I think that this is a more interesting question than the party size question, but has just as vague and answer. It’s totally acceptable to have a party that is all wizards, as a DM, you just have to adjust for that, but there is an ideal party balance. However, 5e is built so you can ignore that if you want.

The ideal party balance goes back to what I said in the previous article, it assumes that you are going to have a Wizard, a Cleric, a Fighter, and a Rogue, or someone that fits into each of those archetypes. But I think a more useful way to look at it is do you have someone for each pillar of the game?

Wait, what are the pillars of D&D?

Exploration, Combat, and Social are the three pillars that most D&D games are built on, though fairly often I would say that exploration is not fully used. Some of that is because people just don’t like the resource management aspect that can be in exploration. It’s also more fun to fight something or talk to an NPC than it is exploring which seems more passive for the players and more on the DM to describe what is going on.

These pillars are important though when creating your adventuring party. You want to have player characters who do cover all of these. Now, I generally wouldn’t say that each character should be good at all of them, but all of them should be good at either social or exploration and then generally you want them to be competent at combat.

If the players and DM focus on hitting these pillars in session zero, the ideal party combination doesn’t matter much. For example, I’ve run games where we have two rangers, a paladin, and a wizard. We don’t have a tank character, but you just have to change which monsters you select and how they work. Maybe they are harder to hit, but don’t deal tons of damage as the paladin is the closest we have to a tank. Or were there was a fighter, wizard, and rogue. In that case, you have no healing, so you either have to hand out some healing potions, or have larger fights, but less fights during a day, so the player characters are less likely to die.

So, to recap, any party combo is going to work. It’s probably more important that they work in your world, such as don’t have a party of wizards when wizards are really rare, unless they are fine being extremely unique, and maybe that’s the plot there. But make it work for your world and your game, but any combo is playable in Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons.

What are some odd player character combinations that you’ve had? Are there any that you thought didn’t work or that were weird but fun to play?

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The the first thing I’m going to to talk about is the size of the party. This means, how many players do you want around the table. Assuming everyone is controlling one character, which they should be, is there an ideal number?

Wizards of the Coast in their D&D books would suggest that 4 is a pretty strong number. It allows you to have the balanced party of a magic user, a healer, a tank, and a rogue-type character. That keeps you bases fairly covered for what you need in a game to do well against a lot of what a DM might throw at you.

But do you need to have four players, can’t you go above four? Critical Role starts with eight players, if I remember correctly. And they consistently have a fairly high number of players, possibly seven most of the time, it’s been a long while since I watched. So you can certainly play with a larger number. You can also play with a lower number. I ran Dungeons and Flagons with 3 players for a long time, and often without that traditional combination.

The there are two things you need to know as a DM when you do that.

First, the math for encounters will change. Basically, the more people you have, the monsters you can throw at them, the less people you have, the less monsters you can throw at them. In the Dungeon Master’s Guide, they tell you how that math works. However, I recommend not doing the math yourself, you’re going to be doing enough math in the encounter anyways. Instead there’s this very handy Encounter Calculator that I found from http://dhmholley.co.uk. This is going to do the math for you so that you can see the XP budget that you could be using for different types of encounters. I believe that D&D Beyond has an encounter creator as well, and if you have a subscription for that, it would be great to use that.

The other thing, and this is more with the larger groups, but with larger groups as a DM, you need to keep everyone involved. It’s easy to simply pull a single person’s story and make it the biggest focal point and focus on that person who will interact with you the most. But you need to keep everyone involved and keep things moving at the table. One thing you’ll probably have to do is ask someone who hasn’t spoken up in a little bit, specifically, what they want to do, or what they think of a situation. Sometimes you’ll need to pull out that interaction. And that suggestion isn’t just for the DM, sometimes as a player you will have to do that to another player as well. But there will also be some people who, in combat, take up considerably more time than everyone else, so it feels like the focus is really on them. I would suggest implementing a rule (made to be used sometimes), where players have to have an action ready when you come around and if they don’t, they have a signature action that they can use without having to think about it. The reason I say this rule is made to be broken, because sometimes you’ll have a player who wants to target a certain bad guy or wonder about a situation, but they should still have a plan and something to fall back on.

With smaller groups, you can really focus in on each players story and give them all the spotlight from time to time. You can certainly run into the issue of focusing on one players story too much, but with less people, it’s easier to move around and engage everyone. The tricky thing with a smaller party is creating encounters. You might have a barbarian who is extremely adept at killing everything, so you might throw in something that is going to be able to hold up to him, but now is that going to just murder the wizard? Or maybe it’s resistant to magic because the wizard has been mind controlling and polymorphing everything, now does that mean you ruined the druids fun who casts smaller spells? I personally have kind of rotated combats so that sometimes the magic users have the advantage in the battle, and sometime the melee combatants do.

So, what is the right number? I don’t think there is a right number, games can work well at higher numbers and lower numbers. Personally, I like running for a smaller group, 3-4 seems ideal to me. But for you, that might be a large group and having that dynamic is what you want. If you are just starting, I’d suggest starting with a smaller group and then working up to a larger group.

Do you have a preferred number of players to run a D&D game for? Or, as a player, do you have a preferred number of other players to play with?

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