Know Your Role
Kicking down the door is a mainstay of adventuring. That’s why you’ve got damaging object rules, the portable ram, and barbarians. You’ve also got teleportation magic, the knock spell, and good old fashioned finding the key. There are any number of ways to get through a locked door, but for some reason gamers seem to carry this collective assumption that, “We need a set of lock picks in the party!” I’m talking of course about the old party composition concept.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “I got stuck playing the healer” you know what I’m talking about. Sing it along with me now: fighter, caster, cleric, thief! These are the things that every party needs, right? I mean, in case you hadn’t noticed, The Handbook of Heroes is kind of based on that old chestnut. But here’s the thing: just because it works, that doesn’t mean it’s required.
Whether you’re in a class-based game like D&D or a more free-from system like D10, it’s nice to cover a lot of different abilities between the different PCs. If everyone is good at hitting things and nobody is good at magic, for example, you’re going to have a tough time in the Arcanum of Esoteric Spell Riddles. But for my money, I think that party composition is a great way for GMs to figure out what kind of campaign their players want. Did everybody roll up a sneaky guy? Adjust your campaign accordingly and add a thieves guild. Did everybody roll up a talky guy? Adjust your campaign accordingly and add some courtly intrigue. Did everybody roll up a barbarian? Adjust your campaign accordingly and add some dwarf tossing. If the players find themselves without heals, lock picks, or relevant spells, then that’s an interesting challenge. Let them hire a healer/locksmith/sage in game. Give them a quest for a magic item to fill the role. Don’t design for a perfectly “balanced” party. You want your players to come up with unique solutions to in-game problems, right? This is an opportunity to let them do that.
Question of the day then: Have you ever been in an “unbalanced party?” How did it go?
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I played in a group that was practically all melee. We had an Arcane Trickster (Me), a Pact of the Blade Warlock, A Monk, a Fighter, and occasionally a Paladin when he could make it, but that was a rare event.
My character was meant to be a skill monkey, and to that end I needed one Cleric level for the Knowledge domain. This made me the “healer” of the group, because I had a few spell slots and could toss out wee little heals if anyone went down.
Normally Healing Word is good action economy for a character, but that’s isn’t true of the Rogue, which should be using its Bonus Action every single turn if you know what you are doing. Thus, I wasn’t too keen on continuing the healer role, even though I’m normally fine with it.
My solution was to offload those duties to my Familiar, a mouse named Squeak. I gave him a little backpack that could hold a few potions, and he would zip around the battlefield administering them to downed allies. Being the consummate pun lover that I am, I named this sort of healing “Mouse-to-Mouth Resuscitation.”
Well that’s adorable. I gotta ask though: what is Squeak’s current death count? Familiars are freakin’ fragile in 5e!
Good on ya though. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Your party composition meant you were short on heals, and you found a solution that was both workable and flavorful. That’s brilliant. Even better, no one was “stuck playing the healer.”
Oh, don’t I know it! They die just from looking at them. Fortunately you don’t take penalties for letting them die anymore, other than a wee financial penalty for re-summoning them.
Still, Squeak’s death count is surprisingly low for a few reasons.
My DM won’t have enemies attack Squeak directly most of the time, because he’s such a small threat and he’s not doing damage to anyone. Thus, only the smartest of enemies goes after him. However, he is fair game for being hit on accident by a crit fail or getting fried with an AoE.
I also toughened him up a bit. I rolled his HP and got the max of 3. Next, I took Inspiring Leader, so that he (and the rest of the party) gets 10-15 Temp HP per rest. Finally, I crafted some mouse barding for him, equivalent to a breastplate. This brings his AC to 15. Overall, he’s probably about as tough as a level 3 Bard, which isn’t great, but certainly better than being as tough as a mouse. 😀
I will have you know that, when you got to the bit about mouse barding, I made a high pitched and distinctly un-manly sound. I hope you’re proud of yourself.
I had literally the same response and was about to post a very similar comment when I saw Colin’s.
I am proud indeed! Here’s some artwork of the little fellow, drawn by a friendly redditor.
goo.gl/DYYtjM
My current 5e group I’m GMing has 2 barbarians, a monk, a druid, and a warlock. Health potions! Health potions everywhere!
I wonder what the conversion rate is between clerics and health potions? 6 gets you through 1st level, 14 get you through second level, etc.
They just got a set of magically refilling tankards that can heal anyone X amount once a day, so I’m hoping that keeps the TPKs away
Nice! That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re making it possible for everybody to play the character they want without punishing them for it. Good GMing right there.
You have a Druid, though. They are perfectly good healers.
Unless they’re one of the druids who spend all their time as a dinosaur. As a 5E druid it can be hard to remember that your character sheet isn’t actually the dinosaur and animal entries in the monster manual.
Most of my D&Ding is on chats, which means either you have rogues lurking in corners and not participating with people (20% of the population), the altruistic cleric that goes on every single adventure and scene due to scarcity (5% maybe), the parcel of arcane casters (mostly sorcerers because e-peen is a thing and Charisma makes it bigger, 15%), and then about 10% Other. The remaining 50% is Melee Hulk, either Fighter or Barbarian or something that uses Power Attack, because every last powergamer compares his damage output with the other characters to see if he’s building right. So it’s not uncommon to go on a 5 man squad with Fighter, Fighter, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard.
The nice thing is that said wizard (yes, me) can leisurely attract zero attention from the baddies as I go about casting Web and Haste and whatever I choose. The rogue, too, is never, ever without a flanking buddy, but he’s probably ranged anyway, so that’s actually a bit limited use.
Final note, when you have so much meat shield, it gives you plenty of time to put together Haste-Invisibility-Overland Flight-Every Other Buff-Polymorph into a War Troll. Also your familiar, who shares spells. Suddenly 2 trolls pop out of nowhere and go full nova, shaming all the melee lunks and laughing gleefully from their wizardly interior.
You ever read Treantmonk’s take on wizards? His guide got me through my life as a Pathfinder wizard, and I think there’s plenty of wisdom in there for 5e as well.
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/extras/community-creations/treatmonks-lab/test
…Oh, neat! After a quick google it appears he’s done a 5e version as well:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZHzEjiHvtDItZE2ixfoYwqi7brTO-ag8uBJndE5saro/edit
Looks like that’s just a spell-rating system though. The cool theory of wizarding material is all in the Pathfinder version, and it sounds like you nailed the “be a controller” advice. GJ.
Treantmonk’s guide was incredibly helpful to me when I was trying to get into the swing of wizarding, and a fair majority of the wizards I played in 3.5 were Transmuters, except for the gnome illusionist who was out to fleece everyone.
In Pathfinder, I’ve played but the one wizard, who is a Conjurer with the Creation Arcane Subschool. Create Item is -incredible-. Teleportation would probably have been super neat too, but we can’t have everything.
I’ve mentioned our World’s Largest Dungeon team before. Battle cleric/walking tank, paladin who may be fallen because I can’t recall her ever using paladin powers, monk, and an assassin who can mostly pick locks because we were aimlessly wandering hallways of locked stone doors until she finally gave in and put some points into it.
Very little magic. No arcane casting at all. No one knows how to cook, so we’re relying on the assassin’s meager survival skill (Mummified bugbear, anyone? It’s natural jerky! And probably maybe won’t kill you!) and the cleric’s ability to create food and drink (when he’s not out of spells). Our level is falling behind the level of things we encounter as we start not being able to stand up to the creatures that can’t be harmed without arcane magic or +2 or better weapons – we have to win by poisoning something, then outlasting it. Or by careful applications of blessings and praying to the dice gods to be merciful. Or just giving up on fighting to begin with, and avoiding or negotiating – while trying not to break the cleric and paladin’s oaths with all the intelligent evil things around.
It’s actually kinda grimly bleak in outlook. In some ways, I’m glad we’re on hiatus because it was getting to be “Is this the week we die, weak and alone, in a dark, cold, unfeeling labyrinth?”
I think there’s a real future to be had in “dungeon jerky.” You be CEO, I’ll take care of marketing. We’ll make tens–nay–fives of gold pieces!
I’ve heard that the World’s Largest Dungeons gets a bit…samey…after a while. Lots of similar rooms after similar room. Maybe you just have to hang around and grind the lower level area like a video game?
What’s interesting about dungeon like that is the concept of the “empty room.” These are the spots in old school crawls where there’s just nothing especially interesting. They serve to help out with the sense of verisimilitude (not every chamber can hold ancient secrets after all), but they also act as convenient spots for GMs to insert original content. In your case, an arcane ally might be nice.
In one of my current games we tried going at a dungeon with no consistent healing ability (I’m a low-level Pally with about 4 1d6 Lay on Hands a day, and across the rest of the party we had maybe 3 CLWs prepared. Very first fight we were spitting distance from a TPK from 3 Kobold Rogues that weren’t actually even trying that hard. In a combat-heavy party you *need* some kind of consistent healing, even if that just means a CLW Wand and someone who can use it reliably.
That said, another game is almost entirely consisting of Divine Casters, and that’s gone well enough. Only real issue is I get bored a lot, being the offensive touch-spell specialist in a game with 3 melee and a Large animal companion.
Why do you get bored in the divine casters party? Is it just that there’s too much competition on the front lines?
Yeah, I can’t get close enough to deliver one of my (much weaker offensively) spells with the wall of deadly meat in the way. Most of the time I wind up handing out heal-wand taps and the occasional buff. I plan to take Reach Spell soon to (hopefully) let me get more use out of my spells.
In a game I’m currently playing our party composition is Paladin, Sorcerer, Monk, and Summoner (my character and a homebrew class I made).
So all our healing is coming from the Paladin which at level 1 is a whole 5 hp worth. (The Summoner will get some minor spellcasting ability once they hit level 3 which will include some healing spells.) And nobody is proficient with lockpicks. Though we are as a party proficient in a *lot* of the various crafting tools. So it’s not exactly 100% “unbalanced” but it’s not really “balanced” either.
By and large though, I tend to wind up playing in more or less balanced parties just because people like not stepping on each other’s toes and I, like many other people, tend to aim to fill in gaps when making a character rather than what would normally be viewed as directly competing with someone.
I do think it would be a lot of fun to have a party based around a theme aside from “can’t cast spells” which is generally just a product of low magic settings rather than a playstyle theme in my experience.
When you say “based around a theme,” what are you thinking? All bard travelling band?
“The Polearm Crew”, a band of thieves, Cloth Wearers Club (if this is your first time at Cloth Wearers Club, you have to cast), a traveling band (doesn’t have to be all bards as long as everyone is proficient in an instrument and the characters are built around the theme), “the Five Steves and their pets”, Children Adventurers in Ravenloft (this one actually almost happened for me a few months back), a traveling band that also moonlight as a band of thieves (or vice versa), y’know… whatever.
Just would be fun to build the party around a common idea rather than the usual everyone making their character in a vacuum and having a mishmashed assortment of personal goals. Not that that isn’t fun too, but that’s what we’re doing most of the time already.
We had an interesting short campaign where the party was hilariously unbalanced. The DM started out by warning us that magic users were treated with some suspicion due to some asshole vampires and that we should not cast spells in the middle of town without pulling shenanigans.
I don’t know what she was expecting, but a party that consisted of a Cleric, Blight Druid, Bard, and Wizard probably wasn’t it. Every last one of us was kitted for stealth and/or social skills, and no one was great at combat. (The Cleric and the druid were about tied for “most capable of melee combat” although neither one had great strength. or constitution.)
Needless to say, we ended up organizing a lot of ambushes.
That is extremely cool. You wound up changing your play style rather than relying on the chorus of “Never Split the Party.” I’m guessing it made for a memorable campaign. Well done!
Yes- the GM told everyone to bring their characters pre-made, and no one bothered to check with anyone else. We ended up with 3 rogues and a wizard. We ended up sneaking past 90% of the encounters in the dungeon, and then arguing for 30 minutes if someone could be “caught off guard” by multiple sneak attacks in the same round.
Nice! I bet that wizard loved life. No meatheads to get in the way… everyone willing to listen to his sage advice about not standing in the blast radius… he gets all the wands and scrolls… Good times.
My first game was 2 rogues, a ranger and a monk. It was a hoot. We had enough skill points and charisma that we talked/intimidated/clever thinking’ed our way out of almost every fight. Our GM played fairly loose with the rules which made it easier, but it was a lot of fun (for everyone except the monk. He just punched things.)
None of the skill-based PCs made it to the dungeon last session. We wound up with Paladin / Paladin / Cavalier / Bloodrager. The highest Int score was 10. The highest Wis was 12. They wound up searching for secret doors a square at a time with adamantine glaives. It was great.
This comic again goes back to the similarity between rogues and barbarians… their skill at opening locked doors. One of my favourite characters was a 3.5e barbarian who carried what was described as a “+5 adamantine lockpick”… a massive two-handed maul, that opened doors with great efficacy.
Well dang… Now I wish that Barbarian was in this one instead of Fighter. Well spotted!