[pmulcahy11b]

I've always found, both as a GM and a player, that games work best when each player has one character. Sometimes, when you don't have many players, one or more of the players has to play more than one PC; inevitably, the player concentrates on one character and the rest become "throwaways," the ones who do the really dangerous and deadly things and enable the player to protect his favorite PC. So size of a character group really depends on how many player you have on hand, perhaps rounded out by some GM-controlled NPCs, to give the group additional firepower or with the skills the group needs but no player had the foresight to choose.

But...it can go too far the other way too. Have you ever played at a general, open game at something like a convention? This is composed of 1-3 (usually harried) GMs and, in one game I played in at Texacon, 32 players with one player each. It's wild, it's crazy, jokes fly fast and thick, and everyone is having fun (except possibly the GMs). But it can take 10 minutes of real time to open a door that in real life would take a 2-second kick. One 10-minute firefight took 3 hours. It's like playing the old SPI game Airwar; fun every so often, but it would get old fast if you played once or twice every week. Fun to play in every so often, ultimately, a group that large is unmanageable and unsustainable in the long term.