9 Player DCC with Player Roles: Caller, Mapper, Quartermaster, Time-tracker
I recently ran a 5-hour session of Operation Unfathomable with 9 players, and one of the key things that helped everyone at the table – especially me – stay engaged and organized was that I had four players help me run the game. Before the game I identified four sets of information and decisions that I wanted to offboard from me, and then I asked folks ahead of time who could help me. It was easy to setup and once everyone was engaged it worked like a charm.
I’ll describe each of these roles, and will finish by talking through what it means to have responsible players that you can trust.
Caller
Back in the early days of OD&D/AD&D, having a party of 6+ players was the norm. The legends speak of 8, 10, 12 or more players around the table for the early games, and I’ve certainly played in larger games back in the early ‘80s. There just weren’t enough DMs (still a problem today, though not as severe) and getting invited to sit at a game – any game – was a thrill, no matter the party size.
In order to maintain the chaos of decision-making during non-combat turns (the 10 minute long ones, more on that below), one player is designated the Caller. I’m still digging through the AD&D books to find a citation, but the Caller is the player responsible for holding the party’s collective decision making process for the DM. This is the first time I’ve ever run a game with a Caller, and while I only needed it a few times, when I did it was beautiful.
The Caller’s job is to hold the answer to the question “what are you doing now?” for the entire party, gaining consensus (or not) and anointed by the DM as the single point for an answer. My friend Dan is a Sr Director at a large tech company and so he was an easy pick for this role.
I only used him a few times – a key example is when the party emerged from the entry side tunnel (we’re underground) and I asked “do you go left or right?” The group took a good five minutes to discuss, and then slowly waded into a confused back and forth that these large group decisions often go. So then I pointed to Dan and said, “Well?”
He stopped the discussion, made a decision, and checked back in with the group (“everybody okay if we go right?”), got a collective shrug of acceptance, then told me, “we go right.” And that was it.
There is an important psychological moment with agency and decision consensus that the group went through, but it took Dan’s energy and focus to hold the group in that moment, and I didn’t have to do anything. Furthermore, it wasn’t me as the DM holding the decision, it was the party who did it, which also builds a greater sense of buy-in and agency. We didn’t need it often – most of the turns I gave people the opportunity to do their own thing – but when we did, it worked extremely well. I’m all in with the Caller.
Mapper
There was a mix-up at the start when I asked the second Dan to bring a battle mat and he only brought smaller folio-sized combat maps. I had envisioned mapping the tunnels in a large-scale – not necessarily to scale, with one square equaling 20 feet – but putting the large map out in front so everyone could see it. But it all worked out in the end.
Rob heartily volunteered for the role of Mapper, and his job was to draw a map that showed the dungeon with any notes of encounters. This was particularly important because we are only playing once a year, so there needs to be continuity for the group to pick up in 2025. Rob did great.
We agreed on a few key ideas as we started:
- 20 foot squares
- There are no cardinal directions (as we’re underground) but for the sake of simplicity, the top of the map is north
- If Rob needed clarification, he could hold up the map and ask “like this?” and that while I would not correct every single detail, I would make sure he has the overall structure correct.
And that’s how it worked. Like the Caller, we didn’t need it until we needed it. He checked in a few times, but for most of the game he was sitting at the end of the table, creating a map of the dungeon and quite enjoying himself. A few times he helped steer the group back on course, a few times he asked if he had it right, and now there’s a map of what they’ve explored so far. Absolutely easier than what I had in my head when I started.
Quartermaster
Again, I was thinking about getting decisions and tracking off my plate and onto a player’s, I asked Dan2 (not the Caller) to manage the group’s inventory. I did this for three reasons:
- The campaign starts with the PCs getting a bunch of magic items that I didn’t want to manage myself.
- I wanted someone to track food and ammunition (more on this below).
- And there would be treasure and other items the group came across to track.
Moving the consensus building from me to a player was again so helpful. When the party arrived at the start of the dungeon, I gave Dan2 an index card with a list of 10+ magic items, and then he went around the table and figured out who got what. While he did this I continued to prep and think about where the first encounter would be.
Also, I don’t really like tracking individual rations and ammunition, and like to use the One Year Engine’s resource-tracking die mechanic (they didn’t need torches because the dungeon is lit by phosphorescent fungi). Basically, your resource (eg rations) start at a d20 value. Then, whenever you eat (let’s say daily) you roll that resource die, and if you get a 1 or 2, it drops down to the next die in the chain (usually d12 down from d20 but we’re playing DCC and I haven’t decided where the d14 and d16 fit it, lol). Then you repeat until you reach d4, when if you roll a 1/2 you are out of that resource.
We did it for ammunition for the one crossbow in the group (no bows strangely) so it wasn’t used a lot, but Dan2 just rolled a couple times and didn’t get a 1 or 2, so ammunition stayed at the d20. Much easier than tracking individual shots, and really great to have this all managed by someone not me.
Time-tracker
This final piece was the one I wasn’t sure about, and I waffled up until that morning, then just decided to go for it. I’ve not run a large scale dungeon crawl in a while, and 9 players or not, I don’t have a go-to framework for managing the action economy while exploring. After some research and discussions with a friend, I just went simple and built the following rules:
- It takes 10 minutes to explore a 20’ square and gain the core information.
- Any other exploring or resting will take another 10 minutes.
- 60 minutes to an hour, etc.
The key for tracking time is used for:
- Tracking daily rations usage
- Tracking spell and other underworld and Chaos effects
- Understanding overall time spent for in-game context
It was fascinating to discover at the end of five-hours in actual time that we had spent five hours in-game. The ebb and flow of 10 minute exploration rounds versus the few intense encounters centered on the large combat (which only took 30 minutes in game but a whole hour in real time) still ended up with a very similar time-frame.
Glenn gladly took up this role, and he pressed me a couple times to be clear in how much time had passed. The first few times I had to think about it, but we got into a groove and by the end, I was comfortable judging whether or not to tick off another 10 minutes. He created his own tracker on a piece of graph paper, and again, was happy ticking time away with almost no inputs or management from me. So good.
On Players
The key thread through all of these roles is that I had players who easily jumped into their responsibilities with almost no prodding or management by me. These are all good friends of mine, and I’ve known most of them for decades, so there’s a level of trust and communication that already exists. I’m thankful for their help, and I recognize that a less mature table (maybe comprised of strangers at con) may not be as easy and effective as mine was.
One would hope that sitting down with a larger group at a convention, or even at an annual gaming weekend of friends like mine, would naturally bring the engagement needed to pull this off. I could write a whole blog post on managing people’s expectations and what communication skills are needed to pull this off, but that will be for another day.
For now I’ll leave saying that these roles not only helped the party function and gave the players more agency – they made the game more fun for me as the DM. It’s a lot of work managing a dungeon crawl, never mind one with 9 players only run once a year. Getting help in this way significantly improved my enjoyment of the game, took many decisions burdens off my mind, and let me focus on the story and encounter flow.
I heartily recommend these roles for larger groups, and feel like the whole thing is possible with these shared responsibilities. I hope you get a chance to try them some day.