D&D General Player Numbers - The Sweet Spot?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Four is perfect for me, depending on the players.

My youngest player is 8 and doesn't enjoy waiting around, so she needs the smallest possible group to give her more agency and screen time.

I also DM some old fogeys who are happy to sit back with their beer and snacks and watch until it's time to unleash a fireball, or the equivalent.

 

[Hussar]

I've always found that 5 is our sweet spot. It means that if someone can't make it that week, no worries, they just fade to the background, get run as an NPC and we truck right on. 4 means that being a player down hurts and often means that the game limps forward because that fourth person is actually kinda needed for whatever is going on at the moment.

The unfortunate thing, IME, is that our group has a cursed 5th seat. It's brutal. No matter what, that 5th seat seems to have an ejection button. We keep the same (or roughly the same) group of 4 for ages, but that 5th seat winds up being a carousel of players. It's already struck in my Candlekeep game. Got the game going with a nice group of 5, one adventure in, real life strikes and the 5th player goes down. We're on 5th player Mark II now and we'll see how long that lasts. :'(

 

[Scott Christian]

I've read of parties of 8 or 9 players, which sounds like an absolute nightmare to me.

It can be a lot of fun. But, it is rough. Especially combat at any level above four.

 

[jasper]

6 players. Has enough so if one person can't make it, it does not drag down the game. If all make it and are in the groove, they play with each other and help build the experience.

 

[cbwjm]

4-6 I've always found since I started playing to be the right number of players. Less than 4 and I feel like they don't have enough players for a decent adventure, more than 6 becomes a bit unwieldy. I have run with less or more in the past though and with less players you can add in more PCs per player if needed, but I still feel it works best with at least 4 players.

 

[J.Quondam]

None!
I can't have anyone upstaging my favorite DMPCs.

 

[Campbell]

I'll run games for 3-5 players. For other more character focused games that leans more to 3, but I'm willing to do up to 4. For more group focused games it leans to 4, but I'm willing to do up to 5. I take continuity pretty seriously. Unless the game's structure is built to account for missing players I'll generally do something else if a player is missing.

 

[Laurefindel]

Three-player games are my absolute favourite.

The game is fast, the DM has plenty of opportunities to spotlight the players, RP with three characters is fun and intimate (as in the characters get to know one another more intimately, you dirty mind you!), and action and RP don’t get in the way of one another.

it’s easier to get the group together, and faster play allows for shorter sessions (which with kids and spouses, and work and life, becomes necessary).

 

[ccs]

As the DM I generally prefer 4-5.
• Because at 3 or lower if someone can't make it you run into canceling games, nerfed encounters, or encounters that are beyond the capabilities of the PCs who are present.
• Because in my xp things bog down exponentially at 6+.
• It does depend alot though on who that 6th + is though....

As a player? 4-5 players. Reasons? See above reasons.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

4 players, but 5 or 6 characters.

I can go with 3 or 5 players easily, and I ran 6 once without a problem. How well players are able to invest and stay focused is huge. If everyone is present and accounted for mentally the whole time, 6 is great fun--but that can be difficult to get consistently with online play, even with players heavily invested in their character and the campaign. The temptation to zone out (or more likely multi-task) when it won't be your turn for a bit and no one can see you is too much.

But as far as characters go I'm never satisfied with a D&D party of less than 5 characters (outside of a short adventure), because it rarely manages to cover enough of the bases for that D&D experience for me. Sure, it would be unwieldy to have one each of all 12 classes, but by golly would I like to feel like all the main conceptual categories are covered.

So that means I want to see one of each of these categories (parentheticals only half fill a role).
1) Full arcanist: Wizard, Sorcerer, (Warlock)
2) Holy Person: Cleric, (Druid, Paladin)
3) Front Line Warrior (You want at least 1.5 of these): Fighter, Ranger, Paladin, Barbarian, (Others)
4) Rogue (I know you don't need a Rogue for locks and traps, but it just feels wrong not to have one)
5) Wilderness Adept: Druid, Ranger, (Barbarian)
6) Social Adept: Bard, Rogue, (Other)
7) Prepared Full Caster: Cleric, Druid, Wizard

Even though there are multiple classes that can fill each role (and some creative ways of leveraging other classes or subclasses), usually about the only times it feels to me like one character is fully filling two roles is with Prepared Full Caster, or social Rogue.

More often, you can end up with characters that can fill 1.5 roles, and stick them together to cover the bases. But the more characters there are, the easier it is to have room for characters that are extra/supplemental, like Monks or Warlocks.

There are many ways to cover everything with a 6 character setup. Here's a classic example:

Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard, Ranger, Bard

Here's the two most efficient 4-character setups I could think of off the top of my head (you need the Druid, Cleric, or Rogue built as a partial front line warrior), and there aren't many more ways to pull it off with only 4:

Paladin, Druid, Rogue, Wizard
Ranger, Cleric, Rogue, Sorcerer

The less characters I have, the more limited the ways to fill all the categories, and the less room for characters who don't.

Here's the setup of our current 5 characters party:

Fighter, Rogue (Swashbuckler), Warlock (Blade), Bard, Warrior-Mage (custom class: most of Wizard capability, and decent backup front line warrior--think Bladesinger but shifted just slightly from wizard towards martial).

Here's how it fits.
1) Full arcanist: Warrior-Mage, (Warlock)
2) Holy Person: --
3) Front Line Warrior: Fighter (Warlock, Rogue, Warrior-Mage)
4) Rogue
5) Wilderness Adept: --
6) Social Adept: Bard, Rogue
7) Prepared Full Caster: Warrior-Mage

So you can see that we're doing great in 3 and 6, and we have covered 1, 4, and 7, but we have failed to cover 2 and 5. Conceptually, the Warlock gets his pact from a deity and has Piety, so he's the closest thing to a holy person role. (But his patron is CE in a good-leaning party, so that makes our sole divine connection pretty non-standard). For the Wilderness role, the Bard has Nature and the Warrior-Mage has Survival, and that just doesn't feel like it thematically totally fills the role. And something I learned after many sessions of play, is that ideally we'd want a second prepared caster (could be a half caster, so Paladin or Artificer would work) to feel like it's totally checking that box. Casters with a limited list of known spells just feel like they are less castery in D&D.

The party is fun and it works, but Turn Undead would sure be handy, in addition to the thematic under-representations.

Now, this isn't to say that every game needs to check all if those boxes. I sometimes like to run theme adventures (10-15 session mini-campaigns) where everyone plays classes with the same theme, or even the same class. Our Questing Knights adventure had knights of the following classes: Fighter (Battle Master, because there wasn't Cavalier yet), Paladin (Devotion), Cleric (War), and Ranger (Hunter). With only 4 characters, no one got to play the Valor Bard knight idea, or a non-knight Wizard or Cleric (Knowledge) as a wise companion role. I'm planning to run a martial arts theme adventures where everyone plays a Monk, chosen from a list of most subclasses, plus possibly one companion who could be a Samurai, Cleric, or Monk (Way of Shadows (Ninja) or Kensei). Getting to see the differences in styles amongst the different subclasses is part of the theme, and even if we leave out the Tasha's Monks that I don't like, that's still 5 subclasses to potentially be available, and each party member less than 6 means we don't get to see one of them.

So basically, it is difficult to balance covering enough bases for maximum D&D fun without making the group potentially unwieldy.