I was wondering, how many players could you could reasonably handle with PTA? Anybody have any experience with or ideas for handling larger groups, say of six or seven people?

They say talking to yourself is not a good sign....

I thought about this a bit and I tend to think a larger group is possible, but you probably ought to chose your series premise wisely for it.

One thing that might work well, for instance, would be a cop show where you'd almost always have at least two people in each scene just because the cops who are partner will tend to go around together. You could also set things up that characters are tied to each other for a lot of character scenes. For instance: Alice is in a relationship with Bob; Charles, Doug, and Ethel are buddies and always hang out in the same bar after work; and Gary and Henrietta are siblings. These pairings would mostly be different from the professional partnerships.

As for actual tv series with large main casts I can just think of Firefly here. Interestingly, when they are in space pretty much any not completely private situation could have any given character show up since it's such a small ship. Living quarters and place of work are almost identical too.

So that might be another kind of setup that might work for larger groups: Everyone is physically together a lot of the time. An exploration game where everyone is togethr on a vessel most of the time. A place like a boarding school or an acedemy might also work.

A series where each character goes off on completely different plots with mostly thematic commonalities and only occasional plot overlap would be more difficult for a larger group, I think.

M.A.S.H. is a good setup for a big cast I would think. So is the West Wing. You almost always have multiple people moving through a scene...

Keith