Poll: What is your ideal fight size?

[Steve Jackson]

I think of 3 on 3 or 4 on 4 as a good size for demos - allows tactical richness but moves quickly.

Battles in a campaign can include more figures without seeming to slow down, because all the characters are familiar and each player has an emotional investment in the combat and the performance of the figures.

[Shostak]

Wizard battles between players familiar with the game are far more interesting with three or four on each side than are on-on-one matches. You get to use a larger range of spells and strategy becomes more of a factor.

[Nils_Lindeberg]

It's not the size it is the timing. I usually play campaigns so it is mostly about drama, tension, what fits the story and how much we have left of the gaming evening time wise. But sometimes you create an adventure around a key scene or battle, and then everything else leads up to that. But over all, I would rather have a few memorable battles than a bunch of smaller ones.

But for a straight up battle, maybe two characters per player and a henchman or two that can be taken over by a player if they are out of characters to play.

[ak_aramis]

I want to be able to handle PCs × 4 figures, plus mounts.

[Skarg]

The experience of the players (especially the GM, if there is one) makes a huge difference.

When I was first learning Melee, I was quite fascinated by one-on-one arena combat, for quite a while.

The more I had memorized and internalized the game system, the less interesting smaller fights were, and the more quickly I could resolve combat, especially as a GM resolving combat between NPCs. Then I started wanting to run larger battles.

[bluekitsune13]

I'd like to have TFT sit somewhere between man to man, to a larger skirmish sized game. I want to use TFT as an alternative to larger mass battle wargames like Warhammer. Instead of buying 4 packs of 10 soldiers to make a unit of 40, I'd rather just buy the one pack and use them. Scaling up the game does cause some issues though. Keeping track of all the complexity can be hard.

[afschell]

Those that let me "crush my enemies, drive them before me, and hear the lamentation of their women."

Seriously, I try to scale the combats so that there are about 1d6 more opponents than the PCs and that they (the opponents) are slightly weaker individually, but not much. If the bad guys are IQ 9 or more (on average) then they play smart. Otherwise, they may just as likely charge into the pike axes as not.