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.
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.
ReplyDeleteOne 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.
Having just a few characters and allowing them to change class is an interesting option, though it does mean that their class cannot have a big impact on their character / background / story. And the stories of someone who trained as a fighter, mage, or thief will likely match poorly in most conventional rpg worlds.
ReplyDeleteIn Spiderweb's Avadon you have a team of main character plus four subordinates. You can only bring two of them on any mission (some missions require a particular one) but they all level up at the same rate, so your only problem with switching them is that you will want to swap out the best gear sometimes. All the characters have a fixed class, but it's one of those games in which the classes are not so heavily specialised that group composition is restrictive. I'm sure there are better-known games that work like this too.