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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 8322884" data-attributes="member: 6677017">4 players, but 5 or 6 characters.I can go with 3 or 5 players easily, and I ran 6 once without a problem. How well players are able to invest and stay focused is huge. If everyone is present and accounted for mentally the whole time, 6 is great fun--but that can be difficult to get consistently with online play, even with players heavily invested in their character and the campaign. The temptation to zone out (or more likely multi-task) when it won't be your turn for a bit and no one can see you is too much.But as far as characters go I'm never satisfied with a D&D party of less than 5 characters (outside of a short adventure), because it rarely manages to cover enough of the bases for that D&D experience for me. Sure, it would be unwieldy to have one each of all 12 classes, but by golly would I like to feel like all the main conceptual categories are covered.So that means I want to see one of each of these categories (parentheticals only half fill a role).1) Full arcanist: Wizard, Sorcerer, (Warlock)2) Holy Person: Cleric, (Druid, Paladin)3) Front Line Warrior (You want at least 1.5 of these): Fighter, Ranger, Paladin, Barbarian, (Others)4) Rogue (I know you don't need a Rogue for locks and traps, but it just feels wrong not to have one)5) Wilderness Adept: Druid, Ranger, (Barbarian)6) Social Adept: Bard, Rogue, (Other)7) Prepared Full Caster: Cleric, Druid, WizardEven though there are multiple classes that can fill each role (and some creative ways of leveraging other classes or subclasses), usually about the only times it feels to me like one character is fully filling two roles is with Prepared Full Caster, or social Rogue.More often, you can end up with characters that can fill 1.5 roles, and stick them together to cover the bases. But the more characters there are, the easier it is to have room for characters that are extra/supplemental, like Monks or Warlocks.There are many ways to cover everything with a 6 character setup. Here's a classic example:Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard, Ranger, BardHere's the two most efficient 4-character setups I could think of off the top of my head (you need the Druid, Cleric, or Rogue built as a partial front line warrior), and there aren't many more ways to pull it off with only 4:Paladin, Druid, Rogue, WizardRanger, Cleric, Rogue, SorcererThe less characters I have, the more limited the ways to fill all the categories, and the less room for characters who don't.Here's the setup of our current 5 characters party:Fighter, Rogue (Swashbuckler), Warlock (Blade), Bard, Warrior-Mage (custom class: most of Wizard capability, and decent backup front line warrior--think Bladesinger but shifted just slightly from wizard towards martial).Here's how it fits.1) Full arcanist: Warrior-Mage, (Warlock)2) Holy Person: --3) Front Line Warrior: Fighter (Warlock, Rogue, Warrior-Mage)4) Rogue5) Wilderness Adept: --6) Social Adept: Bard, Rogue7) Prepared Full Caster: Warrior-MageSo you can see that we're doing great in 3 and 6, and we have covered 1, 4, and 7, but we have failed to cover 2 and 5. Conceptually, the Warlock gets his pact from a deity and has Piety, so he's the closest thing to a holy person role. (But his patron is CE in a good-leaning party, so that makes our sole divine connection pretty non-standard). For the Wilderness role, the Bard has Nature and the Warrior-Mage has Survival, and that just doesn't feel like it thematically totally fills the role. And something I learned after many sessions of play, is that ideally we'd want a second prepared caster (could be a half caster, so Paladin or Artificer would work) to feel like it's totally checking that box. Casters with a limited list of known spells just feel like they are less castery in D&D.The party is fun and it works, but Turn Undead would sure be handy, in addition to the thematic under-representations.Now, this isn't to say that every game needs to check all if those boxes. I sometimes like to run theme adventures (10-15 session mini-campaigns) where everyone plays classes with the same theme, or even the same class. Our Questing Knights adventure had knights of the following classes: Fighter (Battle Master, because there wasn't Cavalier yet), Paladin (Devotion), Cleric (War), and Ranger (Hunter). With only 4 characters, no one got to play the Valor Bard knight idea, or a non-knight Wizard or Cleric (Knowledge) as a wise companion role. I'm planning to run a martial arts theme adventures where everyone plays a Monk, chosen from a list of most subclasses, plus possibly one companion who could be a Samurai, Cleric, or Monk (Way of Shadows (Ninja) or Kensei). Getting to see the differences in styles amongst the different subclasses is part of the theme, and even if we leave out the Tasha's Monks that I don't like, that's still 5 subclasses to potentially be available, and each party member less than 6 means we don't get to see one of them.So basically, it is difficult to balance covering enough bases for maximum D&D fun without making the group potentially unwieldy.</blockquote>

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