Small party composition

[Mr. Teapot]

I saw a suggestion elsewhere (and really like it) that a good two man party would be a paladin and a warlock. The paladin is a Defender with a dash of Leader (buffs and heals and such), while the Warlock is a Striker with some Controller type abilities (negative statuses, forced movement, possibly area damage abilities).

And you get a cool "Good Cop/Bad Cop" character dynamic going, if you take straight paladin and warlock stereotypes. (Or, since paladins can be any alignment you could reverse expectations and play an evil paladin and a Good aligned Fey pact warlock.)

 

[JohnSnow]

I think some judicious multiclassing might be necessary to make exceptionally small parties work. For example, I could totally see the following group:

Fighter
Ranger/Warlord
Wizard

It's a little light on healing, but you'd have a pretty diverse list of abilities. Consider classic adventuring pairs like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and you'll see that the characters in small parties are almost always multiclassed. For instance, I'd stat the twain as follows:

Fafhrd - Fighter/Ranger/Warlord
Grey Mouser - Rogue/Wizard/Fighter

It's worth noting that both of them probably started out with modest multiclassing (just the first 2 classes mentioned) and only picked up the further diversification later in their careers.