8 player table top advice

[jelie]

A group of my friends decided they wanted to play D&D so went out and bought a set of core rule book (4e). I found out about their attempts and offered my assistance by DMing for them. None of them have any experience. I have never DMed before, but I believe I know enough I would do a decent job.

The issue is that the table will have 9 seats around it (8 players, 1 DM). New DM, new players, HUGE party. This is set up to either be a hilarious success or a catastrophe. I need a bit of advice on this one.

Things I need:
-Help with a plot line. Where can I bring such a big group that will be fun for all. They will probably want more of a hack and slash kinda game, but just normal encounters will not be able to keep such a large group occupied. Too much down time for individuals.
-Help with plot line. Seriously, where do I put these guys? Just a general dungeon crawl? Something fancier? I don't want to make it too complex on myself, but at the same time I dont want it to be boring. And it has to be wide open, a tight dungeon is no place for a party of 8.
-Any tips you have. If you have any advice at all, let me hear it. I could use it. I am already going to work on some basic rule twists to speed up encounters, but the more advice the merrier.

Things I am already doing:
-Limit turn time. Giving them only 1 or 2 minutes to finish their turn will force them to know in advance what they plan on doing and will keep the game from hanging too long during a fight.
-Party initiative. Adapting something I have encountered on DnDOG to the table top. Average initiative roll of monsters vs average initiative roll of players and they go in groups. I will go clockwise around the table, a player can postpone his or her turn until later in the party turn if they really must. Eliminates fumbling around with initiative orders. New players wont know enough yet to take advantage of this change in initiative order.
-Pit players against each other. Encounters are too linear to keep players constantly involved. More role playing would work a bit better, but I know these guys, and they are more of the hack and slash crew. If I split the group up into two group and give half of them a secret objective to work together to undermine the group and steal the treasure for themselves, they will be passing notes back and forth all game and during their 'downtime' will have things to occupy themselves with. Better yet. Make the group into two secret parties each set out for their own objectives so they all think they are undermining the unaware other half of the party. Would be fun to see them turn on each other during/after the last encounter and duke it out.

[WoLT]

For starters see the guides in my signature, particularly the Player Guide and GM Guide. That will get your GM skills up pretty quickly. They designed for PBP, but much of what is there translates directly to tabletop.

After that I would say don't run 9 people if you can help it. If you can't, sure, but if you can avoid it get your parties to 4-5 people per game, otherwise it's going to become unruly.

Ban cell phones, computers, other media at the table that isn't specifically being used for the game (such as the GM's laptop to keep notes and spreadsheets for the adventure).

-Pit players against each other Generally I recommend against doing this, always. This can blow up in your face, a lot, especially if you're new. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying you probably shouldn't.

Splitting them up is fine, don't turn it into an us VS them or you may end up with OOC drama you really didn't bargain for.

Plot for this needs to be simple to hold the attention of everyone. Make it cliche and easy to swallow... save the princess, fight the orc brigands, kill marauding dire wolves for a bounty... KISS is your friend here, if you try and run some epic plot with 9 PCs in a tabletop setting you're begging for disaster. Again, it's not to say that it's impossible, but this is your first try, so make the plot easy to follow so you can instead focus on making the game fun.

As far as the setting goes, use the one you know best. If you play in Forgotten Realms, use that, if you like home brew, draft something up, if you prefer dragonlance, go there, but go with what you know, don't try and make this any more difficult than it already is.

To be honest, get yourself a nice, dumb free, pregen adventure. Read it and run it, and use your creative talents to make the game fun and interesting rather than blowing your wad on trying to make something awesome that's going to fall flat. Use pregens as long as you can get away with it and here's why:

The stuff in the guides you will learn is generally personified in well written, pre published adventures and seeing that structure enough times in action will help give you better understanding of how to implement the tools you'll get from the guides, even if by only serving as a bad example.

Using a pregen will also help you avoid over or under preparing and also giving your level 1 PCs too much sandbox and not enough railroad.

Experienced players like options, new players get confused by them. After about 2-3 pregens you'll be ready to start building a campaign around what has already occurred.

If you have more questions, just ask.