideal. During one session of my game, the party split into 3 groups of 3 - this doesn’t sound so bad until you remember many D&D games run with only 3 players; as a DM, you are essentially running 3 games in parallel. Bored players + overwhelmed DM = something to avoid.

Ways to do this: try to write the story in such a way that it’s natural for them to stay together (easier said than done). I ended up directly asking the players to try not to split up, and made it clear they wouldn’t be missing out otherwise. Having just sat through 45 minutes of “stuff happening to other characters”, the players understood and agreed.

2. Integrate players dropping in and out

Find cool ways to integrate players dropping in and out of sessions. With any D&D group, especially large ones, people have other commitments and miss sessions occasionally. “X suddenly appears from an alleyway” is OK, but it breaks immersion. Try to have some in-universe reason for the characters not being there - feel free to work with the players on this! Often, this can serve as a mini-downtime for characters, and can help them flesh out their backstories. For example, one of the characters in my game was shadowing an archmage for work experience whilst at wizard school, and their presence was occasionally required by the archmage. Another character had a strong love but weak tolerance for alcohol.

“Random” events like a player missing a session can add to the story, rather than just being something quietly acknowledged. During my campaign, one character had slept in during what was supposed to be an important mission (the player missed the session), and upon waking, discovered the party had landed themselves in prison! This led to the jailbreak being a lot more fun than I thought it would, as the players had to strategise knowing there was a single character on the outside.

If woven into the story correctly, player absence can lead to fun opportunities and unpredictable, asymmetric scenarios that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

3. Give each player a ‘moment’

Particularly with large D&D groups and structured (i.e. not open-ended) campaigns, it’s difficult to tie every player’s backstory to the campaign without it becoming overly forced. Regardless, each player should have a ‘moment’ where the attention of the party is centred on them. This doesn’t need to be every session for every player - this is hard to fit in seamlessly with the story. Aim for at least one player to have a moment each session.

Note that a ‘moment’ doesn’t necessarily have to be a dramatic character-development scene - it should be something where a player can look back in a few months’ time and think, “I did that”.

Some players step into the spotlight easily, but not all, and as a DM, you want all your players to be having fun. One way to do this is through random events, as I’ve mentioned before, or by having an exclusive skill check (see point 5). A character’s unique traits are an easy way to do this (e.g. race/species, background, languages spoken). In my campaign, one character could access parts of a castle that the others couldn’t, thanks to her cousins, both heirs of a noble family, attending the same masquerade as the party. Player absence is another good way to do this. In the jailbreak example I gave earlier, the player in question was one of the quieter members of the group, and him being the only character not in prison meant the spotlight had naturally shifted onto him.

One important caveat - you must find a balance between bringing attention to a player naturally and making the player uncomfortable. This is part of the skill of DMing.

4. Balancing combat is difficult

The general rule I stuck to was having one “super boss” and minimal “minions”. Minions (e.g. several goblins for a high-level party) take up too much time to run and leave players bored.

Challenge Ratings (CRs) are typically a good measure of how difficult a monster is to fight for a party of 4. With large parties and D&D’s action economy, CRs become more of a rough indication of the monster’s overall power, and it is much easier to homebrew or tweak existing monsters. For example, at level 9, my group were dealing around 150 damage per round. Even the CR 21 Astral Dreadnought, intended to challenge a party of four level-21 characters, would have been bloodied within 2 rounds if I had stuck to the stat block’s HP, and so wouldn’t have had much of a chance to unleash its full terror upon the party. My favourite way to determine hit points was to pick a number in the hundreds (I picked 600 for the Dreadnought) and ask one of your players (ideally someone less vocal) to roll a d100 without telling them why, and add this to the hit point pool (my player rolled 96 - lucky them!).

Importantly, if a TPK looks likely, don’t be afraid to change hit points mid-session. Combat is supposed to be fun, not something your players dread. As with all things, there is a caveat - don’t arbitrarily change enemy HP. This should really only be done to avoid a disaster, like a TPK or the instant annihilation of your BBEG.

The primary issue with the “super boss” method is that there are a few spells that can almost derail combat entirely, such as ‘Silvery Barbs’. For players lucky enough to be unfamiliar with ‘Silvery Barbs’, not only does it give advantage on the next attack against the target, it forces the target to re-roll. Even with a +12 to hit, my BBEG was struggling to do any real damage. After this fairly disastrous combat (for the BBEG), I banned ‘Silvery Barbs’ from my game. I’m not the biggest fan of banning spells, but D&D combat isn’t optimised for large parties, so allowances need to be made.

5. Exclude certain characters from skill checks

Possibly the most controversial thing on this list - exclude certain characters from skill checks sometimes. In D&D, certain skills come up all the time (e.g. Perception) and certain ones rarely get used (e.g. Animal Handling). This results in players whose characters excel in “useful” skills getting a lot of spotlight, and vice versa. A paladin with a +2 Perception bonus will almost never beat the cleric with a +9, so they rarely end up rolling. To counter this, allow only certain characters to make checks. For example, the paladin and the warlock just happened to be close enough to potentially overhear a shifty conversation, whereas the cleric on the other side of the table couldn’t. Importantly, the reasoning must fit with the story, and even then, this should only be used sparingly. It should not feel like you are artificially forcing the narrative.

6. Use a timer for group decisions

Use a timer for group decisions that are taking too long. Players will take as long as you give them to decide, and using a physical countdown adds tension to the game and speeds up the game. I’ve often found the plan they come up with in an hour is suspiciously similar to the plan they come up with in 3 minutes…

Bonus point, applicable to every game: ask your players for feedback!

Whilst DMing a party of nine had its challenges, it was my favourite campaign to have run, and as all my players stuck around to the end, it’s fair to say my players enjoyed it too. D&D might not be ideal for large groups, but with a bit of effort from both ends of the table, it can be just as fun, or more fun, than a smaller group :)