Patching LED Tri Pars

If I understand you well, you can't do that. It doesn't understand multi parameter fixtures, it's based around dimmers.

Words first! Your fixtures are set to a "starting address" and therefore listen to that and the next 4 "addresses". It uses those to control "parameters" such as RGB colors, strobe, master intensity or whatever. The board has "channels" or faders that can have one or more addresses assigned to them. Using the word channel for everything is confusing. 

The 1296 does single or group addresses per channel, but they are all at the same level. With a 5 address fixture you control each address individually. so Fixture 1 would be channels 7-11 (after the dimmer pack?), fixture 2 at 12-16, etc, tracking with their DMX addresses. You can patch the fixtures together, or just address them the same to control them together. 

If you get really tricky you could group some of the 'special' parameters together so save channels, but that's getting into advanced stuff and would only fit some shows. Smarter "Moving Light" or LED consoles (i.e. SmartFade ML) do things very differently and make complex lights much easier to handle.

If I understand you well, you can't do that. It doesn't understand multi parameter fixtures, it's based around dimmers.

Words first! Your fixtures are set to a "starting address" and therefore listen to that and the next 4 "addresses". It uses those to control "parameters" such as RGB colors, strobe, master intensity or whatever. The board has "channels" or faders that can have one or more addresses assigned to them. Using the word channel for everything is confusing. 

The 1296 does single or group addresses per channel, but they are all at the same level. With a 5 address fixture you control each address individually. so Fixture 1 would be channels 7-11 (after the dimmer pack?), fixture 2 at 12-16, etc, tracking with their DMX addresses. You can patch the fixtures together, or just address them the same to control them together. 

If you get really tricky you could group some of the 'special' parameters together so save channels, but that's getting into advanced stuff and would only fit some shows. Smarter "Moving Light" or LED consoles (i.e. SmartFade ML) do things very differently and make complex lights much easier to handle.