This is some follow-on from my musing about too many protagonists.
When we sit down to play a role-playing game, there are three to seven of us (more or less) who want to make a narrative about a bunch of characters. Great. Depending on the game, one of us might play a more general role, wrangling all the walk-ons and antagonists and such, freeing everyone else to really get into the protagonists’ roles.
This doesn’t actually say anything about the nature of the protagonists’ relationships with each other.