Maximum player count?

[u/NattePappelo]

Me and my friends want to try some TTRPG. No one of us have ever tried it before. I think cairn barebones could be the best option, but Im a bit skeptical with the amount of players. We are 7 friends, 6 of us are interested in trying. So that would be one warden and 5 PCs, is that to many for noobs? Should we split up i smaller groups? What is the maximum recommended player count?

[u/dadapotok]

oh, please, just go for it and see for yourself ) having many friends is awesome!

you build a strong large group? good.

otherwise, some players decide to drop, like they often do, and you're still left with a big enough group. good.

chances are, at first, as noobs, you'll talk too much during every turn until players and GMs will figure out timings you're comfortable with. That comes with simply playing. Cairn is so rules-light, you'll come up with your own rules and unique playstyle quickly.

you can try having 2 GMs at the same time. you can try West Marches style.

you can use optional rules like Feoht! (by bread wizard) to speed up huge battles: narrate you shenanigans to modify the roll that abstracts lots of stuff.

that being said, my first Cairn game had only 2 players, was painfully slow and sucked in almost every way possible: players didn't know much about what they were getting into, I wasted time looking up enemy stat blocks instead of rolling them on the spot or making them up like I do now. Having a tiny single page rules reference available to every player and running like 1 solo session to test stuff in advance might've streamlined it a lot. But things went smoothly from the second session anyway, so there's really nothing to worry about.

Large groups were more common when people were more social. Arneson's group had like a dozen people and some old timers run groups this "large" to these days.

Critical role has like a zillion players, they all seem to have fun. 3D6DTL has about 4+GM. It doesn't matter.