Most of the party based RPGs will give you the option of starting with a variable number of starting characters, so there's nothing stopping people play with a party of one. Solo runs are quite common in games like Baldur's Gate. But I'm not sure if that's what you mean.

Neverwinter Nights and Fallout allowed you to hire mercanaries or pick up companions. Unlike with party based RPGs you had only a limited control over your teammates, so it felt like you only were controlling a single character, just that you had friends to help you. But as you say, you usually can't choose the options provided to you and strategy is frequently limited.

I think the game becomes very different once you need to control more than one character. With one character you can design the game like a third person action adventure, where it's all about the hero. With multiple characters, it's now a strategy game. The player needs to be more detatched to move multiple elements simultaneously. Pausing the game is almost certainly required. It turns the game into a diffrerent genre.

Unless someone suggests some solution I haven't thought of, I think you'll need to make the choice about what sort of game you want. Either it's all about one character with A.I. companions (even if it's just one character at a time if you allow the player to toggle who is active), or it's a squad based game.

I think the biggest problem is creating a game that makes the most of both single character and multi character combat.

If I had the choice it would depend on how I control them. If I had direct control like a tactics or RTS interface I would take a party since it opens up more strategy but if they were AI controlled I would just dump all the points into one character since 95% of the time NPC allies are a liability.

Hrmmm the difference in development is that you have more time and ability to add in details for that one specific character in back story and often in costumes as well as stats and such...while with more characters you have less time for back story, character development, other various things that would need to be spread between characters...

Action based games you control one character at a time anyways even if you have a whole cast of others so you aren't really losing anything other than developing stuff for all characters as you want...

So developmentally there is somewhat a clash of interests which keeps people from doing this...

On the player side...games that draw me in more, like MMOs I prefer single character, but at the same time i like having pets and such even if i can't really control them...but generally with RPGs I prefer multiple characters as it gives me more options. I can cast a spell while smacking them with a sword while doing a dance while making a jar... I like being able to do that.

That all being said... I haven't found any RPG with only 1 player controlled character to be interesting enough for me to get over any peeves I may have with it. The whole point that most people make about having less characters a lot of times is that you can customize that single character more, but the customization options end up being variations of the party dynamic or simply don't matter or are sooo poorly executed I find that I don't even think of using most of the stuff developed. Fable II for instance has something like 30 or 40 sets of armor and they are all either ugly, slightly off, or just plain useless. Same with it's weapons. Star Ocean 4 which is a game I like I am at the end of my first play through and I've found I haven't even come across 50% of all the monsters in the game...wtf? Rogue Galaxy, another game that boasts weapon customization has something like 1000 weapons and more than likely you will only see maybe if you care a few of them. Oblivion and the other game in the series both have a theoretically cool way to customize but in the end t just limits the player not too mention the story is boring and so is walking over a half hour just to be told to go somewhere else. KotOR, every time I thought I found something cool I found I couldn't use it or it was too weak, which essentially means the same thing. Fallout 3 I found myself saying "that's cool i should be able to do...nope" which essentially happened with every single thing I saw in the game.

The trade offs to me seem to be a lie, and frankly story wise it's better to have a group to play off than it is to have a single character...

Now if you're talking about play mechanics...people play with a single character largely to challenge themselves...but I bet most people like the option to have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc characters on a team whenever they want. It allows for strategy and challenge and you get the better story to have the team.. there is no reason to build in an extra mechanic to have to select to be able to play with one or more characters n the beginning, but it would be nice to be able to get rd of excess character in a better way than having to kill them like people have to in so many games.

Quote: Original post by Wai
I am talking about a multiplayer game (8 players max), but I think for your purpose it is equivalent. One way you could set up the trade off, is that when you have more party members the experience gets divided. This would force the player to make the party members specialized because there aren't many spare xp points to toy around. But overall it has the same effect as what you described. You don't get enough xp or enough money in the adventure to give everyone in the party the best stuff available. So you have to think about which character could afford to be naked, or just swing a chair leg instead of a sword.

if you were to do that as a MP game you would end up with players playing through in SP and not grouping...

Reason: your penalising group play by decreasing the reward relative to the number of players in the group.

I find having multiple characters much more interesting. Instead of having a all-around character, you can have characters which are all specialized, and combine their actions toward victory.

Also, in japanese RPGs, such as the Final Fantasy series, you always control a party of people. So it's not like it's something rare.

I've a game idea with the same problem. My original idea and planning went in with the thought of having a four man team. This continued along until I though about playing this game through variants, such as planing Final Fantasy 1 with a team of White Mages or a single White Mage.

After a long time, I realized it might just be better to structure the game rewards (money and xp wise) around four characters but still give the option in the beginning to have 1-4 team members.

In the time it takes for a team of four to gain a couple of levels, they should be able to afford decent equipment for each person. In that same amount of time, a single character may gain three or even four levels and have more than enough to get the best equipment around (for a starting area). Now those extra levels don't help all that much when a lot of enemies are attacking the loner at once.

That is the trade off when a single character faces challenges that were intended for a group: though they get more experience quicker, the character has no back up. All attacks are aimed at it and no one can help them if they get some sort of stasis effect that renders them inert, such as being paralyzed or sleeping.

You can give the player the choice of a variable number of party members, but warn them that such a choice will make the game extremely hard.