GMs & DMs: What do you do with (severely) unbalanced adventuring parties?

[Jon_Dahl]

An all-rogue party? No one is willing to be a medic in your modern campaign? The adventuring group is a showcase of poor builds and your players think they are all "very cool"?

Usually the party imbalance is easy to fix by having a discussion with your players but what if that doesn't work? Hypothetical example:
The only melee-character dies and the rest of the party are arcane casters. Bored with supremacy of arcane casters the player wants to create a wizard also. Now you notice that the party is awkwardly unbalanced and the frustrated player politely refuses to make any adjustments to his/her character.

What would you do? Introduce a DMPC or do you have something subtler?

In my group there are occasional issues with imbalance. Usually I see no other solution than an unintended but unavoidable (near)-TPK.

 

[Gilladian]

If your group builds an unbalanced party, that's their lookout. They know what they want to play, and it is up to them to deal with the repercussions. As DM, you are not required to "fix" their party. Nor to redesign the campaign to fit. If and when they struggle, you can point out that all of them being fragile and ranged-attack based isn't smart. It is up to them whether to change the party composition or hire muscle.

If they build all underpowered characters, that's different. Just lower the challenges to suit their level of power. If they're sixth level but all tier three and four classes, then give them challenges for a 4th level party, and they'll be fine.

What is WORSE is when you have 2-3 who play low-tier characters who are sub-optimized and one or two who play codzillas and squeeze the max out of their builds. It's just brutal to watch one or two PCs dominate every activity.

I ALWAYS end up running an NPC cleric in my campaigns, unless something like the current situation exists; we have only 2 players right now, and they each run two PCs; the second PC is a sort of "semi-pc" whom they pay less attention to; one's the rogue, and one's the cleric. The two main PCs are their "primary" characters; they're the fighter and the wizard. Fortunately, the wizard is a pure blaster type, and doesn't really go for the social skills; the fighter's player is more into the roleplay aspects, and loves story above action. It all works out in the wash.

 

[Cor Azer]

I let the chips fall where they may. Usually after telling them, "All rogues? Interesting. Let's see where them chips fall..."

 

[Desdichado]

I take pretty much the opposite approach to the advice you've gotten so far. To me, one of the prime responsibilities of the GM (which is frequently me) is to allow players to play the characters that they want to play, and offer them a game that works for the characters you get, not for some hypothical "balanced party" ideal.

If the GM is going to throw challenges at the party deliberately, knowing that they are not equipped to handle them at all because they aren't "built" that way as a party, that strikes me as a passive aggressive attempt to get the players to conform to your idealogical bent on how to play the game by sacrificing their control over their own characters and what they can play. In addition, the role of the GM is to facilitate a fun game, and he can do so without sacrificing his own fun by running a game that is suited to the player-characters he actually has rather than those he thinks the players should have.

Doing otherwise is a fundamental failing on the part of the GM, in my opinion. And not only is it very poor GMing, it would also, as a player under such a regime, really piss me off, frankly. Being forced to play a role you don't want to because "the party needs it" and you drew the short straw and have to fill it is a really poor way to play the game. And maintaining idealogical purity at the expense of happy players and a fun game is a very poor consolation prize.

 

[Rune]

Can't XP Hobo right now, but...what he said.

 

[Jon_Dahl]

I do see your point [MENTION=2205]Hobo[/MENTION] but running games for one-dimensional party can be very limited. Ok, the players create a gang of rogues... How many adventures do we want to play that are all about stealing things and sneaking around?

 

[Desdichado]

Rogues can do a lot more than steal stuff and sneak around, at least in any edition that I've played. Given that they have 8 skill points per level (in 3e, 3.5 and Pathfinder, anyway--the systems with which I'm most familiar) they can be built to do all kinds of things (including Use Magic Device.) Just about the only thing that you probably want to avoid throwing at them are combats that are sure to be lengthy battles of attrition, or opponents that really can only be harmed with magic.

Although, again, with Use Magic Device, and the ability to make available wands, potions, staves, rods, etc. for rogues to use, you can probably even do the latter.

Although I've never run a game literally for all rogues, I have run a game for mostly all roguish types, buttressed by a few cross class levels of fighter and a single barbarian. It was one of my most successful campaigns. I had more fun running that (and I think my players had more fun playing that) then any of the last half dozen or more campaigns I've been involved with.

And with the release of the archetypes in Pathfinder, running a game of literally all rogues, and casting the campaign in those terms before we even start, has been an ambition of mine for about the last year or so. Now I just need to find a way to make it all happen...

 

[VariSami]

I agree with Hobo in that you should probably create a campaign that is balanced with the group if they've opted for a certain level of power or a limited set of skills.

However, imbalance within the party is not solved this way. I suggest for people to find a balance with each other by thinking which roles each of them would be willing to play, unless they already have strong character concepts. Oftentimes the party is more or less balanced that way but not always.

When there are one or two odd balls out, I'd most likely balance the campaign with the rest of the party. For example, there's this Swashbuckler who can only run and poke like a 1st level character in a party of 6th levels. The player is limited to roleplaying and escaping in his interactions with the world. I have tried to limit the amount of mechanical challenges but last time the rest seemed a bit impatient with it (though this is partly because of my DM'ing style in general, I admit). If I needed to make a choice between creating challenges fit for his level and for the level of the rest of the party, I'd go with the latter and see if the character happens to survive. If he does, his player has earned the character the right to live.

 

[Greg K]

I do see your point [MENTION=2205]Hobo[/MENTION] but running games for one-dimensional party can be very limited. Ok, the players create a gang of rogues... How many adventures do we want to play that are all about stealing things and sneaking around?

I think an all rogues game could be interesting. There was discussion about in the 2e Complete Thief's Handbook. Plus, there are at least two television shows based on the premise-Leverage and Hustle.

 

[Celebrim]

I generally agree with Hobo. There is no such thing as a party that is too weak. There are only parties with are not capable of handling the challenges that the storyteller sets for them (or that they set for themselves).

As for the hypothetical 'all rogue' party, the 3rd edition Rogue is quite powerful and an 'all-rogue' party only plays to its strengths:

a) Everyone in the party wants to flank the target and has the abilities to make this possible.
b) Everyone in the party wants to ambush the target, and this tactic is normally limited by the parties least stealthy member.

I have nothing against an all rogue party. Though, prior to my current campaign I warned the players that rogues might have trouble in long sections of the planned campaign because of the planned importance of monsters immune to critical hits. That being said, had I ended up with an all rogue party anyway, this would have told me something about the parties planned intention to opt out of the story line and I probably would have planned accordingly. Overall campaign events would have still happened, but the party would observe them from a different position in the game world.

The DM that taught me explained he once had to deal with an all thief party in the adventure B2: Keep on the Borderlands that made their primary goal robbing the bank in the Keep. Sometimes you have to adapt.

Sometimes an 'imbalanced' party proves to be really powerful. An all cleric party can be extremely powerful. I got myself into a situation with an all ranged specialist party that tended to mow down any tactical challenge I presented them with without really moving. They were the tactical equivalent of a machine gun nest, and it annoyed the heck out of me (but I also can't say that it wasn't a reasonable solution to the problems I typically through at the party). An all arcane party can be really powerful, either by using spells to move into all the needed roles - summoners can be tanks or healers, shapechangers can be brutes, and of course artillery and battle field control are covered - or by simply overwhelming foes with the ability to go nova all at once or brutal gauntlets of save or suck effects. At low levels, the all fighter party trounces just about everything.

So long as the party is internally balanced, I think you are ok. The real problem you should watch out for is, as others have noticed, a lack of balance between characters. A lack of correspondance between party abilities and some hypothetical average challenge isn't a big problem, at least until the players themselves begin to feel their choices are 'weak'.

My suspicion here is that what is going on is really a failure of the presumed social contract. That is, you seem to be suggesting that your party normally trusts the DM to provide challenges and has the assumption that when a challenge is provided by the DM they must make a reasonable effort to overcome it. Therefore, there is an implicit social contract that the challenges provided by the DM are fair and reasonable. Conversely, you seem to have the stance that player's part of this contract is that they will create characters which collectively have certain abilities that allow you to present them with a broad range of 'standard' challenges. In D&D, for example, it's often assumed by adventure writers that at least one arcane and one divine spellcaster with access to a standard set of utility spells is present in the party. And its generally assumed that they have access to sufficient magical healing that a night's rest can cure most of the days wounds so that a certain high pace of combat and intence challenges can be maintained over the long run. Since your party lacks these abilities, you are feeling that they aren't living up to their side of the bargain.

All of that is normally fine, but I think you should consider that this may be signalling on the part of the players that they would like to change the social contract. For example, the party may be wanting to move out of a passive stance and become more active in setting more of their own story goals. Or they may be signalling that they've become bored with usual sort of challenges. Or they may be signalling a desire to temporarily change the style of play - from gritty to heroic, or from high to low fantasy, or from heroic to anti-heroic, or from high drama to low drama, or from hack-n-slash to melodrama, from exploration of space to exploration of character, ect. Without knowing the details, I can't be sure what they are signalling (if anything).