To Be Resolved

A Quick Analysis of Party Size in His Majesty the Worm

Like most games, one of the first questions asked about running His Majesty the Worm is, "what's the right party size for this game?" Answers tend to be pretty consistent. 2 is a little intense, 3-4 is great, 5 is rock solid but different, and 6+ is verging on a different sort of game. Most folks that chat about the game do not brave a larger party than 6. The way I describe it is that a party of 2-4 has subsistence-focused gameplay and a party of 5-6 gets to have slightly more heroic gameplay. My hypothesis is that this is due to the interaction of the different inventory/status subsystems and that they scale non-linearly with party size, so I'm going to take a crack at where that might come from and maybe we'll have some insight by the end of this.

Bonds vs Wounds, Conditions and Resolve

The most obvious scalar as the party grows or shrinks is the constellation of bonds between players. Each player has a bond with each other player, so for a party size N there are (N-1) Bonds on each character sheet. This means that a party that is intentionally playing out all of their bonds has a pool of N*(N-1) burned bonds at their disposal for the sake of recovering from Wounds, Afflictions, and restoring Resolve. Granted, those burned Bonds are not fungible between players so it's a little bit disingenuous to think about it this way, but we have at least one resource that is scaling with N^2. In more practical terms, each player has access to a much more complete recovery per Camp Phase as the party becomes larger - a party of 3 can cumulatively recover 6 Wounds while a party of 5 can cumulatively recover 20 Wounds.

Wounds/Conditions, on the other end, do scale linearly with party size. Each player character can, by default (we are ignoring armor notches for a moment), take three Wounds to their Conditions and two Wounds to their mastered Talents. This means 5 Wounds per player and 4 Resolve per player. Large parties can't fully recover resources from the brink of death every camp phase, but boy howdy they can take a better chunk out of their Wounds than a small party can. This means that Wounds and Afflictions are the most effective tax/pacing mechanism for a large party's attrition over time, especially if larger parties are capable of scavenging for Rations and Firewood.

Inventory Slots

Each player has an identically-sized backpack, so logically inventory size scales fairly linearly with party size. The less-intuitive effects are treasure and bulky items. Each player character usually ends up determining their sort of minimum viable set of items that they need to express their character identity and to safely finish a delve, so the space that is left over ends up available for treasure. Treasure occupies inventory space, so the space available for treasure scales with the number of players. Conversely, the cost of upkeep for a party is static per-player, so the entire party needs more treasure in order for characters to achieve their desired upkeep. Put a pin in this idea for later.

Bulky items, on the other hand, occupy belt slots which are in much more stringent supply than pack slots. It's still 4 belt slots per character, but they tend to compete with armor. If a small party wants to have a tanky armored character, then they have less cumulative belt space for the highly-functional shovels, picks, and tents that change the ability of the party to interact with the physicality of the dungeon.

Rations, Bedrolls, and Firewood

I have these two items combined because they represent sort of the opposing ends of the scalability of the camp phase. Each party member must consume one ration per camp phase, so there is no economy of scale as the party grows. That is…as long as no party members hunt and fish for more Rations while in the dungeon. For players to gain the full benefit of a Camp Phase, however, they need 2 of 3 between a campfire, a tent, and a bedroll. The way I run the game, that means that the whole party only needs one bundle of firewood per Camp Phase, so this strongly benefits a large party.

Light Sources

If the party runs out of light in HMTW, they are likely to be eaten by a grue. You hate to see it! However, the contrapositive of that statement is that a party with at least one light source can stave off the grue…for now. The main limiting factor on this is that, during the Crawl phase, any detail-oriented or vision-based actions taken while not directly assisted by a torchbearer are made with disfavor. This is typically not invoked during the Challenge phase, but it's a good lever to fiddle with if you feel like your big party is walking all over your tasks. This correlates with the inventory as well - Candles are impoverished, you can stuff your pockets with them if you really need to haul ass out of the dungeon.

This is also a good time to talk about action economy during the Crawl Phase. Each character can take an action during a Watch, which means a large group can very quickly stake out a room or hop to some tasks. This makes sense in fiction, but it's why it is good to be a bit of a hardass about needing close light for detailed work on the Crawl.

Action Economy and Damage Output (combat)

This is an interesting one. Each player only has four cards in hand at the beginning of the round, and only three of those can be used for actions. So in theory, action economy should scale linearly with party size. The only real nonlinear wrinkle here is that, as the party grows, it's more likely that at least one player is Path of Cups and can grant additional cards with High Chant. This still only affects action economy for, like, one round though so it is not gamebreaking.

The biggest factor here is more that there are more sacks of hit points who have a greater capacity to recover between combats, so the group of monsters have to really gang up on a small number of players or ineffectually split damage output. This is an old problem in turn-based tabletop games and, as always, means that if your monsters don't have tools for crowd control or AOE damage then they are going to wear down much more quickly when faced with a large party. The corollary, however, is that monsters who intentionally target torchbearers become far more valuable if the entire table is counting on one single pack mule!

Talents and Party Comp

Just in general, a big party made of thoughtful players is going to have some double-ups on Paths, which means a better diversity of special abilities. Party composition is always an important consideration in group games, and the better coverage you have the more problems you can deal with. Ultimately, most talents are situational and/or cost a resource to invoke so this isn't a major problem in my eyes. Experience is also doled out fairly equally between players so you don't necessarily risk issues of unreasonable vertical progression as the group size changes.

Parties of 2-3 just cannot fulfill all of the roles that a larger party can, so they have to be more thoughtful about problem solving. Ideally your problems in your dungeon are interesting enough that they still provide some challenge for larger parties, but the only way to mitigate this if you wanted to would be to impose restrictions on path selection or make certain types of items more expensive. I think this is a lever I wouldn't touch.

But speaking of touching levers…

Closing Thoughts and Possible Tweaks

I think we have covered my different hunches about why His Majesty the Worm feels different as the size of your party grows and shrinks. Smaller parties have to play more carefully in a subsistence mode because they can carry less gear, they can carry less treasure, a disproportionate amount of their hand and belt economy are taken up by essentials, and they recover much more slowly from Wounds and Resolve than a large party does. So here are my recommendations if you want to make smaller parties a little more heroic and bigger parties a little grubbier.

Making a Party of 2-3 More Heroic

  1. More Bonds. Allow players to have 2 Bonds with one another and/or a Bond with the "Narrator"/GM
  2. Cheaper Armor. Allow Armor to take up 1 fewer belt slot
  3. Cheaper Bulky Items. Either make Bulky items 1 slot or allow them to be stored in the pack

These tweaks relax constraints for small parties and let them take on slightly different challenges than they can RAW without changing the action economy or procedures.

Making a party of 5-6 Scrappier

  1. Be more liberal with Afflictions. Afflictions are an extremely efficient way to make the Underworld feel shitty and to consume Bonds without directly penalizing the Bond mechanic or roleplay
  2. Stricter adjudication of Bonds - I tend to be pretty flexible on allowing Bonds to charge, but tightening up the conditions is a reasonable throttle on recovery
  3. Make Upkeep more expensive when the party is larger. Apply a logistics fee to housing all of these vagabonds. They have more spare slots in their inventory for treasure, so make them use it!
  4. Stricter penalties for Watch actions taken in dim light. Nudge more players into torchbearing roles as a tax on hand economy
  5. Focus fire on torchbearers in combat. Remind players that their lives depend on protecting whomever is holding light
  6. Provide more monsters crowd control effects and Aoe damage in order to spread Wounds more efficiently

Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!