Throw More People at It!

Pen-and-paper games have breaking points, and these usually involve the "throw more people at it" strategy. A lot of games are very sensitive to the amount of people in an "adventuring party." We found when dungeon-ing, five people is a good practical limit and it gives everyone a chance to shine. We have run eight-person groups, and it feels inevitable that a queue starts forming behind the front rank members, as in most dungeons eight is a lot of people to run a game for, and more importantly - balance.

Area-of-effect attacks multiply party strength, and going from five to eight party members typically allows one or two extra AoE attacks on the board during a battle per turn. In strategy-type games this is a huge deal, at least in our experience, as those extra, well-placed area attacks can cause havoc with even an enemy force that is scaled to equal the party's ability to fight.

Let's say you design an encounter for five adventurers, two orc tanks, a controller, and two ranged attackers. Five-on-five seems pretty balanced. When you go to eight, you may throw in an extra tank and two more ranged DPS to bring this up to an eight-on-eight.

Well, this is where the problem lies. When you start to scale up encounters, you get into the problem of "more is better" and you get these strange "force multiplier" issues when you keep adding more of the same type of enemy.

Tanking in Confined Spaces

Tanks tend to lose power in large groups, because in many tactical dungeon battles, space is limited. When you scale up a dungeon designed for five players to ten players, you often don't think about increasing the size of rooms and halls, and you get these theme-park style lines of people waiting to fight while the actual space for the "front lines" is typically a 10-wide hallway with room enough for two fighters, side-by-side. Even though both the party and the orcs can field three or four tanks each, the dungeon often does not have the space to let everyone fight one-on-one.

So some of the tanks sit there unused, and their power is reduced. This does happen to ranged units as well, since line-of-sight is often blocked by other characters and simply being forced to the back of the group.

Limited Space? AoE Rules the Battle

One of the rules of wart is if your enemy has limited room to maneuver, hit them with artillery. If you scale up a dungeon encounter and don't scale up the terrain, you are naturally forcing more combatants into a smaller space, and multiplying the effect of area-of-effect spells, powers, and attacks. A sleep spell that would have hit two or three in the original encounter is now hitting six. A swipe feat that would have only come into play once or twice during the battle is now used almost every turn as monsters jam the front lines to get an attack in.

Area-of-effect attackers love scaled encounters, and you typically see their effectiveness go through the roof. Single target attackers either have to mass attacks or focus on picking off stragglers, and therefore see their contributions reduced. Single-target controllers of de-buff experts suffer the worst, since in a smaller encounter putting a -2 to-hit on the other side's tank or ranged attacker would have been a huge deal, but now that -2 is just one in a crowd, and that damage that would have been severely affected by a de-buff is still getting through with other attackers.

When you scale an encounter you are giving AoE powers a huge buff.

Ranged Attackers

With four ranged attackers, the orcs can single out and really put the hurt on one of the party members. With two ranged attackers, everyone is taking some damage, and things feel balanced. With four, you are taking out one party member a turn (and it feels unfair). If your ranged attackers can all see one target and attack, you typically "alpha attack" one target at a time with your ranged assets instead of spreading damage. This works on both sides, and ranged power is affected by the terrain.

In open terrain such as large caverns, outdoor maps, and huge chambers; increasing the amount of ranged attackers increases your combat power greatly - even more so than on a one-to-one ratio. You double one side's archers and all let them attack during a turn? You can bet they will coordinate and fire at one target, and this really is the thing to do. Those squishy mages in the back ranks better watch out.

In closed terrain the ranged attackers lose a lot of their effectiveness, such as a 10' wide hall that only allows two tanks to fight side-by-side. Your archers will be sitting in the back of the line taking a smoke break and browsing on their smartphones.

The same goes with monsters, if you are scaling up an encounter in a small room don't go for ranged attackers. You are better off making the individual monsters tougher by a couple levels and leaving them the same number.

The Problem With Tougher

There is a problem with making monsters tougher and leaving their numbers the same. Let's say you decide with your encounter to leave their numbers the same, but double up their strength. You are going to be creating a meat-grinder situation where in close quarters the tanks of the party will take a lot of damage and the encounter will be tougher than it should have been. In open-field battle it may work a little better, because you are letting everyone contribute, but the number of attacks on each side may push the battle in favor of the larger side. The terrain starts to matter a lot when you "toughen up" an encounter instead of scale, because the number of attacks matters, and not forcing one or two players to take the brunt of everything also matters.

The Problem With More

Some games just do not scale well. If a party size doubles from four to eight, you would think that encounter size or CR should be doubled, right? We have run into this many times and felt some game's balancing systems started to fall apart when larger groups were thrown at the system. What about a party size of twenty or thirty? We have played games this large, and while the system theoretically 'works' there is a point where the game starts to break down. The multiplicative power of twenty individual players making decisions far outweighs the game's balancing systems (or even a GM making one-to-one fights) because of a number of design factors unique to each game and the power set.

It's like a superhero game, and you go from a nicely-balanced group of four or five Justice League or Avengers caliber player characters and you double that to eight or ten - a situation that is not that uncommon in comic books and comic book lore, as big fights are popular. You will notice two trends, some characters will become very weak and inconsequential, while others will massively over-contribute. The ones that over-contribute will fight at two or three times their strength because of the over abundance of healing, protective powers, buffs, and coordination from the rest of the group. These over-performers will either be tanks, direct damage, or AoE experts, or a combination of these types.

In a more balanced game with less players, you have more equal contributions and players being forced to fill roles they may not be 100% proficient at, just because someone need to cover this hall or hold the sudden attack off. The AoE, DD, or tank may not get a chance to do what they do best, because there is no one else to capture an objective or perform a story-goal, so they have to step in. With less players, everyone has to share responsibilities in the group, and you have less of the "single purpose" over-performing characters purely focused on pouring out one attack type every turn for maximum damage.

Special Units

It isn't hopeless. If you know the game well enough, special units may make the difference and allow you to balance a larger party without resorting to scaling or toughening up. Let's say the goblins have a pet fire beetle that can spit fire and take a lot of damage. That instantly become a tough nut to crack, and it has some interesting fight dynamics and utility for the goblins. Adding the beetle does "toughen up" the goblin side by one unit, but you aren't doubling up or raising their level to make up for the difference. You may need to add another special unit in there if there are more, but be careful that you aren't just increasing numbers to match.

Special Tactics and Gear

Or, give the goblins a falling rock trap they can trigger when several of the party members are underneath a part of the chamber, flaming arrows, heavy armor, or other combat enhancements in order to compensate for the larger party. Let one stay hidden up near the roof in a small cave with a crossbow, or add a small force that rushes in from a secret trapdoor or "spider hole" in the floor when the party fights their way past it. If you make one side fight smarter, that can add challenge without scaling or toughening up, and it also makes the fight more memorable.

Or Just Say No to Scaling or Splitting

Or just focus on smaller groups where the game was naturally designed to play. There is a point where every game breaks and you have added too many players. More isn't always more fun, imagine a Monopoly game with fifty players. Everybody would be waiting for their turn to come up, and the board would be crowded so badly that only the small group of "first movers" would do well. You will find this pattern in tabletop RPGs as well ,and even in non-tactical story type games, the "first movers" and the most vocal of the group will have the most fun, and determine the direction of the game.

If you break them into groups, you can get some of that original balance back (but not in resource management games, two parties will not be challenged if the adventure was designed around the resource management of one party) - but you are also telling half of the players to wait while the other half has fun. You see this in "story games" where the group of investigators creaks apart to investigate a mystery - the more active and forceful personalities will dominate the play time if the party splits apart.

"Pilot player, sit in the starship, guard it, and be ready to go! We are going to go out and take all the session time in the starport now getting into all sorts of fun and interesting trouble."

It is something you have to think of when planning games, and also use creativity to resolve. You don't want to tell someone who wants to join your group "no" and have them sit out, but you also don't want too many people to join where the game is too easy, too slow, or you end up scaling things up that the game breaks and the adventure falls apart. There is that point where the game breaks, and you need to be conscious of that point - especially when it comes to party size, the type of game you are playing, and adventure design.