Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Party Size Discussion

I'm not going to read hundreds of comments a day and plumb the depths of every post, most of which are weak or entitled takes.
I saw the topic, I shared my thoughts on it. It's not invalid because of how the thread has progressed, nor is it invalid because you don't agree with it.
In short, deal with it.

Amusingly enough, the very few defenders of the 4-men party are attempting an angle ("I prefer smaller parties because I can play battles more quickly") that simply doesn't stand a single bit on its feet.

In fact, while a six men party allows you to scale back the number of party members as much as you want (the old Infinity Engine games could be played even in solo and among power players it was a common tactic to reduce the number of active party members to increase their shared exp and level up faster) this interchangeability is completely lost when the limit to 4 characters is not optional anymore.

would be nice. 6 man party

I'm good with 4.
Is there a planned lone wolf option anyone know about?
Perhaps there will be a mod for it, I believe there were for DOS's. I wonder how they handle the inventory screen, shrink it so 6 would fit?

Sorry to say it like that but your exemple is stupid...
You're taking the good numbers to show you're right but you're wrong...

Let's try the same exercice with more realistic values...

1 custom + 3 companions out of 10 possibilities => 120 combination
1 custom + 5 companions out of 10 possibilities => 252 combination

Do it with 15 potential companions now...
Of course this is only values. Nothing i.e related to alignement.

I agree, when playing the original BG games I would decide on who was going to be in my team before I start and they would be the only people I recruit, with the only real exception been early when I'd recruit Monteron and Xzar to fight the mage at the Friendly Arm Inn or Yoshimo in the second just for the opening dungeon.

When playing BG3 I probaly won't recruit anyone who wont fit in my party since to me it's a little immersion breaking, "right you two sit here clean the camp and make dinner while the four of us go fight this dragon and then clear out thirty bandits in their camp"

+1. I've never made a video game and I'm only adequate at being a Dungeon Master IRL, so I dunno. This is my take, though.

I was fine with 4-person parties for a while. I played the s*** out of Dragon Age when I was a teenager, and although I sometimes found it restrictive because I would meet someone new that I liked, I was ultimately OK with it.

Then I played Pillars of Eternity. I felt my heart soar when a fifth person joined my party; it was like my eyes had been opened. And of course I then played BG1+2 and IWD. Still in the middle of Torment.

I totally get wanting a 4-person party for a more focused experience, but listen: if the maximum is 6, you don't have to have 6 people. If you limit yourself to 4, each char will get more XP, leveling up faster to offset the difficulty of an encounter aimed at 6 characters!

As for the multiplayer concerns, they could always restrict multiplayer to 4 and have singleplayer at 6.

I'd love 6. Even 5 would be better. I was quite disappointed when I saw the limit of 4 in DA:O. The problem is with turn-based - changing from 4 to 6 will mean that fight are on average 1.5 times longer, and that's not taking into account having more enemies to balance difficulty. That sounds like it's going to make fights a drag, especially "fodder fights" with multiple weak enemies. I'm not sure how feasible it is to overcome this. (Boss fights I can see getting better though, as you'd have more tools in your arsenal to think of some creative, complex strategy.)

Why people keep parroting this argument?
That's not true at all. A six men party just means that the turn rotation will pass the action more often to one of the characters you are controlling rather than an enemy.
Which if anything is something that feels fairly NEEDED in the current build, where way too often you are watching a whole bunch of enemies "Alpha-striking" your party (and focusing on the casters in particular) with very sparse chances to inject your action in the middle. You may even end up cleaning encounters more quickly than with four characters.

Of course, in the long run it MAY be needed to buff the enemy side a bit to balance encounter design. Which can be achieved in a lot of ways that not necessarily pass through "adding more of them".

/sigh
ok, lets try this again Alodar, and this time, try not to limit your view and add artificial limitations to create scenarios that support your mistakes.




Difficulty adjustments are based on more than just challenge rating (CR is a guideline only), take a look at other books than just the DMG that have dedicated in depth info on this. I can't remember which book it is off the top of my head because it has been while since i sat down with it and i don't have my books to hand at present. But there is a huge section of tables that describe how to adjust encounters for party size.... Tome of Foes maybe? I'm sure someone can confirm which book i'm thinking of. On top of this, in adjusting difficulty you as a DM should understand your players' limitations and weaknesses and use this knowledge and the special properties of a creature to provide an appropriate challenge for your players. There are plenty of examples where CR just makes no sense when you consider two different creatures of the same CR as the special properties of one make it innately more challenging than the other.



I never said combat was shorter, combat speed is improved, I didn't say anywhere that combat takes less time to complete. I was talking about the amount of input you as a player have relative to the amount of time you are not giving input. You brought up combat speed without understanding what it is now you're refuting that by arguing about something different entirely.




OK, assuming you are 100% correct here. You are saying that either i make an urchin or take Astarion in every playthrough if i want a proficient thief. How is this increasing variety from one playthrough to the next? How are you providing an argument that supports the idea that 4 man party offers more replay value? You aren't. You are arguing AGAINST a smaller party with the backgrounds argument because you are advocating for making your party more alike every time.


9 times out of 10 is not pulling a statistic out of my ass, it's a turn of phrase. If you don't know the difference you are too young to be playing BG3. The Cheese list you linked, also has no requirement for 6 man party. Most of those cheese tactics where used in solo playthroughs. If you're going to google something to throw at me like that at least read the cheese strats before making a claim that they had anything to do with party size. Most of those are oversights in mechanics such as the potion stacking which is still possible in solo runs. I mentioned these already in this thread and I don't see how this helps your argument or is in any way relevant outside of my point about "inventive solutions". Linking this does nothing to refute my arguments and nothing to support yours.



This is so so stupid. No one is arguing to be able to take all companions in one playthrough. You are completely ignoring the argument here.
It has already been said that there are plans for more than 5 companions.
It has already been said that you need a bigger companion pool for a larger party to work.
"so many accusation and so wrong"
"if you do the math which you seem to think you're an expert"
I made no accusations and you don't need to be an expert mathematician to understand basic math.
The math that is actually being argued for here is as follows:

At each stage of play the player is offered a set amount of choices, let's call this number of choices x. To simplify the representation we will assume that every choice has only 2 possible outcomes, this is obviously not an accurate representation as each choice may have many more potential outcomes.
Therefore, in this example at any stage of play the total number of possible outcomes is 2 to the power of x.
For each incrementation of x the total number of possibly outcomes experiences exponential growth.
Again this is the same principle that all probability ie. a vast amount of statistics which is an entire of study within mathematics is based upon.

In asking if a 4 man party is better for replay value, or 5 or 6 is better, we are actually asking is a large x value better or a smaller x value. Is more choice better or less choice better for replay value. The answer is obviously more choices which is what you get with a larger party.


False, unless you add additional limitations that are not what people are talking about in this thread, ie, if you limit the number of available companions/mercs/hirelings/pets so that you as a player take the same ones every play through. Again, no one is saying they want to take all the companions, they are saying they want to change group composition so that you are NOT taking the same or very similar selection of companions/mercs/whatever on every playthrough. How are you not getting that? It has been made pretty clear.



Actually, yes what I said not only disputes those points, it completely disproves those points.
Again to summarise:
Your understanding of combat speed when you say that is wrong, you're arguing for shorter combat time, which is of much greater importance in pen and paper than a cRPG and if you want less combat, maybe a cRPG isn't the right medium for you as by their very nature you spend more of your game time in combat in a cRPG than in a tabletop game.
You're argument for replay value is based on additional limitations that you are adding to the discussion, not one person in this thread has argued for maintaining those limitations. I myself fall in line with the belief that less fleshed out mercs are the the answer to fill extra party slots on top of whatever fully fleshed out companions may be in the works already. This is much easier to implement than full companions, they don't have to react and be as interactive they just have to have some interactions and input at important moments, much like the companions of BG1.
As for the strategy bit, yeah i'm not going over that again, if you don't understand strategic difficulty, turns of phrase and the underpinning principle of probability and how that same principle applies here you are either way too young for this game or you're just a lost cause.

You are entitled to your opinion, but don't try to argue that white is black. You may prefer it, but that's not the same as you're opinion being fact or in any way based in logic.
As for you're comment on modding, we are well aware that mods will be a part of things, that this is one thing that can be modded, but why on earth would someone take a game that is already too easy (in part because of the 4 man party) and cut its difficulty in half (at least) by adding two extra characters without adjusting every single aspect of the game to make it more suitable
"If you want to make a mod that overhauls the entire game, every single combat encounter in the game, you are free to do so after full release" is not constructive in the slightest. Larian are balancing encounters and fixing issues now, now is the time to do it. Not rely on someone having the time, motivation and skill to rewrite a huge portion of the game to fix this issue for them later for free. It would be better to just balance it around 5 or 6 party members now than for modders to do it later as not only is doing it later far far more work, but would have to be done by a team that is a fraction of the size.

People want a bigger party. Personally I would say a 5 man party would be the best approach as it could be done with far less work, allow a little variation and means that the mercs mechanic wouldn't be as big a portion of the party which keeps the full companions much more centre stage.

But if you have 4 party members and 6 enemies, it makes for 10 turns per round. 6 party members and 6 enemies: 12 turns. But indeed, it might mean that you will feel more agency througout the fight, as the ratio of allies/enemies will be better, if they go with "buff enemies" rather than "add more". One problem I could potentially see with this is that buffing enemies in a meaningful way (not just pump numbers) requires more effort than adding more of the same... Or not, if the enemies are unique and would require new models/animations/voices. Still, rebalancing might be more complicated than it would seem. But I think we might have a better idea of this when we see the difficulty options, which are said to be more interesting than "buff numbers". Perhaps a solution would be "bump this type of difficulty settings by 1 for 5-man party and by 2 for 6-man party to experience a similar level of difficulty".

(I'm playing a bit of a devil's advocate here, I would strongly prefer a party of 6. I mentioned the "parroted" argument because it seemed like a legitimate concern, I will be happy to be proven wrong.)

As someone who has been playing D&D computer games since they first appeared (alas yes I am that old!) I'd have to say I was more than a little disappointed when I tried to get a 5th member to join only to find out it wasn't possible. The vast majority of D&D games have had six party members as the standard size - Gold box series, Eye of the Beholder series, actually pretty much all the SSI games, Baldurs Gate 1 & 2, Icewind Dale 1&2, Temple of Elemental Evil, Pool of Radiance - Myth Drrannor etc etc. Even Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2 had 5 I think.

Four is just too limited for me - ideally I'd like six although I'd settle for 5. Whether they settled on four because its what they've always done or because they have concerns over the duration of combat or limitations in the engine doesn't really matter - one more character in the party would make a world of difference in allowing a bit more variety/flexibility in party composition, and I can't see that having a 5th member would require a major change in the game systems especially given that we are just at the beginning of early access.

Doesn't help that the party members you can pick up at the start are unlikable and totally opposite to the kind of party I prefer to play!

I think I read somewhere there might be a "crisis point" locking your party like in Divinity: Original Sin 2 which I could understand why they might want to limit the party, but that just made me always play someone with an origin (eg Lohse or Sebille), rather than a player-created character, unless I was maybe doing a multiplayer campaign with some of my friends. I would enjoy a larger party size, especially since I'd like to eventually play a bard, ranger, or maybe even a druid eventually, but when you have to look at frontline/healer/dps composition, 4 doesn't give a lot of flexibility right now, until maybe more classes are added, like paladin or something. Ultimately I suppose it depends on gameplay and story and how Larian feels about it, but I'd personally try to work harder to accomplish something if it means I get to keep more of my companions.

Lol that’s not what I was saying
I was saying this all came about because Larian said you had to decide which characters at the end of Chapter1 you were sticking with.

Thus my claim is that I don’t mind a CORE party of 4 IF I can add to it with npc’s, animals, whatever.

Because I actually largely agree with larger parties and the conversations about interesting compositions. So far though I’ve gone with my experience from BG1&2 (I’ve yet to try BG3 EA), and that was very combat heavy, so a team of six really did allow for some oddball characters tagging along.

I’m also totally up for fully fledged 6 characters all with epic stories and interaction, I just appreciate it’s a ton of work to get that to work! Hence my 4 core plus 1 or 2 slot fillers.

I agree that 4 party members feels very limited in this game, especially compared to DOS2 where builds were a lot more flexible. +1

How to go about adjusting difficulty is an important concern, I would imagine for some fights increasing numbers would be the best approach (number of fodder mobs or HP values), some fights would be better served by adding a mini boss or a lieutenant type mob, some by adjusting the fight environment slightly. In some encounters this would be easier to do than others I'm sure. There really is no other way but to look at every encounter individually which will already be happening to some extent while balancing for 4 man party, there is obviously an increase in workload to adjust things from their current state to make it suitable for a 5 man party and even more work would required to adjust for a 6 man party. Hence I think 5 is a better answer than 6, as much as i would like to have 6 with a potential 20ish companions to choose from, that simply isn't a realistic ask.

5 gets my vote due to practicality.




I wouldn't count NWN1 here, didn't really have a "party", it used mercs that the player didn't have direct control over and they had limited story interaction, they were like BG1 companions in terms of their input, not in the same league as bg2, you had your main character and 1 ai controlled follower that was of... limited usefulness fairly frequently, they played more like summoned creatures than party members (HotU did improve on their interaction levels though). NWN 2 varied your party size in the campaigns and returned full control to the player. The OC had a 5 man party that increased to 6 for a part and you took all companions for the finale, Mask of the Betrayer had a 4 man party iirc, but your choices were reasonably adaptive, 1ofMany could swap his entire build and honestly even with the very limited implementation of 3.5e character builds were much more flexible than 5e and much more easily broken, especially at epic levels. Regardless nwn1 and 2 were a far cry from the class+kit of BG1 and 2 or the class+subclass of 5e where those choices are so heavily defining. The increased flexibility reduced role rigidity making smaller party size infinitely easier to handle than a larger limit.

Sorry that was as much a joke response as anything.

But yes basically the idea of a set of fully fleshed out companions + a slot or two going to much less interactive companions (mercs or whatever you want to call them) which is the compromise I would push, though I would still say 5 party slots would be the best compromise to limit the amount of additional balance work that would have to be done.

I think a party of 5 would actually be the ideal. Let me illustrate based on my experiences so far with the game. I'm playing a ranger and thanks to the way I built her my character can use thieves tools to open locks and deal with traps (though I haven't encountered any traps that I can disarm, maybe I'm just being dense and missing when I can do this) so I don't need Astarion in my party for that. Lae'zel has been my favourite character thus far and has been a reliable tank from the beginning. Likewise Shadowheart has been absolutely vital as a healer. The limit on short rests and the relative scarcity of healing items makes it so, and it's rare I come out of a big fight not desperate for healing, and the game has done a good job making me hesitant to take long rests (I think I've only taken 4 in the past 12+ hours of playing). Plus she hits hard enough that she serves as a good frontliner alongside Lae'zel. I would not last long without Shadowheart for healing so she's a mainstay. That leaves me with only one extra slot for another character. Now consider that the is a really important area for Wyll's storyline and not taking him means you're gonna miss out on what seems to be a major beat in his story, so I have heavy incentive to take him along. Which means that for the goblin camp my party is set from the get-go since without Shadowheart and Lae'zel I would not be able to handle a lot of the combat without them should I get into combat (and I accidentally aggro'ed the whole camp so having them is the only way I could play and not die).

Now I like all of those characters so it's not the worst situation in the world, but right now with the characters I have currently, I only realistically have one free slot for the remaining 3 companions. A fifth slot would immediately allow me to take another non-essential companion who I want to have along purely for story reasons. A lot of people hav been talking about combat length but the only time I've felt like combat was too long was when I accidentally aggroed more enemies in the middle of a battle that had already been going on. So personally having the combat be longer would a plus for me since I enjoy it a lot overall. Plus a fifth companion would mean that while combat length might be greater, each character in the party would be expending relatively fewer resources so you likely wouldn't run out of them as quickly.

I'd like to point as well that, as a D&D player and sometimes DM, number of characters in a party does influence a little bit if only on CR from monsters in a encounter. And what does the CR of monsters in a combat mean (if you come from DOS)? CR tells you the upper maximum difficulty of the monster, for example the famous Illithid Mind Flayer Arcanist has a CR of 8, meaning a party of 4 players lvl 6 could take 1 on with hard difficulty while a party of 6 lvl 6 could take it easy.

Later in the game encounters like an Adult Red Dragon would be deadly for a 4 man lvl 12 but manageable for a 6 man lvl 12 party. It might sound like the game might be too easy for a 6 man party instead of 4 but it can also make it more challenging and epic if you throw more epic stuff at them since they'll manage: Why not an Adult Red Dragon (CR17) that Summons two zombie Beholders (CR13) as allies? Or even a Death Tyrant (CR 21) and a powerful Lich (CR21 or 22 in it's lair)? Yeah that last epic encounter I just described can only be taken by a 6 man party lvl 20 at a Hard Setting, it's deadly for only 4 characters.

Sure the game might not be like real D&D, but I do want a bigger party for future encounters in the late game if we are expecting to have the same amount of epicness and legendary encounters we had in BG2. I'd like to have a Bard countercharming and polymorphing, while my Fighter and tanks and wrecks havoc at the enemy frontline, my Paladin destroys the evil and protect it's allies, my Ranger deadeye shoots enemy magic users, my Wizard casts Timestop or Meteor Swarm and my character do whaterver I want it to do in the last spot of a bigger and more balanced party.


Sure, we're still in the early stages of the game, but rest assured we won't always be fighting 20 CR 1/4 goblins or CR 1 Imps

Ugh, tell me about it. This is why most feedback i've given about stuff doesn't come with optimism that it'll change, because they can just be like "nah i like this". Not gonna go into specifics about what I've talked about, not needed. Just wanted to reinforce what you said. It's even more relevant because we don't know if a change is going to happen UNTIL it happens. They don't bother putting out any sort of roadmap or list of changes they are going to do. So we could be focusing on things that are already planned for changes and not on things that they aren't and we should give feedback on the latter. Larian has it's upsides...being vocal and communicating during EA on what their plans are and what they are doing isn't one of them. Wasn't during OS2 and probably won't be for this either. Haven't seen them talk leading up to EA about a roadmap of sorts so we have an idea of their plan. It's a very one sided thing.