The Ten-Player Table and the Kiddie Table

Recently, I ran an absolutely immense game of D&D, with 10 players at the table. Yes, 10.

We’ve had about 4-5 players on average for D&D Encounters, but on that Wednesday, we had more and more people arrive. Bridget (my wife) was actually able to make it, since my brother came to visit and offered to put our son to bed. The kids who come to play invited some of their friends, and had even helped them make characters beforehand with the Red Box, so I felt like I really couldn’t turn them away.

In the end, the table was packed with ten players, more than half of them around the age of 10.

We had two hours to complete one encounter with ten players. Hmmm…

Since we were moving directly into the encounter with almost no exposition (the encounter directly followed the last encounter), we dove right in. I was scrambling to find more lizardmen to pull out of my minis, and in the end, I think I doubled the minis with the intent of turning some into minions on the fly in case we were running late.

We didn’t need to. The players were fantastic, blowing through the encounter and monsters like they were nothing. I even tried some dirty, underhanded tactics, and they just kept killing. We had two kids who had never even played before, and they had a blast.

I spoke about this on a recent episode of RPG Circus, and talked about some advice I have about anyone running a table that large, specifically about keeping the game running. We recorded that on a Tuesday, and I showed up the following Wednesday knowing I’d have just as many players.

Wrong.

I had more. One more person had shown up. It was at this point, I decided we needed to split the party. One of the guys who usually shows up graciously offered to run another table, and we split up, with the kids deciding they really, really wanted to all play together.

So what happened? I ended up running the kids. There were five of them, and they were all friends, so I noticed a lot more table talk than last week, and without adults there to help, there was a woeful lack of tactics. I had the two party wizards in close combat most of the game.

By the way, we had three fighters and two wizards. Not surprising, since I’ve found as a 10 year old, you either want to be a tough guy with a big sword, or someone throwing fireballs and lightning, with not a lot of interest in the areas in between.

I also found that without adults there, the kids were much harder to wrangle, and we actually ended up taking longer with 5 than with 10. The game didn’t go badly, but if we ever have that number of players again, the kids will be split up, I think.