[Katherine]

I'm curious as to what sort of parties people play and how they play them. Who's in your current (or most recent) party?

Mine (serial port MP game):
Tiax as my main warrior and leader of the group (chaotic evil)
Yeslick as his backup and constant foe (lawful good)
Quayle just because he's so smart and will tell you so at every opportunity (chaotic neutral)
PC-Invoker (lawful neutral)
PC2-Thief (chaotic neutral)
Xan to round things out with constant complaints and to back up the warriors in tough fights with his snazzy moonblade. (lawful neutral)

This is a really fun party. Tiax has the Gauntlets of Ogre strength, so he's the main tough guy with a +1 mace. Yeslick, who hates him, backs him up. They both carry shields, so no ranged attacks from them.

Quayle mostly just stands around and will only get into the fight if it's going badly. He heals people and uses the wand of heavens in tough situations. I like the way he insults the other party members, basically. "If you ever need any help... you know- thinking... just let me know."

My Invoker and Thief are wife/husband. The Invoker is the main PC. The thief is the only party member with an effective ranged attack (bow).

Xan... He's a good fighter when he casts Armor and goes a brawling. Being an Enchanter, he doesn't have a lot of really great offensive spells at level 6 (I play the specialist mages so they mostly cast only from their specialty), so he will go fight when needed. I also like the way he builds party morale with his pep talk.

I don't reload for bad "level ups" unless the character only gets 1 hp, and even then, I let that happen sometimes (Xan, level 6, has 12hp). I also let characters die if they are smashed into pieces and resurrect the ones that die but aren't smooshed. Unless a party member has scouted ahead, I don't do all the preparation spells and potions for big fights that they wouldn't know about. This group is currently in chapter 7 and buzzing around, doing some of the TOSC stuff before ending the game with a respectable reputation of 12.

Anyway, I've found this game to be much more fun and rewarding than my previous ones, mostly from my approach of very limited reloads and having the really weird NPCs as my group. Okay, that's it. What about your party?

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