I do think you can have any combination of alignments in an adventuring party. However, I would say that it depends on the game that you’re playing. If you’re getting all your information from the church, having a chaotic evil character is probably not going to work that well (and generally Chaotic Evil is going to be the hardest to make work in a campaign). Even a lawful evil character will be willing to work with the party as long as it’s in their interest.

When I start a game, I generally recommend to my players, since we don’t play evil campaigns, that we go with the part of the alignment matrix that is Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, Neutral Good, and Chaotic Good. That means that the party should generally be on the same page. Though, we don’t use the alignment system that heavily, so a Chaotic Good character has some flexibility in what they do, as well as a Lawful Good character. I might write on the different alignments soon. But by having your party generally in the same area of the alignment matrix and not dipping into evil or trying to be a true neutral character allows you to have a more cohesive party.

But what if you have someone is playing a lawful evil wizard in a party with a lawful good paladin? And then you have a chaotic neutral rogue, and a true neutral druid? How do you make that work for the party?

You really need the full party buy-in for that. It’s too easy to have the paladin and wizard at each others throats while the rogue steals there stuff, and the druid just sits by and does nothing. And then eventually you end the game in a battle royale after the wizard and paladin realize the rogue has stolen their stuff. That’s going to be less fun for everyone, and definitely less fun for you as the DM as you have to basically scrap your campaign or work it in such a way that everyone ends up happy sometimes.

But, if everyone at the table has buy-in before you start playing, you can do things to negate this. The lawful evil wizard can animate the dead for missions while the paladin is off doing something else. And both players can make sure that’s how it’s working. The rogue can respect the party enough that she doesn’t steal from her party members, but in turn, the Paladin will not notice when the rogue steals from a shop. Once, however, one person in the group decides that the effort to make that happen to not step on the other player characters and players toes, you have a chance for breakdown in your game.

Now, you could also just run an evil campaign for a little bit so that lawful evil wizard gets their game for a bit, and everyone is playing an evil character. I might eventually write about evil campaigns, but they tend not to be that interesting an idea to me, I prefer the heroes journey.

So, basically the recap this last bit. Figure out the alignments that are going to work well for your campaign and offer those up to the players. Give some wiggle room in them, but try and keep the party focused in the same area so that you don’t have to deal with anything odd. And that can be either a good party or an evil party or anywhere in between. And if someone is an outlier, it’s on them to figure out why they fit in, not on the other players and not on your as the DM.

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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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