Single class campaign anyone?

Occasionally, I feel fits of intense boredom (?) at the usual D&D adventuring party. One or two tanks, a healer, an artillery caster, a sneaker. I sometimes feel that the composition of the average party somehow forces my hand in designing adventures. There is a wide set of stories that just won't work, because they would leave out one or more of the party members, thus boring the correspondant player.

Every now and then, I feel like I would enjoy DMing a short (or not-so-short) campaign with the restriction that all characters must belong to the same class. Think about it! The possibilities of a group of rogues working for the thieves guild, or an elite team of warriors, or a crusading party of four clerics and a paladin! Even a band of bards on a tournée. With a few off-class levels for added flavor.

It would make for adventures that would be very different from the usual ones. An overspecialized party has an immense strength in one area and horrible failings in others - it would most certainly be unfit for the standard "travel, grab item, kill villain" quest. This fact could be used though to design adventures where the strength is tested and the weakness is exploited much more than usual.

Not something I would devote my life too, but certainly it would be an interesting break from the norm.

So, how many of you have tried this out? What was the result?

I've done two of these. One that was mostly all fighters (2 fighters, 1 ranger, 1 barbarian, 1 rogue). And the rogue was the strongest in the party with a 20 str. These guys could deal out damage, but couldn't take too much and had no spell support. It was a lot of fun. No worrying about memorizing spell or getting enough rest for the spellcasters. No need worrying about identify items, if it looked good they used it and figured out the bonuses. At 6th level they took out a 12 headed normal hydra in two rounds.

The other one I did was city based and had 4 rogues and 1 bard. The whole campaign took place in the same city, they left once or twice. I felt this worked better since the rogues could difersify a little easier and it was not as combat oriented.

Rangers & Rogues...

I am playing in a campaign that required each PC to take at least one level of Ranger and has restricted each PC to only Ranger or Rogue lvls there after. Once we qualified for PrC they are fair game as well.

I must say that I like it a lot. While each charachter compliments the others, we have also learned to compensate for the missing elements. The Ranger soaks the damage and sets up the rogue. The "ninja" covers the sneaky stuff. The "spymaster" covers the social things. One rogue is an archer, another always provides the flank for the third to get the backstab. One rogue studies arcane things and can use the magic devices.

I think it forces beter teamwork. It also allows the DM to create cool sneaky things for us to do that does not leave anyone out.

There's an article way back in Dragon #217, page 26, called "Class Action! Designing AD & D game adventures for one PC class." Seems like advice for what you're looking for, if an edition behind. If you can get a hold of the article, it has some interesting ideas.

Well, I haven't tried it, but I think it could be really cool. It would certainly make it easier to make a believable background story and give good reasons for the pc's to be together. It would also provide a definite focus for the campaign.

I'm working on a campaign where all pc's start out as members of the local militia of a wilderness stronghold/town. When the town is hit by a plague of unnatural monsters, the pc's are chosen to form a task force, whose job it is to find the source of the monster plague, and fight it. All characters would start out with the same class (or close, I'm thinking Fighter/ranger maybe a rogue scout). Whether they would be allowed to multiclass later, I haven't decided yet.

darklight

Dang, all this talk... now I wanna play in a single class PbP!!

"Just hook it to my veins!!"

I played a very entertaining campaign where every PC had to have at least half their levels in a psionic class. That was a good time... we were playing githzerai re-colonizing their rediscovered jungle homeworld, which was a completely wild-magic plane. This was just after the release of the PsiHB, so we were mostly just experimenting with the rules. It worked all right, IMO, but for a few different reasons, we ended it early.

I will put forward my belief that a group that's focused on a single class will be weaker than a more diverse one. There's a reason that D&D encourages (and assumes) this diversity - it works better. Several times during the psi campaign, there were things that would have been easy for a regular group that were hard for us.

(For the record, here's the party as I recall them)
-Monk1/Psychic Warrior5, focusing on speed and claw powers (me)
-Psychic Warrior6, spiked chain specialist
-Psychic Warrior5/Zerth Knight1, essentially a paladin via PrC
-Psion5/Pyrokineticist1
-Psion4/Psychic Healer1/Psychic Warrior1, the group healer, who would absorb someone's wounds via Empathic Transfer and then use the self-heal power several times
-Psychic Warrior5/Slayer1, just a standard psychic warrior tank
-Psion6, no real focus (the only shtick I recall is that she had Trigger Power with Recall Pain)
-Psion6, a shaper, specializing in the Astral Construct powers
-Psionic Thief6, just a standard thief with some psionics

Never done it, but I like the idea.

I also have always wanted to run a "single race" game. I am playing in one now, of all humans, which has been pretty interesting.

SteelDraco said:

I will put forward my belief that a group that's focused on a single class will be weaker than a more diverse one.

Click to expand...

I think everyone mostly agrees on that. It's one of the interesting points of the single-class campaign, though.

Now I am having ideas for an all-mage game (using the mage class from elements of magic).

As a question to any that have given deep thought to, or actually run, a single class campaign, how would you handle the leadership feat and gaining a cohort?