player limit

[Draeus]

Hi folks!

I apologise if this is already on the forums, but i cannot access the search facility from my phone.

What is the maximum number of players you can have connected at one time?

[phantomwhale]

As many as your bandwidth can handle. More likely to be your mental bandwidth than your actual internet bandwidth though ! I've had 7-8 connected without any problems - which is more players than I can handle in all honesty.

[VenomousFiligree]

I believe doswelk has pictorial evidence of the most players in an FG session... :)

[Draeus]

Cheers folks!

[Valarian]

Practical limit is around 4 to 6 players. The software can handle more if the bandwidth is okay, but I'm not sure I can :)

[Draeus]

I was talking about software limit and I suppose bandwidth. Mine isn't the best in the world. My current groups are 6 & 5.

I think the maximum I have ran for is 52 on a special event day where 9 groups merged into one. It was awesome fun. But very chaotic. I owned a rpg shop at the time and opened it after hours and turned it into a mock inn where every one was meeting.

[Griogre]

There is no limit on the number of connections imposed by the software. The practical limit will be based on the "up" bandwidth of the server. In a case like you outlined: 9 separate groups playing, merged into one big one - You would most likely be better off just setting up a one connection for each *group* and have that group "hot seat" on that connection. That would keep the number of connections reasonable. The FG client can handle multiple characters run by one player or in this case the entire group.

From an admin point of view it would be a lot simpler as well to just set up 9 computers instead of 52 as well.

Practically speaking, though, if you wanted to do a monster mash like event with such a large number of players you might be even better off with having co-DMs run a subset of the groups.

[Trenloe]

I was talking about software limit and I suppose bandwidth. Mine isn't the best in the world. My current groups are 6 & 5.
I've been running 6 player Pathfinder Society games over a basic ADSL connection (1.5Mbps down, 896Kbps upload) and I haven't had any issues.

[Griogre]

As Trenloe says you can easily handle 5-6 as long as you keep your image (map) file sizes small. Transferring images usually suck the most bandwidth with FG.

The biggest bandwidth hog after that is audio. If you use voice and don't have a dedicated voice server then have a player run the voice server for you. You can also use something like RaidCall or GSC which are free and offload a lot of the bandwidth usage to their connections and not yours.

[Dracones]

Can you still export everything into a module and have players pre-download that from a webshare? That way when you share out maps and tokens they pull from local instead of your system?

[Trenloe]

Can you still export everything into a module and have players pre-download that from a webshare? That way when you share out maps and tokens they pull from local instead of your system?
You can make a copy of the player cache and send that to the players before the first game - this can make a big difference in initial connection/download time and can get "common" modules to the players better (which can include player tokens).

However, to the best of my knowledge, GM maps and host tokens can't be shared this way as the modules are set to "host". I could be wrong - I haven't done any testing with sharing maps etc. to a localhost player connection and then unsharing them and seeing if they are still available in the player campaign cache so that when the GM shares them in the actual game they are referenced by the players locally in the campaign cache.

[Griogre]

Can you still export everything into a module and have players pre-download that from a webshare? That way when you share out maps and tokens they pull from local instead of your system?
Yes, as far as I know. There have been a number of changes to FG though. Tokens are now cached so you don't need to worry about making modules with them in them as much. Other than that I think the rest is still current: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7585&highlight=Hosting+Dialup

Trenloe's cache technique works as well, especially if you use dropbox or something. The only problem with the player cache idea is it trashes hot keys.