Smaller Parties?

[Stormborn]

Anyone have experiance, on insight, running 4e with parties smaller than 5 and if so what were the challanges you had? I have two players and in 3.x or similar we tend to run 2 PCs each, sometimes with temporary NPC allies depending on the adventure. When I had 3 players we tended to play one each and usually compensated for the lack of a 4th with extra magic items or houserules or the like. Given a new edition I am reluctant to have players running 2 PCs, at least at first, nor do I want to neccesarilly have a NPC heavy party to compensate.

Thoughts or solutions?

 

[Zetesofos]

I ran a party of 4, and we managed to cover all the roles, so no problems. With smaller parties, it's all about roles really. With three, you can usually have no problems if you drop having a striker. With two, a leader and defender can probably survive a good sized army of their level. If you settle on using multiple strikers/controllers with no leaders/defenders, As a DM, I would design encoutners that don't use monsters that attack those weakness.

Defenders > Brutes > Leaders
Controllers > Soldiers > Strikers
Controllers > Minions > Strikers
Strikers > Artillery > Controllers
Strikers > Artillery > Defenders
Leaders > Controllers > Defenders

This isn't a hard and fast rule by any means, just what I've observed.

 

[Palladion]

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=231586
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=231809

There were at least two previous threads with the same question, I think a lot of people are in your situation. I could not really summarize for you, but there are lots of great suggestions.

Hope that helps...

 

[Stormborn]

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=231586
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?t=231809

There were at least two previous threads with the same question, I think a lot of people are in your situation. I could not really summarize for you, but there are lots of great suggestions.

Hope that helps...

Thanks I figured I wasnt the first.

 

[blargney the second]

We have a 4e game that started with just two players. My girlfriend made a drow rogue and I played both an eladrin warlord(wizard) and a minotaur fighter. We worked out pretty decently.

The core is really having a leader for healing and a defender for buckets of hit points and stickiness. If your players aren't relatively newbie gamers, let one or more of them play two PCs. This works best if they've done some DMing before, so multiple personalities won't overwhelm them.

One big thing to be aware of: with less PCs the party will have less skills available, so some skill challenges will be impossible. That's where getting a striker comes in handy - they've got different skill sets.
-blarg

 

[JDillard]

The mixed roles classes can really help too. A paladin and warlock team (defender with some leader aspects and striker with some controller aspects) will generally do better than say, Ranger and Wizard or some other combination.

It's definitely do-able. The DM also really need to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of the characters played. If they do go with more of a Ranger/Wizard team, they're probably going to have a lot more trouble with skirmisher monsters than with brutes. A good ranged ranger can run (I believe the MMO term is "kite") a brute around the battlefield, but skirmishers are designed to be just as mobile as the ranger.

 

[frankthedm]

I say go two PCs each! Plenty of character options to explore and battlefields will be chocked full of enemies galore!