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@@Kolth To kind of repeat (blatantly copy and paste with some minor adjustments) what I said to Twilight in a private conversation before. 6 characters each is an awful lot, you must be able to make each and every character:
- unique and distinguishable from the others.
- relateable, or fun to read about.
- memorable.
- have a personality (and a backstory is not the same as a personality).
And to qoute Gwenio from fimfiction (check out his stuff, he writes some awesome stories):
And 7 or more characters is not just a bad idea for a writer to write about and a reader to take in, also from an adventurer's viewpoint it is not a great idea. To elaborate, let's take two common sizes for parties, which are 3 or 5 party members. Parties of three are optimal for travling, they are nimble, agile, and barely need any time at all to debate on any possible issues within the party. Parties of five, while not as fast as a party or three, they have the added bonusses of versitality (by the merrits of having more members) and are generally just stronger as a whole, and by that I mean stronger diplomatically as well as physically. Parties of six fall just outside of the range of comfortable, but this can be excused if the party has a compotent and charismatic appointed leader, and/or a support party member who doesn't put a strain on the active members. I assume you might be able to see what I'm headed at. A party of thirteen is just too much in my opinnion. You're better off reducing the party size to six, saves you (and us) and the readers a lot of energy, and doesn't deduct from thom the natural credibility of the party's situation. Just my two cents, do with it as you see fit.
Edit: As a corollary and to further demonstrate my point I'd like to offer this. Let's say I told you a story about this adventuring group of ponies, Light, Garland, Frionel, Matteus, Onion Knight, Cloud, Harvey, Kain Highwind, Golbez, Terra, Jester, Strife, Lockhart, Silver Mane, Squall, Lagoon, Ultima, Tribal, Kuja, Meg Ryan, Manly Man, Yuna, Dolly, Prishy, Hunter Pirate, Judge, and finally Lightning, chances are you probably don't even remember how I started this sentence before listing the names of 28 different characters. And if I'd ask you to recall as many names as possible,
Now I will grant you that in total you'd "only" be dealing with 13 characters. So let's remove 15 names from the list, and to throw you a bone, I'll remove what are probably the least memorable names, so now we're left with:
Light, Cloud, Terra, Jester, Strife, Silver Mane, Ultima, Tribal, Manly Man, Dolly, Hunter Pirate, Judge, and Lightning. There, the 13 most memorable names are left, does that make it any easier? Well, yeah... but not a whole lot. As far as my point goes, you'd probably still not be able to remember all of them without putting effort into it. And as far as putting effort into remembering trivial stuff while reading goes, trying to remember a character's name can draw you right out of the emersion of the story, and I take it you're not aiming for that to happen.
Going back to the adventuring side of things, you need to have 13 different characters, who each behave uniquely enough to be remembered while being similar enough to eachother to not get into constant arguments with each other that slow the pacing of the story down.
Of course you can say that you're just going to avoid writing about those conflicts, but why would the honor and valor obsessed Light and Judge not complain about every single thing the morally disgusting Hunter Pirate does, and Manly Man, being the gentleman that he is, will try to break the argument up, only risking getting himself involved, Jester and Dolly poke fun at the whole situation, cracking jokes and pulling pranks left and right, somewhere down the line they insult Tribal, who gets angry at them for who-knows-what-was-insulting-about-what-they-said, Cloud flies off to leave everyone to argue while getting some sleep, Strife somehow figures this is all his fault and sits in a corner while blaming himself, and somewhere down the line you just forget what started this all and why this even matters. My final statement?
Make things easy for yourself, keep the character count to a minimum, that way you can flesh out each character more, give the reader more time to relate to each of them, force out more creativity when they end up being stuck somewhere as opposed to just getting the pony who has the right talent who could get them out of the situation, make conflicts more concise and emersive, and most importantly, have the reader remember who they are reading about.