Story Driven Parties

Military parties and similarly focused parties are easy to Game Master. As a Game Master, this means the call to adventure can, if all else fails, simply be orders from a superior.

Nothing prevents a military party from having a proper balance of job strategies. A combat medic is still a healer, and communications officers, or bomb technicians, or infiltration specialists are all technicians.

Religious parties are a slightly different breed. Are the members of the party all priests? If not, then the party’s religious affiliation is simply an easy source of motivation. If they are then think of the crusades. The party can consist of holy knights for long and short range combat, a priest who specializes in healing, and scholarly priest to serve as technician. Nothing in this party presents a problem.

The same is true about ideologically driven parties. Fraternal/racial parties will simply have similar allies and enemies across the board, and this makes their actions a little easier to anticipate.

Parties of destiny on the other hand, are a whole other animal. Parties of destiny are parties that essentially thrown together by the Game Master. A party of destiny is generally a bizarre mix of people who would never associate under normal terms, but have been thrown together by fate and must work together or perish.

In order for a party to qualify as a party of destiny, the Game Master must specify that the characters do not know each other at the beginning of the game, and must then contrive to push them together and force them to work together with story forces. This is one of the more common ways to start a campaign, but it is one of the more difficult ones.

Unless you are confident in you ability to manage to players individually and meld them into a group, it is best if you let the players know that they are friends, or otherwise already aligned at the beginning of the adventure.