Best # of players? How to play with small groups?

[Celebril]

There are 8 players in the campaign I am running. Since we are all friends and have been playing together for years everything tends to go smoothly.

Edit:
My biggest problem with 8 players is finding enough space. I own a Victorian home and even my dinning room is kind of cramped with that many people.

[zedturtle]

I have seven currently in my PbP game, it seems to generally be working.

[Rocmistro]

I have seven currently in my PbP game, it seems to generally be working.

But that's only because Zed is a frekkin' dynamo of a loremaster!

[Valarian]

I'd say that 3 is the minimum for The One Ring. The game works well with large groups. I've had 7 to 8 players in an online game (Fantasy Grounds) and this has worked. Usually, I'd be loathe to have any more than 5 players in a game due to the complexities involved in running a large group.

[Andrew]

I'm running a campaign with only 2 players at the moment, and actually it's working just fine.

They do have to spend Hope occasionally to "fill in" during a Journey, but that's only been once so far I think. And I have to watch the number of adversaries during a fight, but so far so good.

[Rocmistro]

With only 2 players though, I imagine they are each other's fellowship focus, and thus so much of the hope they use should go into the source of inspiration/source of hope mechanic. I imagine they are a couple of hope recycling homies, as well they should be. I imagine their bond would be crazy strong under those circumstances.

[Andrew]

Yes, but it's a bitch when one of them gets wounded.

[Otaku-sempai]

We've suffered from a scarcity of players for our AD&D game. Our players often choose to play more than one PC at the same time (usually not more than two).

[Hermes Serpent]

I started one company with three players as we were all in the early stages of learning the rules and, seeing the Travel roles, decided that the company should be made up of two characters for each player. As we progressed and I got more comfortable with the rules I had one hero dropped by each player with the proviso that they could swap their hero back if they decided they preferred the other one.

In another game I had players want to swap out heroes or Rewards/Qualities as they found that they didn't work as they expected. being as it was the first adventuring phase I had no issues with this and made some adjustments so some heroes didn't get as much XP as they weren't in some sessions.

[Elmoth]

We have a troupe of 5 players, so 4 official `players + LM. However, most sessions are run with 3 characters/players since one of us tends to fail for one reason or another. Works OK, but I and the other Loremaster tend to downgrade the number of opponents slightly if this is the case. It works well for us.