I'm new to Dungeons and Dragons, having played only 3 games as a DM with a group of friends. Initially, it was difficult to find people to play, but now I've run into the problem where too many people want to play.
I'm scheduled to DM tomorrow for a group of 6 players, and I don't think that I can handle that with my limited experience.
Is it a good idea to have two players play as one character? If so, how would that work?
Two players could play one character, but probably it would be too boring.
They could agree all the character's action, and they could take turns when role playing him. But that would be less interesting and exciting than having one character. Also, it can lead to discussions when the two players are agreeing what to do, so the game can be even slower than if any of them have one character.
In my experience, six players is a big group, things are going to be slow, but it's still a manageable number. I think it's best to have such a big group than having them share characters.
Another option could be instead of sharing characters, sharing the GM position. You could ask one player to help you with the GMing. Then, if you are playing a combat, he can control some of the monsters. You could even split the party and make the auxiliary GM guide some of the players and you the rest.
Possibly but this is unlikely to solve your problem.
The problem is that the players are the ones playing the game and no matter how you structure this there are 6 players wedged into the same amount of playing time. In theory this means that each player gets 33% less time to play than in a 4 player game, however, in practice it is much more complicated than this due to group dynamics, personalities and the nature of the play itself.
What follows is my personal observation of how my players play the game (your mileage may differ). There are basically 3 modes of play:
Every group and every player in each group differs on how much time they like to spend in each phase but every group must spend some time in each. Depending on how you game is balanced; player's playing one character may speed things up a lot or a little but the trade off is that player's sharing a character will have less investment in that character.
You would be better off making sure that you have a solid structure to your tactical play phase. Conflict is meant to be quick and exciting and you can reinforce this by running combat crisply and efficiently see The Angry DM's post How to Manage Combat Like a M*********ing Dolphin.
Having players sharing a character something I might think a highly experienced GM might be able to hazard a middling job at handling.
For a new GM, I'd have to say no freaking way.
It will be much easier, and much more interesting for your players, to play one per character, even if the group was large enough to be unwieldy.
I'd suggest you instead organize things to reduce the load of dealing with so many players.
This includes things like:
have them choose a party leader. In situations where they must make quick decisions, that person's word is what you take, and that person is the one you deal with. Allow only fairly limited discussion in media res. [If they want to have an extended planning meeting about who is doing what, then they can but time marches on ... they might lose initiative, or even miss their whole turn (you were so busy talking the goblins got tired of waiting).]
They can change leaders in non-crisis situations but not in the middle of combat.
push as much bookkeeping as possible onto them -- e.g. have them write down marching/traveling order and who keeps watch when (vs who sleeps or whatever - so you know who is where all the time). They can have several ("In the wilderness we do this, indoors or underground we do that, in the town we do the other", overnight we do thus and so) as long as it's always clear which order/list they're using. The leader should be able to answer your questions about who is doing what at any moment during combat (i.e. let him or her keep the pieces of paper to do with the party).
if players really want to do something "out of the ordinary", well, they have to wait until you've dealt with the main group and they can't make everyone wait for very long (unless you deal with it in a break in play in which case several minutes on one player might be doable)
reduce combat size by having fewer opponents (but correspondingly tougher ones) rather than lots. (Beware the impact of the action economy in this situation)
make sure you have your encounters prepared - stats and equipment and tactics all organized, NPC personalities/names/habits of speech etc, how they'll respond to violence/threats/bribes/gifts/free drinks or whatever as appropriate to the situation
If you're properly organized, 6 should just about be feasible for a new GM.
[Once your group settles down a bit, you can relax whichever of the rules it will be more fun to loosen.]
I regularly run groups of up to 6 and have even run 7 or 8 on occasion (I prefer to keep it to 6 or under just to make sure it's easier for everyone to have something to do). Just make sure you have an easy way to keep track of hit points etc, that you balance the encounters appropriately, and that everyone is aware the game will play more slowly due to more people taking turns.
The main thing you need to do is keep things moving and snappy. When it's someone's turn then if they don't know what they are going to do and start doing it knock them down the initiative and give the next person a go. Each person should be planning their move while the people before them are still acting and be ready to go when it comes to it.
This is because the biggest problem here is "screen time". If each of 3 players takes 2 minutes to do their actions then you are still active every few minutes. If 6 players do that though then that means 5 people are waiting around for ten minutes between each time they get to do things.
At that point urgency/immediacy is lost. People start getting bored, checking their phones, etc and the immersion falls apart.
This answer is more for completeness to this issue, giving another answer which someone may find useful. As should be noted in the tone of this answer, I do not encourage the original poster to follow this.
4 Words, and an idea stolen from Blizzard Entertainment: Homebrewed Two Headed Ogre.
It can be any creature which could conceivably have two heads in D&D lore, such as a troll. I do not suggest doing this for the following reasons:
My answer is not from official rules of 5e,it's homebrew material (3.5 official though), however, I thought it could be useful since the author originally asked for ANY insight, it was the best answer I thought for a solution to the players playing ''one character''
There is a way to actually play 1 character with 2 players, if you want to try like I did back a few years.
(you'll both have a body but only one soul).
I played The 3.5 version of the Dvati race in the past with a DM, it was really fun, we each controlled one of them, but they are in synergy together, one soul but you can still make one a bit different than the other for some things like clothing, one can be more agressive but they always agree, with my DM we didn't want the others in game to know about how our race, so we did pretend to be 2 different persons. Plus since They can communicate via telepathy at an unlimited range and across the planes,it was easy to act such a way.
The Dvati race (was official in 3.5) Source:
(Dragon compendium p.14, originally from Dragon #271)
Middle finger of Vecna however tried to adapt it to 5e, but is not an official source, but since you asked for ANY insight, I'm sharing it. http://mfov.magehandpress.com/2016/07/dvati.html
