I'm a strong believer in the idea of chucking the "balanced party" paradigm. If a GM is passive-aggressively punishing players for playing the characters that they want to by making them fail if they don't have all of the roles from classic D&D TV Tropes party, then he needs to take a step back and reevaluate his game, or touch grass, or whatever the cool kids are saying these days. You're responsible for the game. If it doesn't fit the characters that came to the table, then that's a significant failure of GMing.
I strongly disagree.
I come at this from three paradigms informing the stance I'll outline. MMO tactical group gameplay, being a veteran, and the quirky one: being a fan of classic shows like Scooby Doo.
Even a civilian informed genre show like 'The A-Team' has elements of what I feel is important.
The first two of these inform how I feel
a balanced party is important in games with an action or dangerous mission focus.
I would never willingly go into a firefight with a pack of 4 random dubiously motivated civilians and no chain of command. It happens - but that's what games like Call of Cthulhu are for, and when you want story out of it, that's why I mentioned Scooby Doo.
When you're intending to go into danger, planning for it, you get down to business and coordinate team composition, tactics, and chain of command.
I get that most players will NOT stand for the last point. I'd have to be playing with veterans and cops to get that most likely. People who understood it, understood doing it right and not 'main character syndrome style', and understood that it wasn't going to 'cramp their roleplay'.
This is why I have all of 'negative 5' tolerance for the 'lone wolf drama' player. Those kinds of people do not survive contact with the enemy and get their unit killed.
A balanced party, to me, means coordinating roles and tasks around the build of the characters. The players might be a pack of nerds who haven't been withing 1000 miles of a real situation, but their characters are people from a world where that risk is on the other side of every door (assuming most gaming worlds - exceptions exist, I'll get to those LATER - again, why I noted Scooby).
Gaming-geeks, of which I am also one, should get that in something like an MMO raid
you build a team comp to compliment each other and get the task done. Real world tactical units try to do the same thing, but with different metrics. The important take-away is you come to the table prepared to contribute, with skills/ability/gear that benefit the overall comp, and with coordination in mind.
I'm not listing a specific comp here because that varies by the situation. But the mindset of 'team player' doesn't.
The typical 'set of 4-5 randos in a tavern' that so many players go for should TPK. They deserve to.
For a non-action game. Be it story, mystery, comedy, whatever... I pull from my Scooby Reference.
You still have a team comp, but it's designed around story. You need the 'straight man' (Fred), the 'brain' (Velma), the comic relief (Shaggy), the face (Daphne), and 'maybe' the mascot / quirky gap filler (Scooby). Or some thought to concepts like that. For example if your personal reference was the 90s show Friends you could build almost the same list. You build your 'party balance' around ideas to push story.
A story based game with 4-5 "nonchalant lone wolves' goes nowhere.
Story / drama games have a whole different kind of balance. Here you are building so that each character has an angle to get spotlight time, but none of them hogs that spotlight. It's actually a very tricky balance to get right. But it's just as important as tactical balance in an action game. You need to ensure no one ends up as a Mary Sue Main Character nor a wallflower.
This is NOT a duty you force on the GM.
The Players need to engineer their characters for the best results in both action and story based games. And if you're a mix themed game / campaign - they need to do both.
It's on the players, not the GM, to make characters that work well together.
