I have a pretty sizeable group of friends who like to hang out and play RPGs together. We’ve done a handful of games, ranging from crunchy stuff through rules-lite games. But one common theme is that our games can go pretty slow. We’re a group of 7 most of the time, which means 6 players + 1 GM, which is can make stuff very slow. Iterations of D&D all suffer from this, and it gets really bad in games like Dark Heresey for us. But even tropey, free-form games like Blades in the Dark and most stuff on the Apocalypse engine feel sluggish, since they’re so tightly based on the Player-GM feedback cycle.
The only types of games that I’ve found play quickly with a large group are the light, beer & pretzels games like Everyone Is John, Paranoia, but those don’t extend well beyond 1 session. I also like the higher-stakes, longer-form RPGs where the players can shape the world at scale.
Are there games that can support both longer-term campaigns AND large groups, or am I looking for the impossible here?
Honestly, I do think early D&D games kinda show the way to some extent. Large groups made sense when games were games were more procedural, with a designated map-maker, a designated “caller” who settled on final decisions, a designated inventory tracker. Combat that makes people want to avoid it more often than not, morale rolls. The very episodic nature of adventuring vs. modern campaigns where every session is highly coupled probably helped too.
I think early first-person dungeon crawlers and JRPGs are closer to how “serious” AD&D groups actually ran things. Players literally glued to the hip and doing something more like piloting a multi-person mech than all trying to run around doing their own thing.