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Wednesday, July 01, 2026
Ditching your friends
In Pillars of Eternity, the game I am currently playing, there are 8 companions in the base game, plus another 3 in the DLC. However, there are only five slots for companions in your party. Baldur's Gate 3 has a similar problem, with 10 companions in the game, and only 3 slots in the party besides your main character. There is some logic to that in the class-based system these games use: If you choose for example a wizard as your main character, you might not want a wizard companion. But besides those class considerations, each companion also comes with his own story and personal quests.
I have to say that I dislike swapping companions in and out of my party repeatedly. Of course, with some foreknowledge it is possible to always choose the optimal party configuration for every hard battle. But I am more likely to swap companions because I'm going somewhere which relates to a personal quest of that companion. You will want to have Lae'zel with you when dealing with the Githyanki, because otherwise you are missing out on the specific content of that interaction, and so forth.
But from a pen & paper roleplaying point of view that companion-swapping doesn't make much sense. Characters in a tabletop RPG would only change if either a new player joins the group, or a player for some reason switches to a new character. I over 40 years of D&D I never had a player switching back to a previously played and discarded character. A new player with a new character would also simply just add to the group, not necessarily replace a previous player with a previous character. But games like BG3 or Pillars of Eternity have hard caps on the number of characters in a group, so you can't just take an extra with you for the occasion.
I tend to get used to the characters I am playing with, and interested in their stories. Thus I am reluctant to bench them, just to get to know a new character and get involved in his story. It feels like ditching a friend. So maybe a better way would be if a game just had as many companions as there are free slots in the group, but those companions could adapt their class to result in a balanced group around the main character class choice, while keeping their personal stories constant.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:05 AM Permanent Link
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I very much share your concerns on this one. Unless I actively dislike a particular character, I tend to want to stick with the team that forms naturally through playing the game. Benching them and replacing them for plot reasons or to make fights easier just feels wrong. I see it as a flaw in the way these games have come to be designed.
One solution would be for characters to require a certain amount of rest and recuperation at times. Rather than the player dropping them, they could request some personal time or recovery time, which could be ties in with the various subplots. For example, when you acquire a new character with their own storyline, the game could assess which of the current team had completed their narrative, or was at a convenient point to pause it, and that character could request some time off, possibly even suggesting the newcomer as their replacement while they're gone.
I just feel there must be more creative and immersive ways to handle the whole thing without either making the player feel like the manager of a sports team or reducing the amount of character story available.
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One solution would be for characters to require a certain amount of rest and recuperation at times. Rather than the player dropping them, they could request some personal time or recovery time, which could be ties in with the various subplots. For example, when you acquire a new character with their own storyline, the game could assess which of the current team had completed their narrative, or was at a convenient point to pause it, and that character could request some time off, possibly even suggesting the newcomer as their replacement while they're gone.
I just feel there must be more creative and immersive ways to handle the whole thing without either making the player feel like the manager of a sports team or reducing the amount of character story available.
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