Build or recruit a party?

[Shin]

I voted build your own party, mainly because recruiting often ends up with limited character choices which can make more unorthodox parties impossible, specially if the companions have a lot of writing depth. That's p. much the only problem, since even with recruiting dudes nothing stops it from allowing you to set all their stats.

I don't really care much about numbers, people obsess with having 6+ parties because most games have banal, shit, boring combat mechanics. Of course if half your party is condemned to (A)ttack, (B)lock and (M)ove you better have plenty of dudes to have a semblance of tactics. That said, I think bigger parties tend to be better because they allow for more variety in roster and gives the developer more freedom to design encounters and add more lethal mechanics.

Small parties are specially a problem with D&D-like games, with 4 dudes for instance, you're condemned to having a fighter to frontline, a thief to deal with traps and locks, and mage for control and aoe, and a cleric for support. So you're basically left with a cookie-cutter party, it can perhaps be salvaged a bit with multiclassing if it's supported but it's still not ideal.

This is slightly off-topic, but you made me wonder if there are any D&D modules where you take more then your 6 players? Why not have 12 or 18 players? Probably a totally retarded idea but I'd think that having an army of adventurers might be fun.

 

[Tripicus]

This is slightly off-topic, but you made me wonder if there are any D&D modules where you take more then your 6 players? Why not have 12 or 18 players? Probably a totally retarded idea but I'd think that having an army of adventurers might be fun.

A lot of AD&D modules would often advertise the recommended party as 4-8 characters of #total levels, with a level range.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Fenris 2.0]

is there a party limit in toee with co8? I know you can raise it, but dont know how much

You can have up to 8 Characters in your Party, you have to choose how many in the Co8 Start Menu - if you choose 8 self created Characters you can't recruit NPCs (this includes Escort Quests IIRC). Vanilla Settings are 5 created and 3 joinable Characters.

 

[Zombra]

I like making all the characters, not necessarily to maximize combat efficiency, but because I can explore the system better that way. If I have 8 characters to screw around with in my party build, I might be able to make a guy who can't fight at all but is an expert on translating languages, stuff like that, and still be able to play the game. I guess I like making specialists.

Story is actually pretty important to me in RPGs, but often I find myself hating (or worse, being bored by) prewritten companions. I think it's best for NPCs (not CNPCs) to carry the story.

One big issue for me in party generation is character voices. Looking at the IE games or TOEE, the voices are kind of disappointing. They don't really breathe life into the characters, and actually make them feel flatter. I feel a stronger connection to my silent Wasteland 2 or Fallout characters than to my IE characters. But Wizardry 8's voice system is exceptional. They went all the way with tons of personalities to choose from, and they deliberately made them quite extreme and as a result very memorable. Admittedly, this makes the PCs less my creations and more Sir-Tech's, but it doesn't matter because the writing and acting is so charming. I think it helps that the characters' animated faces appear whenever they talk. Wiz8 was also an improvement on Jagged Alliance in that the personalities were not linked to premade, pre-statted characters. I could make a lizard man fighter with the scholar voice, or a wizard who talked like a gorilla, so I still felt "in charge" creatively. Of course I love Jagged Alliance too, and in that series recruiting guys with built-in faults and strengths was appropriate and fun.

 

[Dorateen]

You build a party at character creation and allow NPCs to join that party, if available.

 

[Invictus]

I remeber spending hours making my characters in Darklands; balancing points here maximising healing there
I can honestly say that half the fun in that game is making your party qnd trying out builds. You can start with the premade party to get a feel for the game and learning how much you like to mini max your party or try out weird builds like an all women party or no alchemy specialists
Since that game was one of the first games designed around emergent gameplay it was such a delight making up your own story without any memorable NPCs

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Lhynn]

Up to the game, story centric calls for recruitable companions, combatfaggotry can use both, if it has an emphasis on exploration you want to create your entire party.

 

[Irenaeus II]

I prefer to have both types of games available.

What this guy said. Voted Mixed because I like those too.

 

[Avellion]

I prefer creating my entire party from scratch.

Recruitables have a lot of potential, but I seldomly see that potential being met. Instead of characters with their own agendas (which may go for or against the player's favor), and believable reasons for joining, players are instead given 2 dimensional characters, with little involvement in the actual plot and whose only real role in the party seems to be providing the players with romances or the writers special little snowflake.

Having a party composed of the 4 Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris) was the only thing that kept me playing Wasteland 2 for as long as I did.

 

[Lilura]

All I really know is that no matter if I create a party myself or use game NPCs Edwin is always my wizard.

It's funny how in BG1 Edwin is mutually exclusive with Dynaheir & Minsc (the Red Wizard of Thay-Rashemi rivalry), but instead of being forced to choose sides you can just watch them duke it out.

 

[lurker3000]

builds like an all women party

When I need to make a full party I always have one male and fill the rest with women. You know the reasons.

 

[:Flash:]

My two favourite series (Ultima and Realms of Arkania) are opposites in this regard, so I don't know what I like best.
I thought about this question not too long ago, and I think most people don't even realize the far-reaching consequences of this decision.
Some things are not possible with a fully built party - e.g. the friendship in Ultima, the death of Dupre, etc.
But there are other things that do no make sense with a recruitable party, e.g. party splitting mechanics. If you play as one character, with others joining in, you should not be controlling them fully. It still makes sense in normal gameplay or combat (you are the leader of the party, you give orders), but it doesn't make sense with a split party. How is the part without the player character supposed to know where it should go? Fate: Gates of Dawn has Ultima's system (player comes from this world, Fantasy worlders join his party) and Party splitting mechanisms, but I don't know how exactly they work. If you can control both parties, it wouldn't make sense, whereas in a setup as in RoA, it would.

 

[Excidium II]

When I need to make a full party I always have one male and fill the rest with women. You know the reasons.

 

[Zombra]

Some things are not possible with a fully built party - e.g. the friendship in Ultima, the death of Dupre, etc.

Why not? I don't know the full Dupre story, but there's no reason you can't kill off a generated PC or have some other story written around them. Wizardry 8 had one PC get kidnapped and another sacrificed to a demonic demigoddess. Just because a PC is hand made doesn't make them inviolable to everything but hit point damage.

But there are other things that do no make sense with a recruitable party, e.g. party splitting mechanics. If you play as one character, with others joining in, you should not be controlling them fully. It still makes sense in normal gameplay or combat (you are the leader of the party, you give orders), but it doesn't make sense with a split party. How is the part without the player character supposed to know where it should go?

The answer is simple. The PC doesn't have to be in direct control of every part of a story, any more than the hero of a movie has to be on-screen 100% of the time. Interesting story stuff can happen even when the "chosen one" isn't around, and there's no reason that the player (the dude sitting in a chair by a keyboard) shouldn't interactively guide the supporting characters, regardless of who created them. Think of yourself not as an actor, but a director. Better yet, think of yourself as an actor/director(/co-writer): you're starring in the movie as the hero, but you also direct all the other scenes (even though you're not the only writer).

 

[:Flash:]

Why not? I don't know the full Dupre story, but there's no reason you can't kill off a generated PC or have some other story written around them. Wizardry 8 had one PC get kidnapped and another sacrificed to a demonic demigoddess. Just because a PC is hand made doesn't make them inviolable to everything but hit point damage.

There is a difference in storytelling. You either have a band of generic adventurers, or you play one character, who is later joined by other people. In the second case a developer has completely different opportunities in storytelling as in the first. That is why the "cinematic" games always use the join system.

The answer is simple. The PC doesn't have to be in direct control of every part of a story, any more than the hero of a movie has to be on-screen 100% of the time. Interesting story stuff can happen even when the "chosen one" isn't around, and there's no reason that the player (the dude sitting in a chair by a keyboard) shouldn't interactively guide the supporting characters, regardless of who created them. Think of yourself not as an actor, but a director. Better yet, think of yourself as an actor/director(/co-writer): you're starring in the movie as the hero, but you also direct all the other scenes (even though you're not the only writer).

Of course both possibilities exist, that is the difference between the two systems. Either you direct a party, or you are the one person, who is joined by others. But mixing those two is not a good idea.
The join system is designed to create a better identification with the player character. The pinnacle of this is the Ultima way: You play as yourself and are transported into a Fantasy world. There, people can join you, you become friends with the people from the Fantasy world, but you always stay yourself (in the end, Ultima is just Richard Garriot's Larping). Now Fate starts out similarly: You start as a character from Earth who is transported to a Fantasy world (even if that character does have a name). There, people from that Fantasy world start joining your adventure. But if the developer then suddenly switches the mechanic to controlling a party of Fantasy world characters, he tears down the rules that he himself established. It breaks immersion.

Having a fully built party as a mechanic does have a lot of advantages: You have more control, there is more place left for your own fantasy, you are (as you said) more the director. These are all things you give up when you use a join system. But combining the two, you don't actually end up with the best of both worlds, you end up with the worst of both worlds.

 

[naossano]

I would say i prefer already existing companions, with a background, some own quests, lines, other companions they don't like, some companions they would shoot at,etc...
I can't imagine a game like Jagged Alliance 2, without alll those guys hating each other, some afraid of blood, some getting lunatic if they don't fight, some that couldn't live without their loved one etc...
I like having to deal with their strenghts and weaknesses, their behavior, their fate etc...

But, on the other hand, if you reallly really love that game, you would want to replay the game a ton of times.
At some point, you will have tested all those companions, all their shortcoming, all the combination. You would want to bring something fresh into the mix.
So custom companions can join the action, and bring their own factors.
So mixing both pre-existing and custom companions are good for extending the game replayability.

Although, rare are the games in which the custom companions can gain the same level of involvement in the plot than pre-existing companions.

 

[Zombra]

There is a difference in storytelling. You either have a band of generic adventurers, or you play one character, who is later joined by other people. In the second case a developer has completely different opportunities in storytelling as in the first. That is why the "cinematic" games always use the ["Chosen One" ("you") joined by CNPC sidekicks] system.

They usually do, but they don't have to. Look at Final Fantasy VI and VII as examples. In VI you start as the player-identification character, and go for a while recruiting others, and then it turns out that that first PC isn't the blank slate you thought she was, she's very weird, and very early in the game she splits off, the party forms three separate groups, and you follow each story individually. As the game wears on there are several sequences in which you are forced to use one character or another, and by the end there's no question of who is the "main hero"; there simply isn't one. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, it's a fascinating device that draws you closer to every character. VII has a similar device in that it sort of tricks you into thinking Cloud is the player-insert character, but at one point in the game, spoiler alert, Cloud disappears and there's a long sequence in which the secondary heroes have to step up and become primaries.

All this is meant to illustrate that the western trope of the "chosen one" where you are meant to think of a particular character as "you" is completely arbitrary. It's fine that some games, like Ultima, do it; there's nothing wrong with it; but it's absolutely unnecessary, and this is true both in games where PCs are premade and when they're player-created.

 

[DDZ]

I am all for recruit for a few reasons.

-I am a min maxer so I will just try and to create the perfect party from the get go.
-I like focussing on one character as my main.
-I like having to chose companions.
-I don't have the fucking patience to create more than one character.

 

[Xzylvador]

I went with full recruit, mainly because I'm mostly a storyfag.
Then again, most (if not all?*) of the full recruit games still offer the option of customizing the recruitable charater(s), where they join you at your own charlevel and you level 'em up further as you go along, sometimes join you as lvl1 and automatically get enough XP to level yours or have some re-spec option ingame.
Depending on class/classless game, this still allows many to (nearly) all the options of building your own party, with the added benefit of extra story and characters reacting to what's going on (and romances, obviously! ) as opposed to a slavishly following group like mindless drones with no opinion or life whatsoever except for what you choose to LARP.
(It should be theoretically possible to have createable characters have the same kind of life, if you'd have them act according to class/religion/background/ethnicity/morality/whatever, selected during chargen... Which would absolutely rock. But I don't think I've ever really seen that done anywhere.*)

(* Mind may be failing because of fever)

 

[bminorkey]

Fully recruit and with heavy character customization or lots of choices of recruits

 

[Zombra]

On a related subject, one thing that bothers me about scripted companions is that I always feel like I'm missing a huge amount of the writing. If I have eight companions to choose from but I can only take two with me at a time, I'm only going to see 25% of the CNPC reactions for a given scene. It's this constant struggle to swap companions in and out to give them all "equal time" in order to appreciate the work of the writers. Either that or I have to flat out sideline some of them so I never get to know those characters at all - and then there will be a scene in which I'm obliged to have them there, and the writing assumes that I've been hanging out with whatshisname through hours of gameplay and care about the outcome. It's this uncool balance where these guys are simultaneously mandatory and disposable; where the game design and the narrative design work against each other. This, I think, is the major reason that story NPCs are best suited for non-companion roles.

 

[Sranchammer]

Build as I can't stand shitty prefabs

 

[deuxhero]

I don't understand the logic in that. Why do traditional rpgs need talking-head companions and crappy combat? And why can't games with good combat be like traditional rpgs any more? My ideal is ToEE and hopefully WL2 after the new updated version whatever it is called. And WL2 and ToEE also had recruitable characters. One great thing about BG1 and 2 was you had a choice, you could build your own party or recruit the talking heads.

It's easily possible to have good exploration and good combat (Though all that comes to mind is Gothic, which doesn't have long term companions and the combat wouldn't really work with permanent ones, and Dragon's Dogma, which has a very unique system) but most games don't and won't.

This is slightly off-topic, but you made me wonder if there are any D&D modules where you take more then your 6 players? Why not have 12 or 18 players? Probably a totally retarded idea but I'd think that having an army of adventurers might be fun.

Modules are pretty easy to convert to more players (throw more bad guys into fights, add treasure so everyone isn't streched super thin) or less (take out some disposable foes, nerf stuff) and they're just built for ~4 because that's the most common (for some reason). Most of the popular ones have recommendations on exactly what to change floating around the internet