Thoughts on RPGs with lots and lots of characters?

[BloodletterQ]

• Must be proportionate to the amount of combatants allowed.
  
  Suikoden has six characters per combat until the atrocity that is Suikoden IV. 
  
• Chrono Cross has a bunch of characters that can't do much.
  

[*]Must be a valid reason for having a large party.

• 
  Suikoden revolves more around war than a rag-tag team of heroes, even including the strategy battles.
  
• Chrono Cross gimps on characters that could have larger roles and have no reason to be with you. You'd also wonder why they're fighting in the first place.
  

[*]Don't make a bunch of garbage units. This is inevitable, but try to make them have at least some niche. Don't just make the optimal party Corrin, Azura, Xander, Ryoma, and any other royal. Yes, strategy RPGs are guilty of this too. I'm listing Fire Emblem since very rarely will you have generics if at all in most games.


It's a risky maneuver but can be awesome if done right.

 

[Pine Towers]

Make them believable?


Sometimes the playable character (e.g. The Blacksmith) is there at the forge and you talk to him and "Ey, I'll follow you!", leaving behind woman and child(ren) and not turning back until the end game.


Why not make the Blacksmith unavailable at some key points with the excuse of returning home to see his family? Maybe he could even be kidnapped (because was alone) and must be rescued. Or worse! You discover that during his absence he is working with the villain after he learned his family was taken as hostage! You can have more belieable traitors. Maybe The Priest must attend the wounded after the corpses in the graveyard arose by a necromancer's will, being unselectable for one or two missions. Or The Hunter is a must-have party member for the Hunting the Beast quest, restricting your choices.


This way you make the player try other combinations. Chrono Trigger did this so, after a certain event you could choose any character you identified the most.

 

[Slammy]

It really depends on the game but overall, I feel this sort of system is always harmful when the characters aren't very interesting. Personally, I don't see the point in having a large cast of characters if only a handful of them are interesting and well developed, its essentially a bunch of unnecessary fluff that'd make things easier on the player and the developer if it was scrapped.

 

[Evil_Seal]

When it comes to combat, I think it's good if all characters have something unique about them. One character shouldn't be objectively stronger (or at least much stronger) than another. Balancing this would be harder the more characters in the game.


The thing I find the most trouble with is the story aspect. The more characters you have, the harder it is to make them important and memorable. You can write a good character on paper, but if you don't have time to develop them properly in-game, then players will never know, and your work will be as good as wasted. 


In short, a bigger cast is harder to pull-off successfully.

 

[Niten Ichi Ryu]

I see you listed Ni No Kuni, but I wouldn't really consider it as a large cast of characters as only 4 are really developed story wise. The creatures you use in battle are more a game mechanic than really characters. 


Now if what you want is such, and what matters is a large variety of fighters mostly, maybe better to design your game like this. If the characters are "tools", you can have plenty. 


What Suikoden did really well for me was creating these huge casts in each, but not force all to be actual fighters. 

 

[Nuxill]

IMO the amount of characters you put in your game should depend on whether you want the game to focus on plot or game mechanics. Game mechanics can allow for big and small teams but with plot?? introducing all those characters + fleshing them out and showing how they grow as people is very time consuming and could disrupt the pacing. Not to mention most games that have their cake and eat it too are made by big companies with lots of money and teams of over a hundred people. @Niten Ichi Ryu basically said something similar which I would consider a good rule to follow:

Now if what you want is such, and what matters is a large variety of fighters mostly, maybe better to design your game like this. If the characters are "tools", you can have plenty. 

My rule of thumb is never more than double the number of character you can take into battle. (Double minus one is good if you can't/usually can't drop the main character.) Having too many characters not only makes it hard to develop them but also hard to ensure each of them is viable in battle.

And I really like this bit of advice personally, and if I ever make a game with more than four playable characters I'm definitely going to use this. 

 

[kurt91]

I can think of two instances that would justify having a whole lot of characters.


First off, if your battle system is complex enough that you can have more characters without overlapping skills and specialties. For instance, most RPGs have a front/back row system. If you were determined enough to pull it off and had a way to make enough differences between being in each row, you could potentially double your ranks because for each job, there would be a front-row specialist and a back-row specialist.


The second system that I could think of would be if you incorporated perma-death in your game. Yes, your story-important characters have abilities that would give you a huge advantage in battle. However, if they die, every sidequest and plot point regarding that character is suddenly cut off from you. You're going to want a huge number of more generic units to fill your ranks and keep your still-plot-important soldiers from facing danger. Now, when I say "more generic", I don't necessarily mean "Random Archer #42". You can have units that you have to recruit that have their own plots and side-stories, just much shorter so they lose importance to the overall arc sooner. You befriend and join a mercenary whose former team were killed by a traitor. Once that traitor is dead and he's come to peace with what's happened, he joins your team out of gratitude. Well, he's not going to be very important to the kingdom-spanning plot, so since his unique story is out of the way, we can safely utilize him as disposable cannon-fodder.

 

[jwideman]

State of Decay, while not exactly an RPG, does something similar. There are a few set characters, and infinite random characters. All of them can die, except for the one that can't even leave the base because she has Lupus. A few characters are unkillable at first, until they've reached a certain point in the story.


Some of the games in the Fallout series also do something similar, with companions that have their own stories and quests but can die permanently. And not just the companions, but quest-giving NPCs. Going on a killing spree means you miss out on a lot of content.