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What are the examples of good justification of party size limit?

ilitarist

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Party RPGs have party size limit. Obviously it's needed for balance and to reduce microcontrol. Have you ever seen any good in-game explanation of why is there?

At least in games where you create a party (Icewind Dale, Avernum, Wizardry, Might and Magic) you can say those are comrades who stick together so they don't want anyone else. But in some of those games you can hire henchmen or even full party members... up to a certain limit. In others someone just says "we should travel in a small group to not get spotted/slowed down" and everyone sticks with it even it is the time to attack a huge dragon in an arranged battle.

When I started Torments Tides of Numenera and saw how initial companions hate each other I thought the game will have several pairs of characters who hate each other and maybe couple of others who specifically hate travelling in a crowd. That would be a good explanation. Nope, all of your companions just naturally hate to be around more than 3 people.

So, does any RPG explain those things well?
 

Grampy_Bone

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Best justification--Fallout 1, 2, and Arcanum: Party size is determined by charisma; ugly people have fewer friends. Makes sense to me. Not a big deal for Fallout because there are so few useful people. In Arcanum it's more noticeable because of the larger roster.

Worst--Dungeon Siege 2. You only get 2 party members until you pay a ridiculous sum of money to an arbitrary guild. Then you get 3.
 

ThoseDeafMutes

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I don't think I've ever seen a "good" justification. Chrono Trigger had some kind of wibbly wobbly, timey whimey thing where only a certain number of time travellers were allowed at the same time. This forced a pretty brutal limit of 3.
 

Falksi

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Real life social circles are often defined by what skillsets & "talents" people bring to them. Be that humour, ability to repair things, musical talent, a large residence which can accommodate many folk, ability to fight, social connections etc. Etc. It's all a natural evolution of what that group requires, and what it wants/needs as a whole mostly subconsciously.
For the purpose of adventuring, if you wanted to reflect that it'd be tricky to. So for me the best balance may be one found via resource management. Allow as many adventurers to join a team as possible, but have each one drain coin every so often as they would do if they had to live day to day. There'd be far more scope for dynamic parties if money was involved as either pay or survival resource.
 

Nutria

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It would make sense if you had a vehicle that could only carry X number of people, but I don't remember ever seeing that excuse used.
 

Sigourn

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It's a good question tbh.

Browsing at my played RPGs list, Nocturne told you you simply weren't powerful enough to handle too many demons at once. I suppose that kind of makes sense.
 

Viata

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Even Jesus had a party size limit of 12. I don't remember how it was justified in the lore, though.
12 is a "powerful" number in the lore:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+7:5-8&version=NKJV 12 tribes of Israel
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+21:12&version=KJV 12 gates on the New Jerusalem guarded by 12 angels
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+22:2&version=KJV 12 fruits on the tree of life
And so on.
 

Fug

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The game I had the biggest problem with this was probably Expeditions: Conquistadors. You have a huge party but can only deploy 6 people in a fight, from what I recall. Really killed my enjoyment of the game.
 

Hoaxmetal

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Even Jesus had a party size limit of 12. I don't remember how it was justified in the lore, though.
12 is a "powerful" number in the lore:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+7:5-8&version=NKJV 12 tribes of Israel
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+21:12&version=KJV 12 gates on the New Jerusalem guarded by 12 angels
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+22:2&version=KJV 12 fruits on the tree of life
And so on.
So having 12 party members was Jesus powergaming.
 

YES!

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Party RPGs have party size limit. Obviously it's needed for balance and to reduce microcontrol. Have you ever seen any good in-game explanation of why is there?

At least in games where you create a party (Icewind Dale, Avernum, Wizardry, Might and Magic) you can say those are comrades who stick together so they don't want anyone else. But in some of those games you can hire henchmen or even full party members... up to a certain limit. In others someone just says "we should travel in a small group to not get spotted/slowed down" and everyone sticks with it even it is the time to attack a huge dragon in an arranged battle.

When I started Torments Tides of Numenera and saw how initial companions hate each other I thought the game will have several pairs of characters who hate each other and maybe couple of others who specifically hate travelling in a crowd. That would be a good explanation. Nope, all of your companions just naturally hate to be around more than 3 people.

So, does any RPG explain those things well?

Rpgs that make you recruit companions instead of creating your own party are usually complete shit full of contrivances and shit mechanics and devoid of challenge so don't warrant an explanation.

Rpgs with full party creation used to have a pretty good guide by way of supplemental material like the story book thing the SSI games would come with, or a blurb about how the party met and what their initial goal and motivations were like Realms of Arkania and Darklands did. It kind of set the stage and got you to think about a theme to guide your character creation for each party member, to give them personality and see them all as a group made up of individuals with personalities and motivations unique to each one, and not just some nameless thoughtless blob of retarded, contrived nonsense that game's with recruitable talking head nincompoops are reduced to.
 

Alex

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Best justification--Fallout 1, 2, and Arcanum: Party size is determined by charisma; ugly people have fewer friends. Makes sense to me. Not a big deal for Fallout because there are so few useful people. In Arcanum it's more noticeable because of the larger roster.

(snip...)

The problem here is that even if you have low charisma, it is usually easy to pay people to do what you want (they might not have the best morale, and they might even double cross you, but still hiring them shouldn't be much of an issue, especially with the kind of money you usually end up with in these games.

Of course, I don't know any good alternatives to simply using charisma. The best option would be, I think, allowing the player to hire help as they like and then make sure the hired help can be both a boon and a headache (1st edition AD&D had a lot of good advice about this). But not only is this difficult to program for, it could even push the game engine (or the hardware) too far.

Having 6 to 12 characters in a blobber makes sense, I think, because that is more or less how many you expect will be able to work as a unit inside the small spaces, but again, this logic is pretty frequently broken. It is not unusual to face in these games way more enemies at once than you could possibly fit in a "square". Also, the party size won't change just because your PCs are bigger or smaller (which would make sense if pixie or similar small creatures are a valide race).
 

sser

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I still don't get why Jesus kept Yoshimo around on the second playthrough.
 

PrettyDeadman

Guest
Best justification--Fallout 1, 2, and Arcanum: Party size is determined by charisma; ugly people have fewer friends. Makes sense to me. Not a big deal for Fallout because there are so few useful people. In Arcanum it's more noticeable because of the larger roster.

Worst--Dungeon Siege 2. You only get 2 party members until you pay a ridiculous sum of money to an arbitrary guild. Then you get 3.
You got it all wrong. There is no justification why only supermodels can have big parties. Do you think all ancient generals were supermodels? How could they lead hundreds of thousands if people with best possible charisma could only lead like 6 people? Fallout 1,2 and Arcanaum are all wrong.
If there is a law against it (a result of corruption and lobbying from a group of interest - like adventure guild in Dungeon Siege 2) then it makes sense why party size would be arbitrarily limited to a certain ammount. This have examples in real life too. In Russia if you get more than 3 people together without getting a permission from the state you are risking of being accused of organizing an illegal protest.
 
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ilitarist

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There was a law system in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. But there are special places were laws explicitly do not work yet there's still a party size limit.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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There's no party size limit in King's Bounty, and your party size is limited by your leadership points.

This is, of course, only a hybrid RPG which blends strategy with RPG, and more than one entity can occupy the same square, so there's that.

On a practical level, surely there's going to be a limit to how many party members can fit on the screen, particularly in grid-based games where a square cannot be occupied by more than one entity, and some entities take up more than one square, and then you'll have to leave room for an opposing posse that will make the combat in some way challenging. It'd be quite a tedious game if the game was just constant bottlenecks of hoards and only the front 2-10 characters could act each turn, having to click end-turn on the other 234 entities each turn. Also, who's going to write individual characters for 250 entities?
 

ilitarist

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There's no party size limit in King's Bounty, and your party size is limited by your leadership points.

As in "you can have 10000 dragons, but if you have 1 knight, 1 peasant, 1 wolf, 1 mage and 1 barbarian you can't add 1 fairy but can add 92343 wolfs".
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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There's no party size limit in King's Bounty, and your party size is limited by your leadership points.

As in "you can have 10000 dragons, but if you have 1 knight, 1 peasant, 1 wolf, 1 mage and 1 barbarian you can't add 1 fairy but can add 92343 wolfs".

Yes. You can have the quantity but not the variety.

Now answer the rest of the post.
 

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