QQ&A: Balancing a party
Here’s a challenge some GMs face:
How do you ensure the party is balanced? What do you do so there’s a tank, a healer, a spellcaster and a heavy hitter?
The answer is you don’t. The party composition is up to the players.
There are two ways a party can get off balance. One is that the players genuinely want to fill similar roles in the party. That’s fine. In fact, you can use it. A party of all fighters and rogues is a gift, not a problem. It’s hard making encounters that appeal to all the players, but easier when they’re all street brawlers.
You can build it into the story. I’ve never run a game where the party wanted to found their own thieves guild or temple but, damn, that sounds awesome.
“But won’t that make the game hard and slow without healing or spells?” As a GM, you can fix that with a snap of your fingers. Give the party a wand of healing, a wand of dispel magic and a wand of fireball.
Let them be rogues and fighters with magic in their back pockets.
Remember, the GM’s job is to maximise fun for everyone, including the GM. Giving out items to round out the party does so elegantly.
The other way the party can go off-balance is the GM making mistakes.
For example, I heard about one GM whose game slowly unravelled. The wizard realised they could take a long rest at any time by sneaking into a pocket dimension. Soon, they were playing in slow motion - fight one encounter, take a long rest, fight the next one, take another rest.
That style favours wizards and sorcerers, so the players all switched their characters over to those classes.
Fixing that is easy. Either have a frank conversation with the players or use their weaknesses against them. An all-spellcaster party is vulnerable to all manner of threats. If they want to specialise, then they’ll be good at some things and bad at others. Use that.
And here’s a trick that works whenever the party gets creative and shoots ahead in the power curve.
Like the druid builds that can conjure dinosaur stampedes.
Or the one where the party takes a ring that dispels magic and builds a portable cannon with it.
Let the party kick butt for a few fights. They’ve earned that.
Then remember that your world is alive. Any group causing that much mayhem is going to attract attention. Rumours will spread. Enemies will hear about their tricks and begin to build specialised countermeasures.
That’s not an excuse to cheat. After all, specialised countermeasures will have their own specialised countermeasures, by definition.
It’s just the world being alive and responding to their power.
It’s a similar idea to how Footprints can transform your game.
Check it out: