Poll: Combat Number

[JuMeSyn]

What's the perfect party size for combat in RPGs?
1
2
3
4
5
6
7 or higher

[DarkRPGMaster]

5. While that sounds odd, 3 is too little IMO, 4 is traditional, but sometimes you want a team of 5.

[Scar]

5 or 6. Or an entire army. That's cool too.

[ironmage]

Five for regular turn-based RPGs (the final party in FF4 was fun to play). Possibly three or four for action RPGs, otherwise things might get too messy. For tactical RPGs, six or so.

[riulyn]

I'll vote for 6, since I'm a Suikoden fan I like bigger parties in general because you get to use more people, but at some point having too many party members makes it a bit tedious to input commands for all of them. Of course what really matters is that the party size works with the battle system. So for an action RPG I'd probably go with 3 and for a tactical RPG I would go for 7+, since what's the point of having all those classes if you can't use units of all of those types on the battlefield?

[Strawberry Eggs]

Call me boring, but 4 is just fine, 5 will do, but 4 just seems to have the right amount of variety in each battle without fights taking too long.

[ghaleon80]

I like 4. Call me old fashioned but I like the healer, fighter, magic, hybrid combo a lot of turn based RPG's used

[Clix]

I always liked having 5 in the few games that popped up in. It allowed me to focus on developing more characters and allowed for more intense fights sometime since I had more strategies available. I definitely think 3 is too few.

[DarkRPGMaster]

I like 4. Call me old fashioned but I like the healer, fighter, magic, hybrid combo a lot of turn based RPG's used

You dare speak of that when you have a Ghaleon avatar, and used 5 party members during the final battles of both games!? BLASPHEMY! /joke

To be honest, while I like that setup, I've always preferred the 5 man band because the leader of the party is almost always the best all-around character. The other 4, in MMO terms, are usually the tank, the glass cannon, the healer, and the DPS.

[TG Barighm]

I like 5. As someone said above, 4 is the traditional thing, but tradition gets boring. You always want to slip something a little unique into the group, but you don't want to upset established roles. That's what the 5 slot is for: that one weird class, an extra healer, or whatever else you want to experiment with.

I hate 3 man parties unless it's done the way FF10 did it where you can quickly swap out characters. 1 man groups only work for atmospheric RPGs.

[scorpio_7]

I prefer 6 but in terms of rpg's in general 4 is optimal. If it's less than 4 it feels like something is missing...

[lolwhoops]

5 has my vote. The only time more is really worth it is if it's an SRPG that wants to sell the army vs army thing. Unless they want a "Woah, you got an army? Better choose 5 guys from it to determine the whole battle!" thing. But in Etrian Odyssey 5 is nice. In FF4, 5 is nice. I just thing it lets you use more cool characters at once. I'm not fond of 2 or 3 person parties in RPGs because that's just too few, but 1 person works for action RPGs.

[omegabyte]

4 is almost always perfect in most games I play. 3 is usually too few and forces you to make really irritating decisions, and with 5, sometimes you end up with overlapping abilities, or characters that are so focused on one thing that they're useless in other departments (for example, healers that are incapable of performing any kind of decent offensive action in less strenuous encounters)

[watcher]

I prefer 5, but 4 is good too. 3 usually locks characters into certain rolls or it's the main character and their backup singer(s). 6 and up starts to get messy, though is okay in TRPGs/SRPGs.

[xocolatl]

I'll go with 6 or more, since it allows for you to set up formations and such. More is also fine for me. Any less, and it starts to kill off that sense of strategy.

One of these days, I hope there will also be units that occupy 2 spaces..kinda like the Fubar/Hugo combo in Suikoden3. I thought that was ingenius.

[Rya.Reisender]

5 or 6 is perfect for me. When I think about it Final Fantasy IV and Suikoden I&II were pretty cool with their 5-man and 6-man combat, much better than smaller parties. 4 is still fine. 3 and less always ruins the battle system a little because the variety is missing. More than 6 makes you lose overview, though. So yeah 5 and 6 is perfect.

[Nim]

Everything from 4-6. Some games that only have 3 active party members can still do it in the right way. Look at FFX. It was great that it allowed you to switch members mid-combat.

[Jormungand]

Everything from 4-6.

Agreed! Anything below that is quite dull.

[TwinBahamut]

This isn't easy to answer. It's far too specific for the individual quirks of a game.

3 party members works great for games with fast pacing and a large amount of team synergy, where the team is more than the sum of its parts. Chrono Trigger and Xenoblade in particular. I don't like it for a lot of other games, though... I certainly don't want to go above 3 in an high-paced action game. I think Tales and Star Ocean games get worse when you get a full party of four, actually. In fact, even just two characters can work well for a game like that.

4 works (I can't complain about FFV or VI, after all), but I somewhat prefer 5 for any game that involves controlling a moderately-sized party in a turn-based system with a variety of characters to choose from. 4 seems like a pretty good number for Monster Hunter and its clones, though, and it is probably the better number if you can switch out party members mid-battle.

Suikoden games work great with six members. Tactical RPGs feel like they don't even take off until you get at least that many units or more.

[TG Barighm]

It's also an interesting question for MMORPGs because it's not just a matter of party quality in those games. Number of players and speed of grouping is a major factor. I feel MMORPGs should feature parties of four, not 5. You don't really see 5th wheel "jack of all trades" classes anymore, so the extra DPS slot feels a bit redundant, plus it will be a lot quicker to get 4 players instead of 5. That said, 5 players allows for more players to take part in group quests. By having larger parties, it helps give more people a chance to take part in stuff (well, in games with fewer people anyway; in WoW you rarely see big guilds asking random people to fill that last spot they're having trouble finding someone for).

3 man parties would only work in MMORPGs if the DPS slot is fairly equally balanced with the other classes, but that would mean a healing system that allows healers to DPS as much as they heal; otherwise, the DPS classes could become overpowering.