What are the examples of good justification of party size limit?

[Beastro]

Charisma isn't really about appearance though, more force of personality and natural leadership talent. Having high charisma lets you smooth over the personality conflicts that will inevitably pop up when you have a group of various people in stressful situations, enabling parties to work that would have broken apart under a less able leader.

This can be abstracted as allowing a larger party.

Took three pages for someone to post this.

Your average sociopath is a good example of this at work, though in the more manipulative manner charisma (Which is something I feel has been neglected when it comes to Charisma, even with Speech in FO games being tied to it), can be used for and they're not known for something like abnoramlly stunning good looks or anything.

Fellowship of the Ring was a party of nine. That's a pretty good metric to go by if there must be a limit to party size. Historically, some of the best computer role-playing games have had eight character parties.

The Fellowship also fell apart from in-party fighting after 1 dungeon and a handful of random encounters.

Rare loot always causes drama.

 

[Freddie]

IRL military forces all have settled on dividing people into groups of 3-4 people for fireteams who combine into a squad of 8-12 people. This is considered to be a fairly optimal amount of people for combat tasks that every country has learned through millions of deaths in WW1/2 and so on. Beyond this a group simply can't function well and react to threats in a consistently good manner. Taking this into account, 4 is a good number for first person games where the player is taking part and operating the fireteam while 8+ works for more strategic games.

Simply getting a group of dozens of people together and throwing them into a battle does not work IRL without a good command structure (which it's assumed most player groups don't have, being adventurers or w/e). The offense would quickly degenerate into a simple unruly mob charging the enemy and then running away if things looked bad. In game terms it would be unmicroable with everyone acting on their own instincts. Which is kind of what the enemy parties are doing in most RPGs, just a random mass of enemies charging the player characters who are expected to win by fighting more effectively.

Best justification--Fallout 1, 2, and Arcanum: Party size is determined by charisma; ugly people have fewer friends. Makes sense to me. Not a big deal for Fallout because there are so few useful people. In Arcanum it's more noticeable because of the larger roster.

Worst--Dungeon Siege 2. You only get 2 party members until you pay a ridiculous sum of money to an arbitrary guild. Then you get 3.

You got it all wrong. There is no justification why only supermodels can have big parties. Do you think all ancient generals were supermodels? How could they lead hundreds of thousands if people with best possible charisma could only lead like 6 people? Fallout 1,2 and Arcanaum are all wrong.

Charisma is more than just being pretty. It's a good general stat for how well the player takes charge of the group, is able to smooth out problems and otherwise keep people in line through good nature and force of will. Without it people start bitching at each other from the normal annoyances they have traveling with others and the group ends up splitting.

Very good post. I have few things to add.

Adventuring is extraordinary choice. From Fantasy to Cyberpunk most citizens have their more or less ordinary life and are more or less content with it. They have responsibilities, family matters and other concerns to attend. Sometimes there isn't that much population to begin with. In settings where there are huge cities, there are also other groups of adventurers, so number of potential adventurers is also limited that way.