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I was thinking about how usually people try to get a balanced party e.g. covering all the bases one way or another. But I was wondering has anyone done a random party i.e. you know what your making but not what everyone else is until the game starts and if so how well did it go? I'm just curious here because as a game we try to build a cohesive group but if it were real you could just as easily wind up with 4 fighters as a fighter/mage/thief/priest or fighter/occultist/oracle/ranger combination.
In PF1 that can work fine, as character can build in many different directions and there are a lot of options that can enable a group to cover gaps.
I've never done it, but I think even a group of all fighters can manage if the group start at level 1, and as they level up they start heading in different directions for what they do. Like having one fighter using the item mastery feats can get a good amount of pseudo-spell casting for the group. And if you allow retraining of archetypes (but maintain class) I think there are generally a lot of options.
And, if I'm going into a party blind I'm going to play a class that brings a lot of options to the table. Like a Magus, or my personal favorite Inquisitor.
Why does everyone build for melee or arcane casting? You don't want to be "just a healbot," I get that, but I feel like its important to have someone around that can easily remove debuffs like blindness or give folks ability points back w/out always having to load up on expensive wands.
It's a reactive vs active play style issue.
Most people prefer an active style play, while healing and condition removal are reactive. And in PF1 there's not really a capability to have both available to you at the same time.
Sure a cleric can cast any spell, but they can only prepare certain ones. And an oracle has limited spells known.
Of course, a party with an appropriate class can use scrolls (perhaps not as effectively as normal spell casting) to help mitigate that issue.
Why does everyone build for melee or arcane casting? You don't want to be "just a healbot," I get that, but I feel like its important to have someone around that can easily remove debuffs like blindness or give folks ability points back w/out always having to load up on expensive wands.
It is for reasons like this that I gravitate towards classes that can do a bit of everything. For a dungeon crawl, I'd probably come playing a Shaman with the Life & Waves spirits. Got my 3/4 BAB, decent buff spells, healing magic, utility spells, and ability to cherry pick some cleric spells later on for status removal.
When I don't know the party makeup going in, my tendency to gravitate towards versatile characters has pretty much never steered me wrong.
So you're saying... supporting your team is just as important as being awesome in combat?
I'd argue its MORE awesome, but that's just a reflection of personality traits. I get much, MUCH more enjoyment out of the game through supporting the success of others and through picking up the slack when my team really needs me to do so.
It's funny, that doesn't seem to be the general mindset when making characters for PF1 or, really, a lot of systems.
Its a quirk of the human experience. Everyone has their hero phase, wanting to be in the spot light and held as someone to look up to (or feared if you are THAT particular bend). I left that phase behind a good while ago.
Honestly? I think much of the problem is related to the rise of competitive online game play, though it certainly existed before then. People become conditioned to a certain way of playing things and when they inevitably transition to another kind of gaming environment, that conditioning follows them. I've got a little bit of a competitive streak myself, though I am much more aware of it and actively dial it down because it is simply not worth the expenditure of energy to prove myself right, or others wrong, when time will simply do so for me. Time is the great equalizer, after all, and some people have to learn the hard way.
When I don't know the party makeup going in, my tendency to gravitate towards versatile characters has pretty much never steered me wrong.So you're saying... supporting your team is just as important as being awesome in combat? It's funny, that doesn't seem to be the general mindset when making characters for PF1 or, really, a lot of systems.
I'm trying hard not to rant. Bottom line, I agree with this way of thinking and wish more players I interact with did too. I have a guy who has played arcane casters for decades; I had to sell him on the advantages of the Haste spell instead of always filling his L3 spell slots with damage dealers.
Some folks just focus on what they can do, and that can get real frustrating in a team game like PF1. My own suggestion, if you're going into a PF1 campaign blind to what everyone else is playing, is to pick a PC who can contribute in and out of combat to the TEAM'S success, not just their own.
I'm going to disagree about PF1 being a team game. PF2 is a team game. In fact poor team cohesion and planning will result in losing combats. In PF1, after maybe level 3 you can really play as a group that happens to travel together but does their own thing in combat without it being much of a detriment to defeating the enemy (because PF1 characters tend to be pretty overpowered compared to the enemy) unless the GM is greatly altering the CR paradigm the base game tries to put forth.
I'm not saying I disagree that people should bring more well rounded characters to the table, but more so because it's more fun to be able to play a character that has a good array of skills, support options (which can include spells as utility), and combat prowess. Which is why 3/4 BAB caster chassis tend to be so great because they tend to bring all of that to the table.
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Back in the day (like, 1978...) this sort of random party was normal. Some RPGs like Traveller had it built in: pretty much everything about chargen was random, including whether you started as a green youth of 22 with 2 skills and a knife, or a grizzled 48-year-old aristocratic Marine Colonel with 30 skills and a starship. Or a corpse. Chivalry & Sorcery wasn't much better, nor Stormbringer, nor a bunch of others.
There's a good reason we don't do that any more.
This is basically the premise of PFS, so it's still possible.
For a home campaign, it can also work as long as 1) everyone is OK with it and 2) they are willing to have (at least some) characters advance in reaction to fill "missing"/"weak" capabilities of the party instead of being locked in to a specific "build." Note that with all of the options available through classes/archetypes, multi-classing, prestige classes, feats, spells, etc., this will not limit the PCs much (or at all) beyond a level or two.
The most random parties I've seen have definitely been in Society play, especially back in the days when playing in person was still the universal default. You'd occasionally get an "audible" if there was a glaring hole in the table's make-up and someone was willing to swap to another character in tier--and had brought that PC's sheet to the venue.
(Even with tools like Warhorn being SOP, I still see some bizarre party compositions in Society play. Like the one time half a Starfinder table was envoys, because that's what the blurb made folks want to play.)
OTOH, everyone knows that a certain amount of randomness is the rule in Society play, and as a result, many players build with some versatility in mind--at least with some of their PCs. At the very least, it's useful to have a decent skill level in something that's not necessarily your class's primary schtick. In my more limited experience with PFS 2E, that's been pretty much required to succeed with any regularity, whether you know who else will be in the party or not.
Back in the day (like, 1978...) this sort of random party was normal. Some RPGs like Traveller had it built in: pretty much everything about chargen was random, including whether you started as a green youth of 22 with 2 skills and a knife, or a grizzled 48-year-old aristocratic Marine Colonel with 30 skills and a starship. Or a corpse. Chivalry & Sorcery wasn't much better, nor Stormbringer, nor a bunch of others.
There's a good reason we don't do that any more.
Do you know much about original Traveller vs the version that was just released?
Most of my groups’ party compositions have been like this… on one of our current campaigns, only two players coordinated characters, but they are a husband and wife duo, so they tend to coordinate anyways… we ended up with a dodge tank paladin who plays like a Cavalier, a druid who thinks she’s a ranger, a ranger who thinks he’s a barbarian, and a warpriest whos build has elements of all three of the others…
Our Paladin is super high AC, uses charisma for everything, and fights with a reach weapon.
The Druid just uses a Bow and her Animal Companion, she rarely uses spells or wild shape.
The Ranger went with a Twohanded Cleave build
And my Warpriest has super high AC, uses charisma for everything, fights with a starknife at range, and has a cleave build via Startoss Style…
Needless to say, healing was never a real issue for us… traps though… we’ve had issues with those… and our parties average intelligence was 10… I say “was” because we did eventually gain a 5th party member who is playing an investigator… they shored up the glaring weaknesses our party had quite nicely…
So our “random party” composition ended up with 4 very aimilar characters who desperately needed a 5th to do the things none of us could do…
I haven't had a "balanced party" in years. My group runs from 4 to 9 players, depending on who can make it on game nights, and they cover a wide range of official PF1e and PF1e 3PP classes. I let them all choose what they want to play and then they're the ones who have to deal with any gaps in the party that weren't filled, not me.
Do you know much about original Traveller vs the version that was just released?
'Fraid not. I'm pretty sure they'd have done away with the more idiotic versions of chargen, but Traveller has been through so many revisions it gets silly. I have the original and the GURPS version, but that's it.
Incidentally, if you can get hold of the Dumarest Saga books by E C Tubb, classic Traveller suddenly makes sense. While it might be presented as generic SF, it very definitely is not. It's 100% Dumarest.
Back in the day (like, 1978...) this sort of random party was normal. Some RPGs like Traveller had it built in: pretty much everything about chargen was random, including whether you started as a green youth of 22 with 2 skills and a knife, or a grizzled 48-year-old aristocratic Marine Colonel with 30 skills and a starship. Or a corpse. Chivalry & Sorcery wasn't much better, nor Stormbringer, nor a bunch of others.
There's a good reason we don't do that any more.
It's funny I just discovered Traveller T20. I'm looking forward to making a fleet crewed by at least 100 different Pathfinder classes. Logistically speaking, no telling what type of parties or configuration of characters that could be on hand. You might send a Inquisitor, a Slayer, a wizard, a zealot,a marksman and a swashbuckler on one mission and an entirely different group on another mission.
Does anybody have a way to pick classes randomly?| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Make an excel spreadsheet (or Google sheets) and assign a value to each class.
Use the RANDBETWEEN function to randomly determine what you should choose.
Syntax is =RANDBETWEEN(1,X) where X is the number of classes.
Make an excel spreadsheet (or Google sheets) and assign a value to each class.
Use the RANDBETWEEN function to randomly determine what you should choose.
Syntax is =RANDBETWEEN(1,X) where X is the number of classes.
And now I have to create a spreadsheet to make use of this one function. Thanks for that.
Try this here
I could spend more time creating functionality that lets you include/exclude ancestries, classes, and backgrounds based on rarity but I haven't. I could also probably go through and make sure I got all ancestries, classes, and backgrounds (I know I don't have all backgrounds) but this was just a quick little thing I threw together.
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I was not expecting to learn Excel in this thread, but I ain't complaining.