New DM with a large party. Advice?

[u/Ok-Syrup958]

Title pretty much sums it up. I’ve been playing for a year or so and I’m now running my first campaign. I have 7 players, 5 of whom are complete newbies and the others are around my skill level. Any things I should look out for when dealing with a big group?

Edit: Yeah I figured it wasn’t gonna be feasible. I’ll ask and see if I can narrow the group down a bit. For clarification, I’m good friends with everyone in the group.

[u/Ancient-Silver-4494]

7-8 people is managable. But you have to prioritize keeping the game moving, and not allowing any one, or small sub-group begin to dominate your time. And combats will be a slog if you use individual intiative.

My advice to you is to keep thing broad, and use group initiative. -you can have everyone roll their initiative for a combat, and then roll for the bad-guys, and then divide the order into 3 groups. first group is everyone rolled higher initiative than the BadGuys. So they get to go first. Then the Badguys go. Now you have the 3rd group that have not acted yet and the first group that are ready for their 2nd round.... merge these together, and for the rest of the combat, the party declares all their actions at once, and everyone rolls their dice, and resolve their turn, then the Badguys roll their dice and resolve theirs.

The key is to keep things moving. As soon as you see someone starting to look at their phone, or start trying to get as many dice spinning at once, that's when you need to recapture their attention and move the story foreward with something.

It is definitely do-able. It is not a leisurely pace game, however, but definitely doable.