Perfect Party Size?

[Stomphoof]

In 4th Edition, what seems to be the "perfect" party size?

4 people? 5? I only have 2 players and while its pretty easy for each of them to run 2 characters (Basically 1 is an RP character and the other is a personal minion) I would have to run a NPC if 5 is the "magic number"

Or does it seem doable to run a 2 person party with only 2 PC's and not run into too many crazy issues?

 

[Nail]

I, too, am up against this problem.

I'll be runing H1 in June with 2 players. We've tenatively decided that each player gets 2 PCs, and I'll run a 5th PC as an NPC. I'm afraid the game will be more of a S.W.A.T. demo than role-play, but sobeit.

 

[Boarstorm]

Well, for my eleventy-first birthday, I invited 240 close friends, but to be honest it was a bit tepid. I'd say we really needed another twenty or thirty to really get things hopping.

Serious answer: So long as you design the encounters to account for the party size, I can see just about any size working just fine. That said, the published adventures (well, H1, anyway) are keyed to five players, as are the example encounters, so I'm guessing that's WotC's idea of ideal.

 

[Nightchilde-2]

I think the game's assumption is five players, from everything I can tell. HOWEVER, the DMG does have good guidelines for parties of different size, including how to adjust the treasure parcels accordingly. And the way encounter building works, it's pretty easy to scale.

 

[hectorse]

I guess you can reverse engineer H1 pretty easily with the rules given in the DMG (best DMG ever imho)