How To Build An Effective D&D Party
While many players want to choose classes that just sound fun (and this is definitely the best way to play in my humble opinion), many still want to feel like they are contributing to their team. The best part about D&D (and I would argue specifically about the newest edition) is that any character, even if it has low to no optimization, is going to have the chance to make a big difference for their team in the average campaign which is an awesome feature of D&D. However, there are obviously characters that can contribute more effectively based on their inherent strength (which is where tier lists come in) and depending on what other players are playing. For those who are curious about the latter, this is the article for you! There are a lot of misconceptions concerning team compositions in D&D, but this article will cover those, effective strategies, how each class can contribute, and anything else you may want to consider when building a team with your friends!
Understanding Party Roles
When players think of D&D, it’s hard not to think of the archetypal party of a Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard. As it turns out, this is a pretty great party composition as they all fulfill different roles. To that end, many players like to split up the responsibilities on what their team should be able to accomplish amongst the various players. For example, check out this table of rough party roles I have in my D&D Builds Guide.
| Melee Damage Dealer | Ranged Damage Dealer | Tank/Defender | The Infiltrator | The Skill Jockey | Blaster Mage | Control Mage | Support Mage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fighter | Warlock | Paladin | Ranger | Bard | Warlock | Wizard | Bard |
| Barbarian | Fighter | Barbarian | Druid | Rogue | Wizard | Sorcerer | Druid |
| Paladin | Ranger | Fighter | Rogue | Wizard | Sorcerer | Druid | Cleric |
| Monk | Rogue | Cleric | Monk | Non-Bard Charisma Casters | Cleric | Bard | Wizard |
| Rogue | Wizard | Artificer | Bard | Monk | Artificer | Cleric | Sorcerer |
| Ranger | Sorcerer | – | – | – | – | Warlock | Artificer |
Before I continue, we should establish what the party roles even mean.
Melee Damage Dealer – Someone who primarily deals damage from melee (5/10ft) range.
Ranged Damage Dealer – Someone who primarily deals damage from a distance.
Tank/Defender – Protects the party in some capacity.
The Infiltrator – Someone who can get into or out of places.
The Skill Jockey – Someone really good at skill checks (generally just Bard and Rogue, but classes that don’t need to care about too many different attributes can work towards this).
Blaster Mage – A magic user who can deal damage to a lot of enemies at once.
Control Mage – A magic user who can disrupt multiple enemies in some way (direct CC like Hypnotic Pattern or difficult terrain like Sleet Storm)
Support Mage – A magic user who can heal and potentially buff other party members.
If we use the example of the classic D&D party, you have the Cleric as the support mage (healer), Fighter for damage (melee or ranged), Rogue for a ranged damage dealer/infiltrator/skill jockey, and Wizard for your general mage (blaster or control). Looking at the table, this seems like a really good team composition as each of these fulfill a pretty different role making your team well balanced. Guess what? You’re relatively right!
There’s a good reason that most players build their teams like this, it works for the average campaign! However, many people think that this is the way you have to build your team; if you have a friend who’s already a Barbarian, then you can’t be a Fighter or you have a friend going Bard so you can’t go Sorcerer. D&D is definitely not that cut and dry and requires a bit more nuance to understand. To that end, I would actually argue that this is the inherently wrong way to build a party. Why? Because it further perpetuates what I call the Myth of Balanced Parties.
The Myth Of Balanced Parties
While I have 8 different general archetypes on that table, that would imply that all of them are relatively important; however, that couldn’t be further from the truth as there are two extremely big problems with that assumption.
The first is that some roles are substantially better than others. The ability to cast battlefield control spells (a la the Control Mage) is just leagues stronger than trying to be a tank in general.
The second is that some classes/roles can only shine in the context of the party. A particular role can get substantially better or worse depending on what your team looks like.
To understand the first option, we need to establish a ranking in terms of how important each role is for a party. This is pretty generalized, but I think this will give you a rough idea of what should be prioritized.
- Control Mage – S Tier
- Support Mage – A Tier
- Blaster Mage – B+ Tier
- Ranged Damage Dealer – B+ Tier
- Melee Damage Dealer – B Tier
- Skill Jockey – C Tier
- Infiltrator – C – Tier
- Tank/Defender – D- Tier
From these rankings, you can surmise what really matters and why magic has always dominated in terms of power – for better or for worse, magic is pretty overpowered. Again this is pretty generalized and isn’t taking into account party composition, level, and the difficulty of the campaign, but you get the idea.
Control Mages are so effective, for example, as their one spell slot can cause a slew of complications for all of the enemies in a fight where a Blaster Mage can just deal some amount of damage to the enemies which may or may not kill them thus ridding the opposing team of actions. Conversely, a role like a Tank is generally really bad because most tank characters are actually much worse at tanking than they may believe they are and many enemies can simply ignore them, move around them, attack important targets from a distance, etc.
These vast differences in power clearly show why trying to prioritize a “balanced party” is not the correct goal, especially when you consider one major problem.
The Problem With Magic
Overall, the reason why creating a balanced party based on roles doesn’t make sense is because of magic.
Magic in D&D can, quite literally, solve any problem you have. Need to kill a bunch of enemies? Fireball. Need to deal with one tough enemy? Phantasmal Killer. Need to slow enemies down? Entangle. How about when you aren’t in combat? Need to cross a river or canyon? Fly. Sneak into a castle? Pass Without Trace. Convince someone to help you? Suggestion. Find a mysterious artifact? Locate Object.
The list can go on and on and these spells are generally just one example of how to solve these problems. If you can’t use magic, how could you hope to accomplish these things? Sure if you’re in a battle, damage is damage whether it’s from an attack or a spell, but martial characters are generally limited to good single target damage. Furthermore, if you need to do a tough out of combat encounter, you’re either hoping that you can pass your skill check or you’re completely reliant on your mages to solve the issue for you.
Now I’m not trying to say martial characters aren’t or can’t be useful, but it’s clear why mages reign supreme in D&D – there isn’t a problem magic can’t solve, but there are a lot of problems that not having magic can cause.
The Benefits Of An Unbalanced Party
Well if the way most people build parties are wrong, what’s right? Ironically, while most play groups try to create a balanced party, they would be much better served creating an unbalanced party! Let’s look at the three main examples.
All Melee Martial Characters
This meme dream team is a favorite for those who enjoy messing around more than building the perfect party, but this is actually much more reasonable than it may seem. Say in a four person party you have a Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, and Rogue. All four players would be looking to get up into enemies faces which makes a few things work. First, if you can knock an enemy prone (which is easier now more than ever for One D&D), every single party member can take advantage of that where if you had a party member attacking from ranged, it would be now harder for them to hit that enemy. Second, movement for enemies can become a nightmare if they are potentially risking four opportunity attacks!
Now to think about that party composition in particular, the Barbarian can focus on getting in the way of the most enemies and raging to absorb blows. The Fighter will focus on pure damage. The Rogue will also prioritize damage which will be easy since they will have constant Sneak Attacks, and if they are a Halfling, it’s much easier to hide behind an ally. Finally, the Monk can focus on grappling an enemy to stop them from moving while beating on them.
There would definitely be many challenges that this party would face – what if a party member went down, what if there are many enemies, what if there’s an out of combat situation they can’t handle, but for combat encounters, this is technically viable.
All Ranged Martial Characters
This likely doesn’t solve the out of combat issues, but now your team is substantially safer than they were before. Why? You can just defeat your enemies from a distance! There’s no law in D&D saying that somebody has to be on the front lines. If your entire team prioritized having a good movement speed and kiting enemies, what would be the issue with that? Realistically, the DM would have to be substantially more mindful in their encounter design to even present a threat to this party composition as it’ll be hard to put one party member into active danger, but again, skill checks would be rough.
All Mages
Now you may be wondering why I’m not splitting up mages into their individual groups (Blaster/Support/Control). Well, that’s because every Mage can fulfill at least two of these roles! You’d have to work extremely hard to have prepared spells that can only accomplish one of these goals and it’s infinitely more common (and optimal) to have a balanced spell list. So what’s a problem that a party of 4 mages can’t solve? Realistically? Nothing.
If you have a party of a Bard, Cleric, Sorcerer, and Wizard, it’s hard to imagine designing challenges that this composition couldn’t solve. This composition would have damage, control, support, healing, and out of combat issues all solved and there are even overlapping roles in case a party member is unavailable (Bard/Cleric for healing, Bard/Sorcerer for RP, Sorcerer/Wizard for general issues as they have the largest spell lists). Even if you went more extreme with literally just four Wizards, this party composition could still totally work if a few of them go Human to pick up Magic Initiate Cleric/Druid to grab Healing Word. Sure you won’t have buffing spells, but you have the healing which is the important part anyway.
Now you may be thinking of the all mage composition, what if we didn’t include a spellcasting class that had good offensive capabilities? Let’s instead switch this composition to two Bards, a Cleric, and Druid. Well, sorry to disappoint, but this still works perfectly well. I would argue this is worse than the composition with a Sorcerer and/or Wizard, but this is still totally viable. But how will this party kill a bunch of enemies at once!? You won’t, you’ll just use CC spells and whittle them down instead. As long as enemies aren’t actively hurting you and you don’t have a strict time limit, it doesn’t matter much how long a fight goes on for.
So now you may be wondering, is the all mage composition the best party available? Not quite!
How To Build An Effective Party
To summarize all the points I’ve made, a party wants to do two things – work well together and have minimum one person to perform an important function.
We can go back to the classic Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, and Wizard which is decent, but may not work well together. If the Fighter is on the front line and everyone else is back, the Fighter is probably going to be beaten senseless while the rest of the party watches. If the Rogue is by themselves on the front line, they’re useless. If both the Fighter and Rogue are ranged combatants while the Cleric and Wizard keep their distance as well, this can definitely work as none of them are entering melee range ideally, but skill checks will likely be an issue as you have nobody who would naturally have high Charisma and the Wizard is probably going to be working overtime to solve problems with magic that the others can’t (even Cleric as their spell list is a bit specific).
This isn’t a bad composition, even at its worst, but it could obviously be much better. To understand how to build a better composition, you need to understand the roles that each class can fill. While you could go back to the table above and work it from there, you will miss out on some nuance that can really make some party compositions shine!
Barbarian – Solely a melee damage dealer or “tank” role, but doesn’t fulfill either super well. There are subclasses that make their tanking better (Ancestral Guardians and Wild Heart in particular), but better doesn’t necessarily mean good.
Bard – Charisma caster so good at being the party “face”, good support mage, good control mage, and good skill jockey. An excellent class for literally any team.
Cleric – Wisdom caster so useful for skills like Insight or Perception and an excellent support mage. Depending on the subclass, Clerics can be super versatile as you can transform them more into control mages with a subclass like Trickery Cleric or you can become a melee character yourself with Forge Cleric or War Cleric.
Druid – Wisdom caster so useful for skills like Insight or Perception, an excellent support mage, and an good control mage.
Fighter – Either a melee or ranged martial damage dealer. I would argue that ranged is going to be generally better even if the DPR is lower (Two Handers are the highest damage), but if that puts you at risk of dying constantly, that obviously isn’t worth it.
Monk – The obvious role of a Monk is a melee damage dealer, but that’s actually not the best way to use Monks. Monk should function as a pseudo support class with the Grappler feat by either carrying enemies into harmful spell effects or carrying allies around that have a harmful spell effect. This strategy can be surprisingly effective whether you have a team that can produce a lot of hazardous effects or just one guy who can do it that you can cart around. If your team prioritizes emanations or damage spells that cover an area, Monk can be a really valuable part of that strategy, even if you’re the only team member looking to get close to enemies.
Paladin – The Paladin can fulfill many roles like a melee damage dealer, half of a support mage (can’t naturally heal), the face of the party, or a tank, but those all pale in comparison to what’s unfortunately their best function – aura on a stick. Aura of Protection is probably the most powerful ability in the game when you’re considering how one ability can affect your party so just sticking close to your party to ensure that they are always in the aura is actually the best strategy. This is an incredibly boring strategy, but grossly effective if you’re interested in fulfilling it. If you aren’t, Paladins can obviously perform well on the front lines with friends, and if you have a lot of martial allies, even better.
Ranger – Rangers are pretty versatile as they are a Wisdom caster so they have good Insight and Perception, they can be melee or ranged damage dealers, the best infiltrators, and they are ok control mages. Ranger’s general issue is that they don’t do any of these functions that well, but their versatility can help make up for it a bit.
Rogue – Rogues are obviously good skill jockeys thanks to Jack of All Trades, solid infiltrators, and can function as decent melee or ranged damage dealers with sneak attack. Unfortunately for Rogues, they don’t really do a single thing better than a different class as both their utility and damage are beaten by other classes. You can argue you get versatility with a Rogue, which is true, but choosing someone who is mediocre yet versatile is obviously much less good compared to someone who does a few things really well.
Sorcerer – Charisma caster so good at being the party “face”, excellent blaster and control mage.
Warlock – Charisma caster so good at being the party “face”, solid blaster and control mage. Also because of Agonizing Blast, they are pretty good at being a ranged damage dealer as well.
Wizard – Intelligence caster so they’re good at the skills that nobody else is (Arcana, History, Investigation, and Nature), the best blasters and control mages.
Conclusion
To reiterate the most important part of this article, you need your party to perform necessary functions and to work well together. Having different members do different things is fine, but if they aren’t working together the best that they can, you are leaving value on the table. There’s nothing wrong with overlapping classes or roles when they’re good and valuable (such as Sorcerers and Wizards actually being really good complements since they can share the load of a versatile spell list).
All this said, I will always emphasize that you should play what you want first, and if this guide helps you do that, then all the better!
Thanks for reading!
