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

[Ruin Explorer]

IDK, this feels like yesterdays hot take. 3E's vast gulf of effectiveness in system made GMing it a nightmare (and I say this as someone who prefers PF1 to this day). I think the complaints of unbalanced parties was entirely justified and expecting a GM to correct everything is a big ask. Modern designed games have been much better, albeit in some confining ways, at making the gap completely manageable.

I tend to agree.

I feel like 5E doesn't really need a "balanced party", so long as the DM is sensible enough to realize that they have to play the campaign for the characters they have, not the characters they want. 5E's main demands are actually just specific spells to counter specific monster abilities, usually after the fact, and the PCs have access to a magic item or NPCs or w/e to deal with the same stuff, even that can go away.

4E just needed you to really include at least one Leader and honestly... that was it. The rest of the roles, it didn't really matter, so long as you had at least one Leader, you were fine.

 

[Wolfpack48]

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'm equally a strong believer in bright, sharp lines between the domains of the players and GMs, and GMs essentially "soft-mandating" a balanced party is them making a hostile, aggressive foray into the territory of player agency. One of the earliest and most important pieces of player agency is that within the context of the setting and what is available, they can play whatever characters that they want to.

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 am tending to agree, but only insomuch as players should have the freedom to play what they want. That said, I often see players ask "what would be a good fit for the party?" if they are entering an established game. So they are thinking in terms of complementary roles too. I would be more concerned it got into min-maxers dominating other players and telling them how to create or play their characters for "optimal efficiency." If that min-maxer is the GM, even worse.

The best games are ones where folks are playing the way they like to play, and the GM is servicing up opportunities and challenges for all playstyles, ensuring everyone has a chance to shine.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Nothing wrong. It just drives me nuts when players assume that they must make a certain type of character.

LOL why you gotta call me out like this?

Most of my 5E characters have been "fill-in" characters for what I perceived the party to be lacking. Usually someone with healing/restorative magic or y'know, actual skills as opposed to the mix of Barbarians, Paladins, Sorcerers and Warlocks that seem to be the majority of classes I end up playing with.

Fortunately I enjoy playing Bards/Clerics/Druids, especially in 5E where they're not rubbish or weird. Well Druids kind of are but that's a long story.

 

[Desdichado]

The only case at this point then of the balanced party paradigm being an issue is the folks that take it to every RPG they play. I'd say the issue then is more with the D&D template itself and its outsized influence on RPGs in general. Busting D&d of the paradigm entirely is tilting at windmills.

Indeed, that's why it's a hot take. I'm saying that I'm going against a well-established grain that I dislike.

If you're willing to make the tangent, I would probably need to know how you define "paleo-trad".

For me, I view trad as being epitomized by 1990s play advice, and rules built around that play advice, from predominantly White Wolf and 2e AD&D. Setting is king, immersion in the setting is of primary importance, and the players using defined rules to leverage agency over the story is generally frowned upon. The goal is to be part of the DM's story and world.

I actually think referring to story and narrative is a red herring. It's more about immersion and roleplaying, and ditching (at least to some degree) the tactical dungeon-crawling experience as the main goal of play. In fact, the idea that story; the GM's or anyone else's, is the millstone around trad's neck, and people who try to do that create "bad trad" which doesn't work very well. The over-focus on "telling a story" doesn't work and everyone, even who play in a trad style, are usually very cautious and wary of railroads. That's a feature of "bad trad" while effective "good trad" retains flexibility and improvisation rather than scripted expected outcomes.

Another bad habit that comes of out trad played poorly is "my precious character syndrome", which has morphed into neotrad, I guess, but by that point, the goals of play are quite different, so just because it's poor trad doesn't mean that it's bad for neotrad.

This is what I mean by paleo-trad, I suppose; trad games played with immersion and RPing as a primary goal, a de-emphasis on classic or OSR like elements, like pawn-based exploration of a dungeon, "beating the dungon" type of tournament-legacy stuff, etc. Characters are still vulnerable and need to be cautious (more like early 80s CoC trad rather than 90s V:tM super-trad) and its run with a healthy skepticism of "the GM's story"; utilizing only broad, high level outlines rather than something as scripted and linear as, say, an Adventure Path or something like that.

 

[Desdichado]

I don't, however, agree that DMs soft-mandating a balanced party is a hostile, aggressive foray into player agency. Setting up a campaign always involves someone making a pitch and seeing if the group agrees to buy in. A DM suggesting a more traditional D&D campaign that they have in mind isn't doing anything to player agency - the players still have the choice to buy in or not. Maybe they agree to participate, maybe they don't and they move on to the next pitch. Any agreement to participate - whether in a traditional balanced party campaign or a more focused one - means they're agreeing that they may be limiting some of their choices, whether as players or the DM, in the future to match the premise of the campaign. That's no assault on anyone's agency as a player.

If that's explicitly part of the campaign as pitched to the group, then yeah. I've rarely seen pitches like that, however. 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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

balanced across time

The trouble is this only works across a sufficiently long campaign, otherwise it's just unbalanced, as we saw extensively back in the days when it happened.

Also it seems to encourage some design with PCs who "start weak and become strong", which is just terrible awful disaster-tier design, because it means those PCs are boring to play, and basically deadweight on the rest of the party at low levels, then rapidly become completely OP and invalidate the rest of the party at higher levels. Which is fine in some single-player CRPGs, but totally rubbish on the tabletop. You don't have to do that of course, but I struggle to think of a "different XP tables" RPG where that doesn't happen.

Except maybe RIFTS, but that's just because some Rifts RCCs (and even a couple of OCCs) are broken OP to start with and just stay that way!

 

[Scribe]

No harm if one wants to play with a 'everything goes' party, but for my dollar, I would fill to make sure we have a balanced group if given the opportunity.

Its just how I prefer the game be played, and I think it provides a better group experience.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The trouble is this only works across a sufficiently long campaign, otherwise it's just unbalanced, as we saw extensively back in the days when it happened.

I tend to favor long term campaigns

Also it seems to encourage some design with PCs who "start weak and become strong", which is just terrible awful disaster-tier design, because it means those PCs are boring to play, and basically deadweight on the rest of the party at low levels, then rapidly become completely OP and invalidate the rest of the party at higher levels. Which is fine in some single-player CRPGs, but totally rubbish on the tabletop. You don't have to do that of course, but I struggle to think of a "different XP tables" RPG where that doesn't happen.

I think this is very much YMMV. I personally love start weak get stong over time

 

[TwoSix]

This is what I mean by paleo-trad, I suppose; trad games played with immersion and RPing as a primary goal, a de-emphasis on classic or OSR like elements, like pawn-based exploration of a dungeon, "beating the dungon" type of tournament-legacy stuff, etc. Characters are still vulnerable and need to be cautious (more like early 80s CoC trad rather than 90s V:tM super-trad) and its run with a healthy skepticism of "the GM's story"; utilizing only broad, high level outlines rather than something as scripted and linear as, say, an Adventure Path or something like that.

A loose sandbox with relatively weak characters, mostly driven by the DM coming up with "fun encounters"?

I would generally call that "casual play". It lacks the intensity of focus to have a specific agenda and playstyle.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think this is very much YMMV. I personally love start weak get stong over time

Of course you do. You get to basically do nothing for the first few levels, whilst other PCs have to work really hard, and you can just shrug and say "I can't do much!", plus they have to protect you, because you're vulnerable as hell, then you get to be grossly OP and do whatever the hell you want. It's like growing up as an extremely rich kid.

It's not like its a mystery why some people love "everyone has to protect me until I get to be grossly OP" lol is it? But its not good design, nor interesting design for anyone but the OP people. Everyone else gets kind of shoved aside.