Player Role: The Manager
My current campaign is an open table with around 10-14 players per session. Keeping track of the various downtime actions of characters between sessions can get overwhelming. To that end, I've simplified the process by doing the following:
- A strict 1 action per character
- Only characters actually at the session may have a downtime
This helps limit how much I have to process. More helpful is the creation of Manager as a player role. In previous campaigns, I've found that players independently sending their downtime actions to me got rather cumbersome. Here, a player is deemed the Manager, and it is their responsibility to submit all of the orders. This keeps everything in one place, making it much simpler for me to process; it also affords the players a chance to coordinate all of their actions. If no list of actions is submitted, then the characters do not take any actions during that downtime.
In practice, I've found this system to be a huge relief and I recommend giving it a try if you want to allow downtime actions between sessions for more than 5 or so players.