Hot take: get rid of the "balanced party" paradigm

[kigmatzomat]

It's usually more a case of the GM simply can't imagine a different way to play, so when you don't get someone who's specialized in turning undead or disarming traps, the GM screws them over with a campaign that has a lot of that kind of stuff in it anyway.

When I see if players want to be in a game, I have the basic world events planned for 18-24 months of game sessions. I don't revise those based on party make up. I revise them based on player agency.

And honestly, when the NPCs tailor their actions to the party, it is generally NOT to the benefit of the party.

I.e. Star Wars. I have the Emperor, Vader, the Resistance and various factions' major actions planned. The Rebels will get info on how to attack the Death Star. Yoda is on Degobah.

I don't dictate means or methods. Players get to make their characters and deal with the consequences. This sometimes ends up with the heroes being "short for a stormtrooper" or lacking a character with the social skills to say something other than "everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you?"

It also means that after they blow up a Death Star and get some fame, the Empire takes advantage of Han Solo's rep to involve the Hutts when imperial spies indicate the rebela are going to Bespin.

Did I expect Luke flying off to Degobah now? No, I figured that would be after the Bespin adventure. So without a proto-Jedi to sense Vader's arrival, the Empire gets the drop on the party so Han winds up in carbonite. Then Luke shows up late and alone, suffers a critical hit and is down a hand.

Player agency comes with consequences. That's what makes it agency. I don't know what the outcome is in advance when players get involved, but I know what the NPCs would do in their absence.

 

[Panzeh]

I think it's important if all you're really doing in your game is dungeon SWAT team stuff, then yeah it needs to be kinda optimal for that. But I think, there's a lot of kinds of balance that are important especially in other kinds of games.

For example, i do think it's important that everybody have something in the world they can do well, at least something. More importantly, in high-interaction games, it's important that there be perspectives and chances for characters to riff off of one another. In my paranormal GURPS game that's almost more important than capabilities, really.

 

[billd91]

Does the idea of having a balanced party even come from a specific game or publication or is it just a (my favorite term) social construct?

Any game in which a PC build has limited resources to the point they can’t excel at everything useful to the game, a balanced(-ish) party can be expected to do better than an unbalanced one. An unbalanced party then becomes viable as the group pares down the options in the game itself. For example, an all-fighter party won’t likely access extraplanar adventures in D&D and the DM should avoid loading the campaign with opposition/puzzles that require the party to have magic to overcome. In Call of Cthulhu, an all antiquarian group should probably stick to mysteries that are well solved by their skills and academic knowledge than raiding cultist rites and ceremonies.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Or, in character as the PCs, go out and recruit NPC adventurers to fill out the missing roles in the party! Just because there's only four players at the table doesn't by any means limit the adventuring party to only having four characters in it. If the players in a D&D game all decide to play Wizards that's fine; after a turn or two in the field they'll very likely realize they're short on brawn and healing and - one would think - would recruit NPCs* to help out. Those NPCs could be henches, or full-ride party members, or whatever...but the end result is the party is more balanced yet the players still get to play the PCs they want to. * - or second characters for the players, but not every table allows this.

Yes, good point. This addresses the fundamental situation that makes the hot take become highlighted. It's still a balanced party though, just not balanced playing-player's-PCs or however one phrases that.

I wonder how many of these hot takes are reactions to some one-off bad con experience.

I think 'hot take: ' ends up being synonymous with 'thought experiment:' most of the time. OP seems to have run into some really bad times across multiple DMs or campaigns, which instigated the thread. I do question -- given OP's framing of the situation as passive aggression and outright bad behavior -- whether the instigating events were more contingent on truly bad DMs than about the specific DMing techniques or assumptions those DMs implemented.

Does the idea of having a balanced party even come from a specific game or publication or is it just a (my favorite term) social construct?

A/D&D specific: People have found references in the 1E DMG and modules and such and I agree with them. On the other hand, I'm not sure if it really matters whether it was specifically stated or not (I certainly don't think it was stated in all of the different rules editions). Any number of people played 1E bitd as B/X with new class and spell lists and never played modules, yet still stumbled into feeling this assumption.
I think it is because there are inherent road markers for it -- certain negative effects need cleric (sometimes MU) spells to remove*. Traps are an established component of the explained basic play loop, and all the rulesets post-oD&D** said or at least suggested that only Thieves could find many-to-most traps. MUs and Thieves were fragile enough*** that it was clear that there were supposed to be fighters up front keeping the hostiles away from the back line (although henchmen can definitely address this, see Lanefan's point above). Just the abundance of treasure (and how clear it was a main focus of the game to get to use it) that was class-specific really communicates 'it is a really good idea to cover all these bases.'
*often with an urgency that a trek back to town for temple-healing will be too-little, too late
**where they weren't initially part of the game, and the assumption was anyone could find traps, they just could do so by rolling dice instead of explaining their methods
***and clerics able to use so few magic weapons

Other games: There's a huge variety in how well other games even communicate their assumed central play loops at all, much less expectations about how best to play them. There's also a lot of variability in how much there are discrete classes or roles to begin with (and how much they gatekeep various abilities which may or may not be vital to standard play).

 

[Lanefan]

Hotter take: get rid of the party.

It, as a concept, basically obliterates player agency. You can't have any independent goals, not really, because the moment your own schemes get in the way of the wider goals of the party, congratulations, you cannot play the game anymore!

Well, you can still play the game, but you're playing solo with the GM either out-of-session or while the rest of the group sits and watches.

Also, PC-to-PC relationships are the most interesting ones, and constraining them to cooperation is just a waste.

With this I very much agree.

That said, I see a lot of open ground between "forced co-operation" and "can't play the game any more", most of which involves allowing CvC play and allowing characters to work at cross purposes. This way the players can still be together at the table and yet the characters are each doing their own things in the fiction when they can and working together-ish during those times when they have a common goal e.g. "get rich quick" or "save the town from invaders" or whatever.

The CvC piece does, however, require and almost demand that players be (or become) able to divorce their own emotions from those of their characters such that when Jill's character Ranterie totally double-crosses Bob's character Castlan in the game, Jill and Bob remain friends at the table.

 

[Lanefan]

Does the idea of having a balanced party even come from a specific game or publication or is it just a (my favorite term) social construct?

I suspect it's neither. 1e D&D did have some encouragement toward a well-rounded party (not sure if it was in the PH or DMG though); but for the most part my guess is the idea of having a balanced (as in, well-rounded) party came mostly from player-side trial and error - as in, not so much a social construct as a tangible expression of increased player skill.

 

[bloodtide]

I'm a strong believer in the idea of chucking the "balanced party" paradigm.

I've played games where every character was a rogue. I've played games with no healing. I've played games with all magic users. I've played games with all fighters. They all work. They may require a bit of rejiggering on the GM side, but... so what? That's the job.

I got rid of the "balanced party" long ago.

The whole idea of balance got it start in the simple, direct RPGs like 1E D&D. Games that were intentionally designed to be very limited in their forms of game play. 1E was very much hexcrawl....move explore combat and repeat. And 1E was most about the dungeon. And so the balanced party here was the simple ''having a thief to pick a locked door". Born out of the fairly simple horror of some games having four fighters stuck in a room and unable to get past a locked door. And this could end the game.

Though starting in 1E, there was already a movement towards role playing.......leading too:

2E really made the push to the wondrous role playing. Tossing the books off the table and just role playing. 2E really moved away from the "dungeon with a door" that needs a "thief with the lock pick skill". The game world of 2E was anything and everything and more. In 2E a single character could have a lot of varied abilities, not tied to one thing. This created the huge mismatch of not having "ability A to overcome problem A".

And, most of all, pure role playing....the "acting" type. Where any character can just pull out an axe and chop down a door WITHOUT any rolls or rules or "ability to chop wood skill".

The real crown jewel of this was all the adventures. An adventure to recover a lost elven crown, and the introduction says "a balanced party with an elf is needed". Not because the elf has some +1 to elf reactions, but because under pure role playing acting that the NPC elves will 'like' a PC elf better then other PCs. And a player could really role play this, no matter what their character sheet says.

3X moves back to the mechanical rules, but keeps lots of abilities and classes and roles.. Roll X to do X using rule X. Except they keep the wide world of encountering anything....but now all players limit themselves to only rule mechanical rolls. So when the encounter something like a locked door.....then look on their character sheet for an ability that says "open door", if they can't find it, the game just stops.

And 5E ish is somewhere between 3-5, but with nearly all players stuck on only playing the mechanical character sheet.


It is far time to drop the "balanced party" idea

 

[cbwjm]

I remember there was an adventure that required an all elf party, and this was for BECMI so elf was the class. This meant no thief or cleric (though maybe elves if alfheim was out so that the elves still had healing magic) so just a bunch of fighter/wizards running around.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Honestly I don't understand why this is a big enough deal to debate. Some games lean more toward encouraging party composition, some less. But even in the games that, in theory, assume party balance, the GM has a lot of tools to mitigate that. If that's what everybody at the table wants.

 

[Composer99]

Where I would push back is that the approach you mention I don't view as "bad DMing", with the important caveat that the focus of play is explicitly stated upfront.

If the DM tells the players "This game is a sandbox, nothing in it changes whether you play 4 wizards or 4 paladins", then to me the onus is on the players to accept those terms and make appropriate characters. If they don't like that game construction, then it needs to be brought up in session zero.

Participants (both DMs and players) who say "No, that kind of game is fine" while secretly resenting the game direction and then undercut/don't engage with the game are the worst kinds of participants.

I was planning on basically saying this exact thing, more or less.

I would add that for a more tightly-focused game, it's well within the DM/GM's purview to state "this campaign requires a balanced party composition of synergistic specialists" or something to that effect.

Either way, it seems to me that the DM/GM misdemeanours the OP is criticising are actually one of the following:

• The DM/GM wants to run a game that requires or rewards synergistic specialisation by the player characters and penalises parties that are non-synergistic or anti-synergistic, and doesn't tell the players upfront that is what they want to do.
• The DM/GM agrees to run a game that doesn't pressure party composition, and then ends up running a game that instead penalises non-synergistic or anti-synergistic party composition, whether willfully or unwittingly.