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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lehrbuch" data-source="post: 7275209" data-attributes="member: 6811402">Not really. "Parties of adventurers" from literature are quite different from a D&D party.Ensemble groups of characters from literature tend to:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Have wildly divergent level of capabilities. Usually, one or two "hero" "party members" are a whole lot more capable than all the others, who may as well not be there from an overall capability perspective (but may be nonetheless important from a story perspective). There is no nonsense about everyone having an equal chance to "shine". This is radically different from a D&D party, where everyone is the same level, are approximately equally "useful" and grow in capability together.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Often have a lot of duplication/replication in capability area. Literature "parties" tend to be all warriors, or all wizards, or almost all dwarves, or similar. They are hardly ever "one of each" parties, like the typical D&D party. This is because "one of each" parties don't really arise naturally that often from stories. A notable exception is the Fellowship of the Ring, but there party composition explicitly arises from an in-character desire to make the party represent a kind-of-UN-of-nations against Sauron rather than much to do with concerns about capability niches. This is very different to a D&D party.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Often are very dysfunctional. Betrayal, rivalries, sabotage, self-destruction, etc. are common in literature "parties" --- because that is an interesting human story. In fact, that is the story. The plot/quest is often just window-dressing to move the scenes along. Whereas most DMs/players sensibly do not try to have very dysfunctional parties. And the structure is usually the opposite in D&D: the plot is the story, and any intra-party banter / rivalry is just something to enliven the moments between the plot.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Often split-up. As I said before, it's boring and confusing to read about large parties of adventurers, so authors usually find reasons to split large parties into smaller more manageable groups, which the narration jumps between (or maybe the narration only follows one fragment). This is the opposite of typical D&D sessions, where DM and players usually avoid splitting the party. Which is probably partly because dealing with a split party is more complicated for the DM, but mostly to do with the fact that it is boring listening to other people play the game, when you have shown up to play your character.</li> </ul>So, I think that literature which has "parties of adventurers" is only very superficially influential on the idea of a D&D party. It seems like many features of "parties" in literature are explicitly opposite in the typical D&D party.</blockquote>

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