Thread: How many characters is too many?

I fully admit it. The stories that me and Caitlyn are writing, in total, has a HUGE cast! By the end, we must have like 30-40 something characters (although I'm probably off mark on this. I haven't been able to find the cast list file which bugs me)! Some of them are ones we already know, like Grovyle, Wigglytuff, Chatot, Darkrai, Rayquaza and such. Others are completely original characters, like Slowking, Lilly, Dean, Aisling, Woody and others. The 5th story arguably has the largest cast (it is a big world after all!) overall (and this is including major and minor characters).

Is there a limit you set when it comes to characters for you? At the end of the 4th story (the last chapter of it taking place at the end of the "timeline", with possible foreshadowing to the 5th one), we want to write a big epilogue that reveals the fates of all the characters we've written. Some have gotten married/are dating (Mike and Patrica, Randy and Lilly, Carl and Audrey, Deanna and Chip), some have gotten nice jobs (Ratso and Orochi are part of a spy organization, Jon eventually takes over Randys radio show when he retires), some have returned home where they belong (Harold is reunited with Herman, Woody goes back to the Pokemon World to Hoenn and becomes a professor, Timmy heads back to Guardia and lives with Sophia) and so on and so forth.

Some characters, such as the Marowak from Marowak Dojo, are actually given names and personalities. The Marowak? His name is Eldrian (take out the 'r' and switch the letters around and you get Daniel, which is his little brothers name), the older brother of identical twin Marowaks, and he runs the Dojo his grandpa left him. His little brother Danny? He is the Guildmaster of a certain spooky place that we've come to love to fear- now called Nightmare Town in this universe, it was once known as Lavender Town, the Noble Purple Town from R/B/Y/FR/LG. Nightmare Town, like Lavender, is- as described an Jack the Umbreon "full of lost spirits and hauntings" - but don't think it's all that bad. The ghosts there are nice and friendly (although they do like to prank you at times), and the town always has two events every year: their big fun Halloween party (which is almost always hosted by Danny and Jack), and their honoring the day the old Pokemon Tower was attacked (known as the "Rocket Massacre" to them) with the Marowak Festival (think the Summer Festival from the anime, except with dozens of Marowaks instead of one maiden) to pay their repects to the dead. Every year at the festival, seeing as there are always a few who haven't heard of it yet, Danny the Marowak recounts that horrible day when Team Rocket invaded... Daniel and Eldrian were just two of the orphaned Cubones after that day, but their parents still haunt the town, not wanting to pass on until they know for sure that both of their sons are safe.

Seems like an interesting concept with each character being important, but my main question is this: Do you think you can handle that many?

A popular trope that I read said something about both sides having equal ninjitsu, blah blah blah, but the point was, people get lost in crowds. Each paragraph you spend on one character, makes the rest of the characters begin to fade away. The more characters you have, the easier it is for the reader to confuse them, and eventually forget about some. That is the biggest flaw in having a large cast, but the greatest strength is the diversity. Eventually everyone will find somebody they like, someone they identify with, but do you think you can find the way to balance screen time for everyone?

An analogy I came up with on the spot is this. When training pokémon, if you focus on one guy, he eventually becomes amazingly high level right? Well what if you're training six evenly? they are all lower level if you trained for the same amount of time. Now for something ridiculous, try training 30 in the same time. If you do it evenly then they will all be amazingly low leveled compared to with just one. The reason is that the more you have, the less time they each get individually. Similarly, for the reader to make a bond with a character, they need to spend time with them individually, something which gets hard with a large cast. The two things you can change, though, are time and cast size. If you shrink the cast, you can focus on other characters more, or you can increase the time, meaning make the overall story much longer in order to give each character enough time individually. It's all up to you to pick which path to take.

You ever read "The Count of Monte Cristo?" That's about the limit of the number of characters I can personally keep track of (upwards of 40, although some are just disguises of other characters). That could just be because the names are French, but still.

Although, like Chaosj2 said, it's really up to how many you can handle. The important thing is to not skimp on the development of important characters merely because you have too many. There's a reason why most popular stories only have one to three main characters, with a single one being the most important. If a character is vital to the story, they deserve at least some development.

The limit is as big as your capability. With that many characters, you have to know who is most important, but still give spotlight to the other characters. It's a very hard skill to master- but practice makes perfect, right? :)

Nah, I don't set any limits, because some ideas just require more characters than others. Take Fire Emblem, for example. Each game has a gigantic cast, at least fifty characters. And that's not even counting the NPC characters in some cases, like Radiant Dawn, which has 73 playable characters total.

The same goes for my FE fic. There are over fifty characters here too. It's a challenge to give that many enough attention, but I'm having fun with it. It challenges and exercises my character-creating abilities. :3

*shrug* We've known for awhile that the 5th story (Explorers of Friendship) might be the longest. Then again, the Mystery Dungeon games are long too.

A lot of people find they can only deal with twenty or so characters but I've no problems with a cast potentially of sixty characters or above, provided they are distinct and the author is competent. What might affect this question is another one; how many characters are active at any one time? Or, how many are relevant at any given moment? If you have a group of protagonists together, and there are sixty of them, that is unfeasible. If you have a rotating cast of groups of five or so characters, that's easier to digest. And, killing off characters only to replace them will increase the gross character count while keeping the net count roughly the same. Lastly, the longer the story, the easier it is to manage large casts.

So long as you manage to keep them as people and not stereotypes (well, stereotypes may have interesting and/or humoristic effects on the story though, if that's relevant), as many as you want. I've read several Star Wars book series where the amount of characters is close to or above one hundred. But those were story arcs spanning vast amount of time, and not nearly all had the same central roles (i.e. politicians that you saw every now and then, making decisions that affected the story, then you'd rarely hear from them until the next time they made a decision that affected the story).

If you count each pokemon as a separate character, then there's suddenly a TON of extra characters as well.

Generally I agree with unrepetantAuthor though, keep the main-main cast focused and easy to manage, or else interest will be hard to keep. As the example above from the Star Wars books with the politicians, some characters are only relevant every now and then.

I find that it all depends on the author. With a competent writer, I can easily follow dozens of characters, and in my own writing I have a huge cast - four main heroes, their families, each gym leader and many of their acolytes, the elite four, random trainers, random pokemon, contest coordinators, the multiple antagonists, and of course, each Pokemon the four heroes possess. I keep my cast steady by creating character templates, so that I can write down stuff for each character to remember later.

The only time I find trouble following more characters is when you have an author who can't handle it - who ignore a character for whole arcs and then expects you to remember everything about them, who has every chapter full of every single thing a character is doing... then it gets difficult, if only because it gets annoying.

I think you get to have to many characters when you can't include them in a timely fashion. Meaning, if its a school fic, you can ignore a character, but if its a big epic battle of a story and you completely ignore or focus on EVERY one without having a single cohesive story going...you've got to many characters.