In the games I typically end up
running, the classic fighter, cleric, rogue and wizard party tends to
be the exception, not the rule. However, party composition plays an
incredibly important role in determining what the characters are
capable of facing. In this vein, I hope to share of the ideas I've
accumulated. Some of these will seem like common sense, but I hope
they will help. Most of the word count of this piece will focus on
the situation where party composition is simply thrown to the wind.
Substituting Similar Classes
If you don't want
the same old party every time, substituting similar classes is an
easy way to go. Barbarians can replace the fighter fairly easily. A
sorcerer can fill in for a wizard. The issue is that while this kind
of substitution is easy to do and account for, it doesn't make for
the most original party.
Substituting Classes Based on Ability
I've seen wizard
focused on utility spells substitute for a rogue. Of course, there
were some implications for this substitute that would not be present
for a rogue such as spell slots, but at the same time it worked
reasonably well. There are also some situations where multiple
different characters can collectively substitute for a class. You
could try to replace the wizard from the party with a combination of
a cleric and an Eldritch Knight in order to fill in the utility
portion of that role. Generally, while this kind of substitution
works quite well, it isn't a perfect substitution. Instead, you try
to cover the most important portions of the class (protection against
magic and utility for the wizard example) and give up portions that
you can afford to give up (damage spells can be substituted by the
Eldritch Knight weapon damage).
Forget Balance
The last general
approach for the balancing party problem is to simply not to worry
about it. The best way to accomplish this is heavily dependent on the
kind of game being run (more so than the above methods). If there are
no magic creatures to face the wizard's protection spells end up
being redundant. In this kind of case, it is up to the Dungeon Master
to somehow let the player's know the kind of game being run so that
they can make sure to form a party that won't get horribly decimated.
At the same time, the problem can be thrown on the other side of the
DM screen. In this case, if the players want to have no cleric then
maybe they need to have some kind of house rules to increase the
amount of healing they can do (as a quick aside, this can be easily
done by increasing the amount of healing from the second wind feature
or by making the healer feat useful past level 1).
The most common
issues I have seen involves healing and curing effects. If a party
has no cleric, a medusa is absolutely terrifying since there isn't a
good way to un-petrify characters. To get around this we either need
changes in lore (killing the medusa might undo the effects or
smearing the medusa's blood might as well), potions or some other way
of gaining the ability.
Example
One of the
situations I encountered involved a game of the newest version of D&D
(5th edition, in case you are looking at this way in the
future) where the entire 4 man party was composed of fighters. It was
1 champion and 3 battle masters, each with a different build. Since
the world was very low magic, this actually managed to work just fine
without any changes. The players would rotate the lines when the
front line got hurt enough and as a result could spread out the
damage. They also had their hit dice and second wind for healing.
They could have more staying power by increasing the healing from
second wind or by making the healer feat worth using (maybe 1d6 more
per 2 levels).
Conclusion
There we have it.
Like I said, most of this stuff is probably common sense but I hope
writing it down like this helps at least one person out there. In
particular, I want to stress how much the definition of a “balanced
party” depends on the campaign itself. As usual, feel free to
comment on anything related to this topic.
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