D&D 5E Experiences With Party Composition

[Hexmage-EN]

I'm afraid I gave the impression that I wanted to make sure that players could always win encounters. It's more along the lines that I want their class abilities to be frequently relevant.

I will sometimes throw a complete curveball in the mix, though I try to give indications of danger beforehand. In the most recent session I ran, for example, the (Hasted) monk ran down a tunnel to scout it out. I mentioned there was a pile of treasure, but three openings in the ceiling. He approached the treasure anyway and got ambushed by a behir that dropped directly in front of him, triggering a surprise round that allowed the behir to bite and constrict the monk. The behir also rolled higher in initiative, but missed with the bite attack to try and swallow the monk, who fortunately was able to escape the grapple, attack once to trigger his Mobile feat to avoid an opportunity attack, and ran for his life.

In that instance the character's abilities allowed him to escape, but I didn't have those things in mind beforehand.

 

[aco175]

I tend to make encounters without the party composition like several others mentioned. If the campaign is themed such as all fighters, I may adjust to include more one thing and less another, but generally the chips fall where they may.

In your example, the monk was the one that walked into the behir lair, but it could have been the fighter or mage easily enough. You made the encounter and warned the player to be careful, but he ignored the 3 holes in the ceiling and was lured by the treasure. Perhaps you could have had a Perception check to notice moving shadows or something, but it was a surprise and the group was lucky the monk went ahead and not the mage. If it was, you could have the rest of the group hear the fighting and be only a round or two behind, unless the group said otherwise.

 

[Blue Orange]

In case it's relevant, here's a list of the most common party compositions in an older thread:

D&D 5E - Here's The Most Common D&D Party Composition

D&D Beyond's latest data-output looks at the composition of the typical adventuring party. The 'traditional' party always used to be Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard; let's see how that stacks up these days! These screenshots were compiled by SageAdvice.eu. DDB's developer said "I’m going to be...

www.enworld.org

Very broadly, parties of 4 are usually some variant of fighter/barbarian, cleric, thief, wizard/sorcerer, though mixed-use classes like the druid or bard can step in for one of them sometimes. Parties of 3 most commonly drop the wizard/sorcerer, and parties of 5 most commonly add a bard, druid, paladin, or ranger, and interestingly sometimes swap out the wizard/sorcerer for a warlock, though in each case there's a huge amount of variation, and the most common variation is still <1% (except for parties of 8, and given the percentage numbers are a clean 0.6% and 1.2% I suspect we had a small sample size of exactly 167 or something).

 

[cmad1977]

I take no notice of the composition of the group. They are who they are and they’ll face what they face. That said, IMX, the classes can handle themselves without a ‘healer’ or a ‘tank’.

As a player I like to pick late and fill a role… I should probably make a character instead… and I think most/all of the people I play with are similar.