I remember several discussions about "single-class" parties (all characters have the same class, with or without allowing multiclassing), but just a few mentions of party composition in threads about character roles.
I'm a little bored at the moment, so I decided to ask what other people think is their "ideal" party of four characters for PF1e, without using third-party options, for a "typical" campaign (non-monstrous communities, primarily evil foes, etc.)?
I'll start with mine:
- Fetchling (Gloom Shimmer and Shadow Magic alternate traits) ranger (guide) 1/wizard (exploiter; take School Understanding [Admixture; Versatile Evocation] at wizard 1st and Quick Study at wizard 5) 6/eldritch knight 2/arcane archer 3/eldritch knight +8 with the Magical Knack (Wizard) trait;
- Half-elf (Fey Magic [Forest; aspect of the falcon], Fey Thoughts [Climb, Use Magic Device], and Weapon Familiarity alternate traits) oracle (spirit guide; Wood mystery) 8/deadeye devotee 2/oracle +3/deadeye devotee +4/oracle +5 leveraging the elf alternate favored class bonus to boost Wood Bond for the first 12 oracle levels and then the human favored class bonus for the extra spells at oracle 13th-16th;
- Half-orc (Scavenger and Toothy alternate traits) druid (river druid; Crocodile domain) 20, variant multiclass rogue with the Vagabond Child (Disable Device) trait;
- Human (Heart of the Fields [Craft/Alchemy] alternate trait) fighter (mutation warrior), variant multiclass barbarian with Combat Expertise, Fast Learner, and Improved Trip at 1st level.
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Archeologist bard, inquisitor, magus and warpriest would be my choices.
All characters are medium BAB classes with 6/9 spell casting and good fortitude and will saves. You get two arcane casters two divine casters, two spontaneous casters, two prepared casters, two skill monkeys, ¾ of the party has some access to healing and can at least use wands. If the inquisitor takes the right inquisition, you also have two face characters.
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Ideally, I like for all ability scores to be covered by at least one party member’s primary or secondary scores. Going through an adventure without a wisdom or intelligence character can be a real pain, but you will even come across challenges desiring high constitution. This often gets fulfilled by random chance, but I’ve seen low strength and wisdom parties before and it’s tough.
Race is mostly only important for making some niche builds come online earlier. As long as you aren’t taking penalties to your primary and secondary ability scores, you should be ok.
Less necessary, but being able to use most equipment is nice to have. I’ve seen so many suits of full plate turned to vendor trash just because no one can use it. It’s almost a running gag in the APs to give you some really nice pieces in the very early adventures.
My random picks that could change tomorrow:
1) Dwarven fighter. Go full dwarven weapon familiarity and use a dwarven long axe and dwarven boulder helmet to threaten both 5 and 10.
2) Elven druid. Use nature fang and eagle domain for great ranged accuracy. Fey form spells are great for this
3) Human arcanist. Use occultist archetype to bring spell utility and helpful summons.
4) Gnome Oracle. So many great combos here. Pei zin can cover a lot of healing needs. Mystery could be any good one, with heavens maybe filling out the team the most.
Edit: check with your GM first to make sure dwarven longaxe is allowed with a weapon group. That’s an oversight, and many will let you use it as either the axes or polearms groups. If not an option, consider dual wielding waraxes
I'd love if a party agreed on a theme for class selection.
To be honest, one of the reasons I kept the campaign description "generic" was to make sure the "ideal" party would cover all the bases instead of being a more "specialized" configuration focused on a single type or narrow range of foes/scenarios. "Undead and fiends? Lots of channel energy, favored enemy, and smite evil;" "frozen North? Everybody concentrates on fire-damage;" etc.
Ideally, I like for all ability scores to be covered by at least one party member’s primary or secondary scores. Going through an adventure without a wisdom or intelligence character can be a real pain, but you will even come across challenges desiring high constitution. This often gets fulfilled by random chance, but I’ve seen low strength and wisdom parties before and it’s tough.
Yes.
Note my "ideal" party has a (very! +8 alchemical bonus from mutagen and +6 morale bonus from rage by 20th) Str-focused fighter (with some investment in Con, as well), an Int-/Dex-focused caster/archer wizard (minor illusion focus), a Wis-focused caster/flanker/locks and traps/shapeshifter druid (with some Str- and Dex- investment), and a Cha-/Dex-focused caster/archer oracle. BAB for the characters ends up at +15 (druid, but with +7d6 Sneak Attack), +16 (oracle, but with a +5 competence bonus when using weapons made of wood; explicitly including bows), +17 (wizard), and +20 (fighter). 9th-level spells for all three casters using the cleric/oracle, druid, and sorcerer/wizard lists. The oracle can use the spirit guide's ability to gain a wandering spirit to gain (Life spirit) channel energy when needed.
Basically, they should be able to handle just about any type of enemy or scenario. Unless the GM resorts to fiat or over-powered CR encounters.
Campaign criteria: is Variant Multiclassing(VMC) allowed? It is a NO in Org Play and with some experienced GMs. Certainly the CORE guys will be up in arms... the option is to multiclass in a standard fashion.
Respectfully, organized play is a specific type of campaign and not "generic." Ditto for house-rules like Elephant in the Room.
The only restriction is not allowing third-party material, not "a limited selection of Paizo options."
Regarding anti-magic, that is one of the reasons why all four characters in my "ideal" party can contribute via weapon-combat. At higher level play, the wizard (via arcane archer's Imbue Arrow) can even shut down enemy casters with an imbued antimagic field on an arrow and then attack them using Rapid Shot, Clustered Shots, or Manyshot when their magical protections get suppressed...
One other big reason is to reduce the "need" to for casters to cast spells every round in combat or feel useless; or if they encounter magic resistant foes (of which golems can be very difficult if casters don't have weapon combat to fall back on).
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When I DM, I'd say the Classes I like to see the most are as follows:
Paladin
Wizard
Inquisitor
Ranger
I enjoy DMing all Levels of play, really PC-Power preferences go hand-in-hand with a particular Campaign. Low Levels for Ravenloft / High Levels for Planescape. You know. But overall, I guess may favorites are as follows:
16th Level, 6 PCs
3rd Level, 3-4 PCs
8th-12th Levels, 8-9 PCs
VMC
The two of my "ideal" characters that use VMC, the druid and the fighter, are single-classed... The oracle and wizard that use multi-classing and/or prestige class(es) don't. Granted, since they are both archers and casters they don't work well if they have to give up half their feats on VMC.
For those that want to participate without using all the options on Archives of Nethys, just provide some context like DM_aka_Dudemeister did: Core only, organized play, "we only allow a, b, and c content/don't allow x, y, and z content." I'm just asking what people's "ideal" party composition would be at their tables.
This isn't a competition or "DPR Olympics." Although I do admit to a certain amount of optimization is probably required to sufficiently cover all the bases, I tried to set the conditions very broadly so that "one-trick ponies" and hyper-optimized "builds" for a narrowly focused campaign are not the obvious choices.
You do interesting things without common/usual mistakes which is why I read your posts.
Thank you.
PF1e is a pretty big toolkit to tinker with, although I've mostly moved on.
I’m a little bored at the moment, so I decided to ask what other people think is their "ideal" party of four characters for PF1e, without using third-party options, for a "typical" campaign (non-monstrous communities, primarily evil foes, etc.)?
Four players who like each other as people, have broadly similar senses of humour/red lines and all optimise to roughly the same level (or help each other build characters if they have different levels of system mastery).
Beyond that anything goes - someone who can get stuck in to melee, someone who can identify the monsters and someone willing to talk to NPCs are good options.
This isn't a competition or "DPR Olympics." Although I do admit to a certain amount of optimization is probably required to sufficiently cover all the bases, I tried to set the conditions very broadly so that "one-trick ponies" and hyper-optimized "builds" for a narrowly focused campaign are not the obvious choices.
This just sounds like "optimizing fun", which simply doesn't work. I think your very premise is inherently faulty.
Not only is the ideal party one where everyone has fun, I think the concept of "cover all the base" is wrong.
Do we play to have the easiest way? Do we play to never struggle? Do we play to never have to overcome (in-game) hardships? I sure don't! Overcoming challenges is what the game is all about, and needing to come up with creative solutions is a lot of fun, more fun than always having the perfect class feature to trivialize every difficulty you encounter.
The other aspect is that at least in a homebrew campaign, literally everything is adjustable. The GM can make the game hard for a party of optimized builds using every splashbook option there is and easy for a party of four commoners.
Those to go hand-in-hand. If no one in the party has access to flight (or airwalk), the GM doesn't have to use challenges that require flight. Of course, on the flip side, as a GM I can also use precisely such challenges, but use them as a starting point for a quest (to find a magic item, friendly NPC, or whatever) or to give the players a chance to find unusual solutions. That makes for a better experience than making it a "did you prepare Fly this morning" check.
For example, in my current campaign where I'm the GM, I outright told one of my players "you do not need to play a character with healing even though no one has much of that yet, I will provide other means if necessary". The player did end up playing an Oracle with healing capabilities, but if he hadn't then I'd have had the party find a magic item with daily healing. Or gone all the way and give characters outfight HP regeneration of some sort.
I believe the very idea of a pre-constructed party is bad for the enjoyment of the game. A little bit of communication to not step onto each others' toes too much is fine, but any sort of "we need A, B, C, and D" party building only lessens the fun.
Now, when it comes to premade campaigns, there are some things you want the party to do, but I still put 90% of that on the individual character building and not party-crafting. If you want to "do well" in such a campaign, build characters that are actually good. Indeed, not relying on the party members is exactly what you should do - for example, if you want to play a melee, make sure you're not useless against enemies not easily reachable. "We have a Wizard to take care of that" is the wrong thinking.
The "best" party is one where no one is too strong, no one is too weak, and everyone can contribute to most challenges. Many players seem to be scared of overlap, but redundancy is a good thing, both objectively (challenges are more reliably overcome) and subjectively (more people trying to fix a problem means more people are having fun).
A stereotypical "Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard" party is not a balanced party. It's one of the most imbalanced and worst-to-have party you can make. The only thing worse is if you force players to pick something that fits the (antiquated and all around terrible) mold instead of letting them play what they want to play. Never tell anyone "we need you to play an x". Ever. No, your party doesn't need an arcane caster. Nor does it need a healer. And literally no party ever needs a dedicated skillmonkey. And a tank isn't even a thing in this game.
This isn't a competition or "DPR Olympics." Although I do admit to a certain amount of optimization is probably required to sufficiently cover all the bases, I tried to set the conditions very broadly so that "one-trick ponies" and hyper-optimized "builds" for a narrowly focused campaign are not the obvious choices.This just sounds like "optimizing fun", which simply doesn't work. I think your very premise is inherently faulty.
Not optimizing for "fun." Optimizing at least somewhat for breadth.
Speaking from (both personal and observed) experience, not having secondary (or even tertiary, in some cases) options when your primary option doesn't work (or is significantly reduced) can hurt the effectiveness of the entire party. Not just the individual PC.
And a tank isn't even a thing in this game.
yes it is - it can be done typically 2 ways, someone with lots of AC, or someone with lots of HP.
yes it is - it can be done typically 2 ways, someone with lots of AC, or someone with lots of HP.And a tank isn't even a thing in this game.
He may be using the MMO terminology of tank as "drawing aggro." Not the original RPG terminology of a character with high defenses and causing high damage.
Yeah, it's not that hard to make a character very hard to kill. Drawing aggro is the hard part. Simply being first to enter a room should often help, especially against low intelligence creatures, but you can't contain everything.
An unexpected way to go about tanking is by being a tanky healer. Strategic enemies will go after healers first, so lean into that. Paladin 2/Oracle(life) X, will give you good defenses and draw plenty of aggro. Gnome is my favorite for this, as it gets a bonus to constitution and charisma, and the smaller size is a free +1 to AC. Even if the enemies should happen to ignore you as tank, you can still absorb the damage through life-link.
Note: You don't really have to dip into paladin for this. The extra hp, heavy armor and big bonus to saves are really nice, but not entirely necessary.
He may be using the MMO terminology of tank as "drawing aggro." Not the original RPG terminology of a character with high defenses and causing high damage.yes it is - it can be done typically 2 ways, someone with lots of AC, or someone with lots of HP.And a tank isn't even a thing in this game.
welllll - I guess since we are discussing an RPG, then......
Speaking from (both personal and observed) experience, not having secondary (or even tertiary, in some cases) options when your primary option doesn't work (or is significantly reduced) can hurt the effectiveness of the entire party. Not just the individual PC.
I'm not sure what you mean, because this sounds like a character build issue and not a team build issue.
If your Fighter is useless when an enemy is 10ft above ground, it doesn't matter whether the party is three other Fighters, or a Wizard, Zen Archer, and Gunslinger - it's a bad build either way.
I don't have an "ideal" party because to me the idea party is one where everyone brings a character they enjoy. Or hell, they can randomly pick a character out of a group of pregens. I had two players do that for my current campaign (with pregens I made), and both very quickly adopted the character as their own. Did that make for the most well-rounded party ever? No. But it's fun, and it actually makes the party feel more natural.
the Classic Balanced Mix: Ftr, Wiz, Rog, Clr.
Can we please as a collective stop calling this outdated garbage "balanced"? It's not. It never was. It's literally one of the most unbalanced parties you could make.
And a tank isn't even a thing in this game.yes it is - it can be done typically 2 ways, someone with lots of AC, or someone with lots of HP.
That's not a tank, that's a character that wasted a ton of resources on something that doesn't help the party 90% of the time.
While you could argue a tank as a build does exist, when people talk about what they need for a party, the mean tank as a role, and that cannot exist without a reliable way of making sure that character gets attacked.
The so-called classic party is sorely lacking in class features, and diversity. Each character has a clearly defined role, and no other character will be able to assist or backup that character.
Except for the rouge the classes have very few class feature. They are not totally absent, but they do not have much. Even the rouges class features are a bit underwhelming. Most of the other classes have more class features even when you limit it to the core rule book. Compared to the ranger or paladin they are extremely lacking.
All but the cleric has two poor saves and neither the fighter nor wizard have a primary stat that boost saves. The rogue has the worst saves, followed by the wizard. The fighter can come out a bit better because he can use a headband of WIS to give him a bit of a boost. The rogue is going to be the face of the party so will probably be using a headband of CHA.
When it comes to skills only the rogue has both decent amount of skill points and a lot of useful class skills. The wizard will have a decent amount of skill point due to INT, but other than knowledge skills and spellcraft does not have a lot of useful class skills. Both the fighter and cleric have almost no skill points.
Half the party has no magic ability so that means the cleric and wizard are the only sources of magic. There is no backup healer so if something happens to the cleric there is no way to get him up quickly. The best option would be for the rogue to max out UMD so he can use some magic items to get the cleric up in case of an emergency.
To recap ¾ of the party has at least two poor saves, most of the party has no skills, you have only one character that has any real combat ability. Half the party has no magical ability at all. There is only one character that can handle social challenges well, but that character is also handling all the scouting as well. That does not sound like a balanced party.
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While you could argue a tank as a build does exist, when people talk about what they need for a party, the mean tank as a role, and that cannot exist without a reliable way of making sure that character gets attacked.
simple - be in front - be a threat, have tons of HP or AC.
it's not hard to do.
Way too many bad guys have just melee weapons, simply being in front is usually enough to "draw aggro".
But in table top RPG's drawing aggro is not the definition of Tank. Tanks can take a ton of damage, thus freeing up the healer to keep the rest of the party alive.
as for wasted resources, I disagree.
Can we please as a collective stop calling this outdated garbage "balanced"? It's not. It never was. It's literally one of the most unbalanced parties you could make
NO - because it was and still is a very balanced party - it covers all of the potential encounter types in a classic style adventure.
Just because YOU don't like it, doesn't mean anything to the rest of us.
Speaking from (both personal and observed) experience, not having secondary (or even tertiary, in some cases) options when your primary option doesn't work (or is significantly reduced) can hurt the effectiveness of the entire party. Not just the individual PC.I'm not sure what you mean, because this sounds like a character build issue and not a team build issue.
Hyper-specialized characters are a team build issue, not just a character build issue, because they force the rest of the party (or the GM) to cover for that character's short-comings.
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I really think covering for each other’s shortcomings is an important part of this game. Otherwise we’d all just have the same powers.
Yes, no one character can do everything. However, if a character doesn't contribute except in a narrow range of situations then that hurts the group as a whole.
Like the stereotypical barbarian that dumps Int and Cha as far as possible for the highest starting Str and Con (and, yes some players still may not have them carry a ranged weapon at first). Other than smashing enemies in melee, what do they add to the party's capabilities?
So, I personally think the standard party of 4 is almost always going to lack something. There are, after all, 6 primary stats and everyone has to pay the constitution tax. Unless the stat distributions are generous people will have a hard time covering multiple roles.
So let’s cover what’s vital first.
You need 9th level level casting or a truck of gold for the scrolls you’ll need to UMD, and you’ll need both an arcane and divine caster, or at least access to their important spells. Even an especially generalist caster like a Lore Shaman probably will need additions casting back up. I’d argue you need 1.75 9th level casters. So you’ll probably need to double up. For example, a Warpriest and a Paladin can probably make up for lacking a cleric: though you’d still want a Wizard, Witch, Arcanist, or Psychic to handle the arcane side of things.
You’ll need a frontline and someone who can disable traps. Again, one person can’t quite cover the frontline though you’ll likely only be able to afford one trap disabler. Plus the whole host of skills a party needs.
I’ll think on this a bit and come up with my “solution” ; a way to jam 5 hats onto 4 heads.
The cleric and wizard spell lists make a very nice class feature. I would not say either of those classes suffer from a lack of features.
Wizards really don’t suffer from a shortage of skills either. High intelligence means lots of skills.
Clerics do suffer from a shortage of skill points, but should have a passable Charisma score, so if you spend your points on diplomacy, and maybe a feat, the cleric can provide a “face” for the party.
I don’t go so much that way when I build a cleric though. Rather I would get perception as a class skill. Using a trait hopefully. Then taking the Alertness feat. Suddenly you are quite good at perception and sense motive. Just use the few skill points you do have on those two things.
At any rate, both of those classes should always be an asset to the group.
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So, I personally think the standard party of 4 is almost always going to lack something.
And I think this is likely by design. Your party isn't meant to breeze through every challenge. There will come times where you have to seek out specialized magic items to get through challenges a different party comp may have no problem with.
a few tubes of Crazy Glue really helps the players to stick together around the table... °-{8^0
I just wanted to note I was asking about an "ideal" party of four, not the "standard" party of four.
The "standard" party of four is a bit of a relic from the 1st/2nd Ed AD&D days (with the "subclasses" of cleric, fighter, magic user, and thief). Plus, the "typical" party back then was usually six to eight characters instead of four.
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Plus, the "typical" party back then was usually six to eight characters instead of four.I never knew that. When would it have been that tables slimmed down to 4 to 6?
When D&D 3.0 based the CR/encounter math around a party of four.
TBF, in 1st/2nd AD&D you pretty much needed at least five to six characters just to "cover the bases" in low- and mid-level play. Also, the minimum ability score requirements for the "subclasses" (and races, for that matter) made it difficult to qualify for certain characters other than the "standard" cleric, fighter, magic user, or thief unless using a generous generation method.
For smaller groups, it wasn't uncommon to have a player run two characters. Also, henchmen were not uncommon (there were no "cohorts" from the Leadership feat).