D&D General Anyone ever run (or played in) a campaign with entire party (or almost) was a single class?

[Undrave]

It would not be hard to create an all-warlock version of the "iconic 4."

Fighter: Hexblade Pact of the Blade with the Thirsting Blade and Lifedrinker invocations.
Wizard/Evoker: Fiend Pact of the Tome with the Book of Ancient Secrets and Agonizing Blast invocations.
Cleric: Celestial Pact of the Chain/Tome with the Agonizing Blast invocation.
Rogue: Fey Pact of the Chain/Tome with the criminal or urchin background.

Yeah, the DM and players would have to come up with some reason why the group was working together, especially the Fiend and Celestial warlocks. One idea I had was to play on the tensions between true deities and the entities who create warlock pacts. Perhaps all the gods decide warlock pacts are a threat to their power (clerics are the only true way!) and set out to eradicate them. The warlock patrons are forced to band together out of self-interest.

Or maybe the fiend and celestial patrons are actually the same patron. It is a powerful trickster entity playing both sides, lol.

Maybe it's a loophole thing, Asmodeus and some other gods need to do something but can't interfere directly in the situation due to some sort of divine treaty so they reach out to the patrons and have them put a team together. Maybe to stop one of the other god from doing something they shouldn't?

 

[Ogre Mage]

Maybe it's a loophole thing, Asmodeus and some other gods need to do something but can't interfere directly in the situation due to some sort of divine treaty so they reach out to the patrons and have them put a team together. Maybe to stop one of the other god from doing something they shouldn't?

Yeah, that's good. Some of the gods might even look upon entities who create warlock pacts as "contract employees" who can put together a "suicide squad" lol. Why put their precious clerics in danger when they can have some other entity do the nasty work.

 

[Undrave]

Yeah, that's good. Some of the gods might even look upon entities who create warlock pacts as "contract employees" who can put together a "suicide squad" lol. Why put their precious clerics in danger when they can have some other entity do the nasty work.

Mercenary brokers

 

[ccs]

The most recent example of this for me was a few years ago in a very short lived 2e Night Below campaign.
There were 7 players. The DM gave us each 120K xp & access to the "Players Options" books to make our characters.
What followed was a Goddamned mess of shear brokeness & complexity that 1) delayed the start of the game for three weeks as 5 players who'd never even heard of the "Options" books or played 2e had to digest 3-4 entire books, 2) crashed the campaign by the end of the 2nd session as the DM simply couldn't handle it.
There were two of us that warned the DM that this thing would fly off the rails almost immediately....

Everyone made a cleric.
I put all my xp into being a single class cleric. The other 6 players made multi/duel classed clerics (what classes/lvs they mixed depended upon what they each felt made for the most broken).
You can do an awful lot of awful things in 2e when armed with 120K xp, all the Player Options" books & synergizing amongst 7 players....

 

[Stormonu]

We tried once with the party being four wizards back in 2E, with each one a different specialty (Invoker, Diviner, Conjurer & Necromancer as I recall). Game lasted until the first fight (vs. a mix of goblins and orcs). All four cast their single spell (except the one who had cast Mage Armor on himself earlier) and then they tried to book it, but died.

The all-fighter group (which did include a paladin and a ranger) had much more success. They made it to 6th level before an encounter with a magical creature (I forget which, but want to say beholder) wiped their group because of their inability to deal with magical abilities.

Everything else has been a mix of races and classes, heavily suggested by me due to these past experiences.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

We tried once with the party being four wizards back in 2E, with each one a different specialty (Invoker, Diviner, Conjurer & Necromancer as I recall). Game lasted until the first fight (vs. a mix of goblins and orcs). All four cast their single spell (except the one who had cast Mage Armor on himself earlier) and then they tried to book it, but died.

The all-fighter group (which did include a paladin and a ranger) had much more success. They made it to 6th level before an encounter with a magical creature (I forget which, but want to say beholder) wiped their group because of their inability to deal with magical abilities.

Everything else has been a mix of races and classes, heavily suggested by me due to these past experiences.

Interesting. That first example feels like an issue with the fact that in the older editions, there was a different power curve for magic users/wizards compared to fighters and thieves; while more recent editions have tried to equalize that power curve (to lesser or greater success - cf many other threads here on EnWorld). I think if you had done the same thing in 4e or 5e, with the at-will/cantrip mechanics, this wouldn't be as much of an issue.

The 2nd example feels like role protection, where your fighters didn't have access to any magic (or magic items?). Eldritch Knight, Echo Knight, and probably other sub-classes today could pitch in. In 4e, by 6th level, they should have had at least +1 weapons and/or armor, and maybe leaning into +2...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The closest I've ever done to that was "all magical swashbucklers" game in 4e, where everyone had to be a swordfighter with some amount of magic.

We had:

• Assassin/Avenger/Covenant Agent - Shadar-Kai Prince of Britain (royal family based in Cardiff, descended from Mordred and The Morrigan). The CA paragon path was made for Ass/Av MC builds, lots of teleporting, oath of enmity, really fun
• Fey Hexblade - Gnomish French aristocrat with a sword bigger than her and a very pretty gothic roccoco dress
• Avenger - Indian Deva, past life was a Rakshasa, quiet and ignorant of social norms
• Thief Rogue - Vryloka from Westfalia, least magical on the team but his Theme was something magic, don't remember what. Used a rapier and handcrossbow
• Swordy-Bard - Half-elf from Venice, associated with a family of assassins.
• White Well Hexblade - Human Knight of The Round Table, given Excalibur by The Lady to defend Britain.
• (later addition, only played sometimes) Ranger - Drow with a spear, half Norse half Mohawk. (the Reykjavik Federation included members of First Nations from the American Northeast, and was one of the major "empires" of the setting)

They were all students at an international academy of magic and higher learning based in Cardiff, and were a team in a sport that was basically parkour rugby on rooftops.

 

[Stormonu]

Interesting. That first example feels like an issue with the fact that in the older editions, there was a different power curve for magic users/wizards compared to fighters and thieves; while more recent editions have tried to equalize that power curve (to lesser or greater success - cf many other threads here on EnWorld). I think if you had done the same thing in 4e or 5e, with the at-will/cantrip mechanics, this wouldn't be as much of an issue.

The 2nd example feels like role protection, where your fighters didn't have access to any magic (or magic items?). Eldritch Knight, Echo Knight, and probably other sub-classes today could pitch in. In 4e, by 6th level, they should have had at least +1 weapons and/or armor, and maybe leaning into +2...

Yeah, 4E & 5E would go a long way to solving the issue of the all-wizard party.

+1 weapons/+1 armor though, don't help against saves vs. spells such as Hold Person, Disintegrate, etc. Protection scrolls disappeared in 2E and most items that grant/use spells were not usable by pure fighters. Paladins & rangers only just start coming into spells about 4th level back in 2E, and they didn't tend to be offensive in nature. Most of these issues wouldn't be too problematic in the current editions, but spellcasting opponents can still be a pain point for melee-focused groups with sparse or no spell use, which was the case with this group (it had been a somewhat grittier game, with spellcasters/spell-using creatures extremely rare - the opponent that took them out was effectively a climatic boss, and magical in nature to boot).

 

[muppetmuppet]

I started a game where the players were 5 thiefs and an assassin, so it seemed like a good idea to set up a Thieves guild game where they were all from the same guild but it folded pretty fast despite the characters picked it was perhaps not what they were looking for.