Into the Unknown: 7 Player Game

So, these past few weeks have been an experience. I’ve been running a game for 7 players, which is exactly one more than the recommended maximum is. With that in mind, I figured I should throw some observations out to see if other people have different perspectives on how the game balance starts to shift. I have been sticking to 7 elements per scene, as the book recommends.

Scene Element Stuff:

First, minion groups. In most cases, it only really takes one hero with good Area Of Effect(AOE) in the Green or Yellow to shred through a minion group. This becomes especially true, as in a group of 7 heroes, the odds of someone having AOE means that adding one extra minion to the group barely makes a difference.

Second, leiutenant groups. Lieutenants are almost always more threatening individually than minions, and that holds true even moreso here. Lieutenant groups are more important if you want to have difficult enemies, since they can typically engage multiple heroes simoutaneously without going down.

Third, challenges. Adding a 7th hero basically allows the group to divide in two fully effective teams, so having just a single challenge present won’t pose a meaningful difficulty to confront in the story. In addition, the presence of more heroes ensures that any individual twist (minor, or major) has significantly less weight than it would otherwise. With seven heroes, Hinders from twists are quite often responded to by the hero changing their focus to dealing with something with hit points.

Villain Stuff:

We all know that damage reduction is pretty good, but it’s worth pointing out just how good it is. With seven heroes, your villain will routinely be preventing three or four times the actual value of their damage reduction from hitting them, making those abilities signifcantly more valuable. The same applies to actions that Defend against all Attacks until they act again.

Conversely, most defensive reactions decrease signifcantly in value. The ability to Defend against one big attack is great, but each additional hero can spend their time adding more bonuses or putting out more attacks that potentially warrant the use of the reaction. Effects that allow villains to narratively escape gain a great deal of value, since multi-turn plans become much more difficult to pull off when the villain smoke bombs away.

What do people think of the above? Am I horribly wrong? Did I just happen to stumble on things that anyone else saw by common sense?

I’m still trying to find a balance between challenges and minion/lieutenant groups myself for 7 heroes. It’s an ongoing struggle.

My group is 5, although most of my sessions have had an absence so I've esseentially had a group of 4. I'm just playing through the starter kit at the moment, and I've observed similar to the AoE that you mentioned:

There's been a couple of times that I added a bunch of minions to the scene from a twist thinking it would be medium difficulty for the players, and they just killed all of them before the minions even had a turn. I think I'm learning as a GM that minions are more of a nuisance than actually difficulty changing. Similarly, I've had my players express that fighting minions is kinda boring, which I don't blame them. When I write my own content, I'm going to scale the minions based on the AoE abilities as well as the number of players, instead of just the latter. One other idea to throw out there, maybe a minor twist could be limiting the impact of AoE abilities for a turn or something?

Something that my group has done (rotated through three of us GM'ing now) has been to be a little stricter about the concept of "nearby", as well as force our AOE-happy player to consider that abilities like Combustion only say "Targets", and your allied heroes can be at your mercy if not explicitly narratively isolating yourself from them in some way (which lends itself to great twists sometimes!)

Also, since we're pretty united in this being very collaborative, occasionally, if a player is trying to use a multi-target attack without first clarifying how they are doing it, we'll all have a short discussion about how "well, I'm totally in the way of you trying to attack Ray Manta, so I think I'd be one of your targets", etc. It definitely lends itself to some interesting scenarios!

I quickly learned that if I have a bunch of minions spawn in one place (like the Mother Spider-Bot laying eggs), the heroes with AoE attacks will spam that area and quickly wipe out the whole bunch, often before they get their first action. 

With a larger group, I'd be more worried about stacks of boosts and hinders letting heroes wipe out lieutenants and even villains. Combo a boost all allies power with a large group (especially if any of them are minion makers or have boosts of their own) and the heroes start wiping the floor with the bad guys. You can counter with a Hinder All from the villains, but then my heroes would say "Coach thanks Dr Evilface and flips the global hinder to a global boost." 

I've found that a good answer to that is passing to the environment to get the minions put into initiative, and then passing to the minions immediately to that they do something.

Surprisingly, my group hasn't been terribly boost or hinder happy. While they do have those options, they more often just opt to smash the Attack button over and over. Which is valid, and works pretty well against most villains who don't have gimmicks that give them extra survivability.

Note on that global hinder to global boost: The abilities from Wild Card/Gadgeteer/Red Zone Psychic only apply to a single Penalty. Since a multiple target Hinder actually applies a different Penalty to each of it's targets, the heroes would have to flip each of those penalties individually.