How to Build a Cohesive Party

D&D memories are rarely about specific rolls or the appearance of enemies; they are more often about the interactions between players and specific player choices. These kind of memories are not based on your actions as a GM, but rather on the way that players get along together. It is a long-pondered question how to build an ideal party of players, and some GMs struggle with the art of assembling a good party for memorable games. Fortunately, there are some keys you can keep in mind when you assemble your players. Let's get into the considerations you should make to ensure a happy party. 

The first question you must ask is what you want the tone of your adventure to be. You want to find players who match your goal. Let's say, for instance, that you want to run a campaign that focuses on roleplaying and storytelling. You should be on the lookout for people who are creative and spontaneous. Or perhaps you're planning a combat-heavy adventure. Then you want to seek out players who are systematic and strategic. Maybe you want a funny adventure full of hijinks--in that case, consider players who have strong senses of humor and who don't mind getting into distractions from whatever the main storyline is. If you drop the wrong player into the wrong campaign, you'll end up pushing someone to do something they don't want to do. So be mindful of player dispositions when you build your party. 

Let's get into some details as far as this process goes. There are three main ways you could be building your party. Firstly, you might be building a party from people who you know and who already know each other. If this is the case, you probably already have a sense of how these folks get along. Try to include people who get along and don't have any contention with other players. Don't just trust that people who generally get along will vibe together--TRPGs will test the limits of relationships at times, such as when players disagree about a particular strategy or when the story highlights delicate topics. Generally though, groups of existing friends will be the easiest to manage; just be wary of existing dynamics and how the game will affect them. 

You might also be composing a group out of people you already know who don't know each other. This was the model for the Eastweald campaign, and now those players are the party for the mystery campaign. I mention this because this can be a very strong way to build a party. When you go this route, you will have hopefully already covered the first step; my players are all people who take roleplaying somewhat seriously--they're all creative people who are spontaneous thinkers. This makes them a strong group. When you're considering people who don't know each other, you're going to have to do some guesswork. How will these people get along? What do they have in common? What will they all agree is important in the game? These questions should help you pick people who will work well together. Most important is that you build a bridge between players to help them get along--you can do this by starting a session with talking about shared interests or simply sharing a few details about the game and the players' interests in it. Once you have a shared dynamic, you're well on the way to turning your potential players into a cohesive group. 

The last option is increasingly popular these days. Folks are often now building campaigns out of groups of people even the GM has never met. With this model, you can't exactly make decisions about who will get along and who won't without gathering some information. One common method is to administer an interview, not unlike one would do for a job. There are resources out there for questions to ask potential players and how to process their answers. A resource like the one linked is a good start, but you should try to come up with questions specific to your adventure. In general, you want to have players who agree on which editions are best, which focuses of the game are best, and how the party is expected to behave and cooperate. If you're running a good-focused campaign, weed out any chaotic evil players, for instance; it's also important to consider experience levels. An experienced dungeon crawler may not get along well with a beginning roleplayer and vice versa, so decide accordingly. 

The basic focus of a campaign is the most important feature in assembling a party, but it isn't the the only important feature. For me, one of the most helpful tools in building a party is in something simple: everyone's sense of humor. A great deal of a TRPG session is built around players making each other laugh. Only the most dour, strategic campaign could be free of humor, and even those will still be rich in in-jokes and other comedic additions. Why does it matter if everyone's sense of humor is aligned with the rest of the party? For every minute spent goofing around, there is a minute with the potential to isolate a player who isn't on the inside of the jokes. 

How do you select people for sense of humor? It's easier than you think. When you're focused on building your party and considering individual people for the group, reflect on what kinds of things those people generally joke about. You don't want someone who finds dead baby jokes hilarious in a party with someone who finds those jokes repulsive, obviously, but it's equally important to group silly players with other silly players and jokester players with a group that appreciates their jokes. When I built my National Treasure campaign, I gathered a total of six people together. That's a sizable party, and a lot of considerations to make about how people fit together. Let's dive into that process:

I was working at a restaurant in Portland at the time that this campaign came together. I selected a handful of my coworkers and an old friend, plus a few additions made by the players. I'll describe each party member and why I selected them, with names changed to protect the innocent. In my first round of gathering the party, I selected two close friends, both of whom have dabbled in improv comedy. As you may know, I use improv as the basis for my games, so they were natural choices when it came to assembling a party. Both these players, Bobby and Mark we'll call them, have silly senses of humor and tend to make jokes of anything they encounter. They're always improvising, in a sense, and I wanted that energy in my game. Next I added Thomas, a quiet and thoughtful young man whose brain always seems to come up with the last thing anyone else would imagine. I wanted that creativity in the game, and Thomas' sense of humor is silly enough to get along with Bobby and Mark--in fact, the three of them often goofed around at work. I was considering this being the entire party, but I was contacted by my old friend Patty, who was looking for a game to join with her boyfriend, Brad. I didn't know Brad, but Patty is a very intelligent and irreverent person who is prone to silliness. So I knew that Patty would suit the party and hoped that Brad would be similar in terms of disposition. It turned out he was, and he added as much silliness as anyone else. Finally, Mark invited his friend Eddy, who I had only briefly met while playing Magic: The Gathering. Initially, I wasn't sure how to play with Eddy, who was playing a fairly reckless and amoral character in a group of folks who are generally do-gooders. But with a little time and nudging, Eddy leaned more into the silliness that the rest of the party exhibited and less into the finger-eating his character liked so much. I had on my hands a collection of silly roleplayers who were on board for any ridiculous adventure I threw their way, and I did it by almost exclusively considering sense of humor. 

If you're having a hard time gauging other folks' senses of humor, I recommend just asking directly. Have them name comedians or movies or shows or web series that exemplify what they like. If you find overlap with other players, or even near overlap, you're on the right track to building a party. But don't underestimate this tool--it can give you insight on how a group of people will play together in ways that interview questions cannot. 

My last piece of advice for building a party is to start by building a party and develop the adventure later. This may seem backwards to some GMs, but I assure you, it will allow you to tailor your game to your players far better than you might imagine. You can look back at my guide to creating a story based on player suggestions if that's a route you would enjoy, but it doesn't have to be all that involved. If like many GMs, you're having an easier time finding people you want to play with than you are coming up with a campaign that will be enjoyed by every party member, build your party first. Consider the general type of campaign you want to run and begin to build the party around that basic concern. Here is where you decide between story-rich, combat-heavy, roleplaying-focused, or other game type. Once you have a collection of people who generally want the same kind of experience, select for sense of humor. Now you should have a party that's ready to play harmoniously together, and you can set about building the campaign to match the players' desires. 

If you do go this route, consider the advantages you've given yourself as a GM. You have players who enjoy being together, who are oriented to cooperate since they've got similar goals in mind, and who are going to be able to make each other laugh, which is a bigger element of the game than most people acknowledge. You're in a position for success with your party. You're still likely to encounter player issues, but they will be issues of making the game work, not smoothing out things between players. From this point, all you have to do is dedicate time and attention to your campaign and leave behind all the party issues. 

Once you have your party, though, it's important to facilitate some bonding. Especially if your players don't all know each other, host an event where everybody can just get to know each other. You can double this time up with creating characters and drafting character sheets, but set aside at least an hour without gaming to get everybody familiar and friendly. If you did good work building a party by judging personalities, you'll find they get along quickly. By the same token, you'll notice any clashes pretty quickly as well, so take note of that. If it's a serious dislike you may have to remove a player. Go with your gut on that decision, but consider how it will affect the party dynamic. But more often than not, you'll have a group of people eager to game, and that's what we're going for. 

In the early session, I recommend lobbing some roleplaying moments into your game. Even if you're in a combat-focused game with little roleplaying, your players have made stories for their characters and they'll be most eager to share about them in the first moments controlling the character. Allow this to go as far as the players want to take it, especially if they're first time players. You want them to feel like they have choices because that makes their choices meaningful. Be sure to establish that they have agency to make any decision at all, and they'll get into character more fully most of the time. I like to make it so that my players are all playing characters who are strangers to another, and drawing them in together with someone calling for help. A short combat with some variant of thieves/bandits/guards brings the party together, and planting a questgiver nearby is enough to get the players talking to each other for most of the session, especially once they have a quest or reward to obtain. From there you have a group of adventurers who get to reveal themselves through roleplaying. So even if you were to run a combat-heavy campaign, your moments in battle would be informed by who the player designed them to be. After the early sessions, you can adjust your pace to fit the story, but a long beginning is not only room for players to continue to develop their characters but also instrumental to first-time players, who need just such a tutorial. [I play mostly with beginning players, historically. I would estimate I have taught about 60 people to play D&D (and other TRPGs occasionally) over the second half of my life. My goal with GMing is to always include the person least confident in the game as much as possible. But once they get the spirit of it, anyone can play. Similarly, anyone can learn to min-max or roleplay. Give your players the time to succeed in their own way, and it may teach you how to better address what they want out of the game.]

If your party of players and characters are both still rocky after the first few sessions, allow them a simple decision to make and some more time to roleplay. Both will help people find common ground. And you can stimulate your players' interactions by adding roleplaying exercises into the game. My favorite example of this comes from Dungeons & Daddies, my favorite D&D podcast. At the beginning of each episode, the characters all must provide a "Dad Fact," a random fact about their character that expresses what kind of dad they are. In a behind-the-scenes episode, the cast describes the Dad Facts as warmups to get the players into character and ready to improvise. I would recommend the same idea but applied to the kinds of character development questions you can find all across the internet. Pick some fun questions from any list, or write your own. Things like "What makes you irritated?" or "What's your favorite hobby?" are great questions for beginners as well as places to showcase the writing some players have already done. If your players enjoy the questions, consider including them at the beginning of each session. If they don't really respond to the probing you've given them so far, it's time to ask the Dark Question:

What happens when you have to kick a player out of a party? They're being abusive, they never show up to games, they don't get into the game and disrupt it instead; there are plenty of reasons you might need to remove someone from the game. Obviously you will know this person, whereas I, statistically speaking, do not, so I can't tell you exactly how to address it with them. But the big ideas here are to be polite but firm. Take ownership of the action as DM without casting it on the players, even if they agree, unless they ask how many people wanted them out. A general template might be this: "I have been thinking about it and I'm going to ask you to leave the game. [One sentence, respectful summary of why they have to leave] I'm doing this so that everyone else can have a positive space to play in." Further advice is beyond me. I'm more of a storyteller than a sociologist or psychologist, so I won't dabble further into dealing with conflict. I'm miserable at that. 

One final and relatively simple consideration is the alignment of the characters in the party. Experienced GMs know that a party with lawful good characters and chaotic evil characters will have troubles; you may wish to put a limit on the alignments players roleplay. Generally, you can do good through neutral characters together, and neutral and evil characters together; the law-chaos axis is generally less important than willingness to harm the innocent. To prevent a good-aligned character from butting heads with an evil-aligned character, encourage your players to collaborate on the general moral composition of the party. 

This guide should cover the framework you need to perform the art of selecting a party. Trust your instincts about it, but don't forget that people don't all have fun the same way. So get out there, gauge where your potential players stand on the relevant issues, and get ready to game. As always, if there's something I didn't cover here or you would like to see written about here, comment below! Coming soon: alternate uses for my expanded Wild Surge Table, how to keep a game balanced, and adjusting to players ignoring the story. Until next time, happy gaming!

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