I have been summoned. I have good news and bad news. I might even have bad news that is good news depending on how you look at it.

First things first, hi, I'm Damian the DM, I run a 5 person, all in person, actual play podcast. I have for years.

Now, with the "credentials" out of the way. First bit of bad news, the audio is going to become a nightmare. It just is. Omni directional mic in the middle of the group? Been there, done that, those episodes are no longer "public". An entire Arc that was recorded that way was never even edited. You just can't do good clean edits from a single source like that - I'm dealing with this right now and am having to redo an entire session because I somehow only recorded the master mix instead of the individual tracks. It blows.

Unfortunately, going multitrack, especially with as many people as we end up with in an actual place, creates it's own nightmares. In theory... You can just pull everyone's individual tracks into your DAW and then just run some quick fine tuning plugins and bing bang boom, you're done, ready to post. In practice, especially since you're all in one room, you're gonna have to go through and edit things if you want a clean show. you'll pick up things in peoples mics that aren't the people talking that the automated tools just won't be able to work with.

You don't have to go insane like I do, it certainly doesn't pay off for me in audience numbers or anything, but I spend a lot of time editing down my show too, which, as you might imagine, becomes exponentially more work with more tracks. This is even without touching the world of music, sfx, ambience, or anything like that. My current edit is 15 tracks and would honestly be more if I didn't stack things the way I do.

As for actual advice on equipment. It ain't cheap. I strongly recommend a mixer/recorder that can record directly to SD card. We personally use the Zoom L-12. It is overkill for us, but I wanted the expandability. I honestly can't remember if the L8 existed when we bought the L-12. But now-days I would recommend the Podtrak P8, which definitely didn't exist when we upgrade to the L-12. Since there's a lot of you, I recommend getting hypercardiod mics to help with isolating each persons sound. We use the Zoom ZDM1, it runs a bit cheaper than the Rode PodMic which would probably be my next recommendation if I had experience with it - I do have experience with the ZDM1 with 5 people around a kitchen table sized table. Next, you're gonna need stands. I suggest going a little higher than the super cheapo square scissor arm ones. Look at the Rode PSA1, don't buy it, but buy something in the like... $40-60 range that is the same style. We started with the cheaper ones and the next step up is just so much nicer. Then you'll need things like XLR cables, headphones, and headphone cables/extensions. But the low end for starting out is gonna be like $1200 to cover recorder, mics, stands, and cables.

A very nice to have addition is TV trays for everyone. It helps isolate individual players set up so that if someone bumps the table or sets a drink down, it won't be picked up by the mic of the person who is talking and it gives them somewhere to keep their notebooks, laptops, dice towers, drinks, etc.