How big a Cast can you have?

[Danny_K]

A quick question here.  I'm re-booting the PTA game on RPG.net, this time using superheroes and making it much lighter and more anime-like.  Thing is, there are a whole bunch of people interested in the game, and it looks like I could easily have 6 or 7 players if I wanted.  

Has anyone had experience with a game that size?  I've searched the archives, and only found actual play reports of groups of 4 or so players. I welcome both opinion and actual play experience with larger groups.

[TonyLB]

Wow, that sounds extremely unwieldy, unless the screen presence mechanic is compressed or accelerated very sharply, so that everyone gets their chance in the limelight in a reasonably timely fashion.

[Ron Edwards]

Contrary-wise, I don't see any trouble with it at all. PTA seems very much to me like one of the games in which a larger group of participants only adds to the fun.

Screen Presence is relative, quantitatively, and numbers-independently, qualitatively. Let me break that down a bit.

Quantitatively: how much actual time we are spending paying attention to given characters. More Screen Presence in a given episode means more time and attention. This is relative, however - so if you have a big cast of principal characters, it means less time per character for a given Screen Presence value than for a small cast ... but a 3 still gets more than a 2, and a 2 gets more than a 1.

Qualitatively: a Screen Presence 3 in a given episode means your character's issue gets dealt with, definitively. A 1 means the character does a "bit" or adds some commentary here and there, with or without much issue involved. A 2 means either a jumped-up 1 or a setting-up for a 3. None of this is altered by having multiple, multiple characters.

Both issues seem to me to provide plenty of room for "the more, the merrier."

Best,
Ron

[Trevis Martin]

Maybe not so bad if you guys are playing in an asynchronous enviornment (play by post, right?)  It means a lot of writing for you as GM.  I don't know if I would try that size a group live.  And if you are playing by post, I'm interested to know how you handle the issue of story arc and screen presence, it not being easy to identify when one episode begins and another ends.  (Not to derail your thread.)

best

Trevis

[Danny_K]

Thanks for the speedy replies!  I'll see how the game gells.  Some of the new "candidate" players are well known to me from other games, and I'm loath to pass them up just to keep the numbers down.  

I think a larger group might be doable, especially if there's a social dynamic working between the characters.  

Trevis: for most PbP games, the GM has to set episode limits somewhat artificially -- I try to do it pretty quickly (which is still not very fast) and give out XP after every episode (for games that use XP).  For a spotlight episode of PTA, I suppose the episode's over when you've had the big crisis or the big reveal, and maybe a little epilog.

[BlackSheep]

The only potential issue I can see is that we have around six protagonists and a short (five episode) season.

That means six 3s to assign into only four eps.  Pilot, two eps centring on a single character, and two centring on two characters each.

That's a lot of issues being dealt with in a short amount of play.  It's workable, but it's going to need some careful planning.  Might be worth extending to a seven ep 1-1-1-2-2-2-3 season to give some breathing space.

[Danny_K]

That's a great idea.  I'll throw it on RPG.Net!

[Frank T]

I played with five players successfully and think you could probably have more if you must. If Firefly can handle a crew of nine, so can you. But:

1) You'll have more budget than you can possibly spend, since there will not be that much more scenes and the conflicts with multiple protagonists don't cost you a dime more than those with only one. Consider reducing the budget to, say, 25.

2) You'll need a longer season, obviously. I'd suggest to go for 9 or even more episodes. The very least you need is a pilot + the spotlights.

3) You cannot let every player do a next week on. Seven or eight mini-scenes are just more than you can cramp into a single episode. Have the spotlight player pick one, pick one yourself as producer, and devide the rest of the players into teams to agree on two more.

4) You as producer won't frame very many scenes, so you will have to rely on the players to frame plot scenes (if you want plot). That need not be a problem, though.

5) There will probably be episodes in which a given protagonist does almost nothing. Which is just the same in any other rpg with so big a group.

- Frank

[Danny_K]

One happy thought we had was to use "confessionals" between scenes -- proudly stolen Inspectres and from the movies Incredibles and The Specials, these are the moments where it's just the hero and the camera.  A great way to introduce ideas and grub for fan mail while amusing one's fellow players.  

Regarding spotlights: with a pilot and 7 eps, we've got a Spotlight for everybody and a finale episode where everybody's got an SP of 2.  It just worked out that way, which was kind of neat.  

The budget pool is a good point -- otherwise I'd have a budget of 36 for the pilot, which is kind of ridiculous!

About framing scenes -- I thought the player calls for a scene, but the producer frames it.  I stand ready to jog the player's elbows and push for conflict if necessary, as well, both IC and OOC.  I'm going to try to stick to the PTA rules as much as possible and hopefully they'll see us through.

[Frank T]

Sorry, I meant call for scenes, not frame.