When there are a lot of characters, do you get confused?

[ace_of_something]

I find in forigen movies, especially of the martial arts kind, it can be hard to recall a particular character's name and if it's a period film and everyone dressess similarly and has similar hair styles... it gets even fuzzier. A big part of this is in a lot of those movies they only call someone by name once, maybe twice in the whole film. So than you go on describing Donnie Yen's character as 'the teacher guy'.

 

[Spoonius]

Dan Abnett can make me care about 12+ people at a time (Gaunt's Ghost). THAT'S how it should be done.

Agreed. That's guy's an amazing author.

And he's writing the script for the Ultramarines movie...

 

[jubosu]

LOST seems to keep them well enough up and has started to kill them off now so...

 

[Veleste]

If they are well characterised then no. I've never had a problem sorting out the characters in A Game of Thrones, for example. However if they are just thrown at you randomly every few chapters and then make one chapter appearances in the sequals to cryptically hint at what they are doing...then yes. Robert Jordan is a good example of a writer who does that.

 

[Amethyst Wind]

I've heard this ratio said before as enough for decent character development:

Charactersages = 1:30

If each character has at least 30 pages where they are doing something worthwhile, then it should be enough, so a 300 page book should be able to support ten characters etc.