Justin: Hello, this is your friendly host and moderator Justin Weiss speaking, and I'm pleased to bring you tonight's roundtable. Our reader couldn't make it tonight, so it's going to be a staff-only table, but we still have plenty of interesting topics to discuss! Before we begin, however, I'd like our panel to introduce themselves.

Googleshng: Hi everyone, I've been doing enough of these I no longer have a little joking way of introducing myself.

Michael: I'm Michael, yet another Roundtable veteran. You can usually find me slaving away in Media.

Alan: Hey there, I'm Alan, RPGamer's requisite fanfiction and English person.

David: Hola, me llamo David Looney. I run guides.

Justin: Now that that's over with, it's time for our first question. This is geared toward some of the older games under our coverage, but it's still quite pertinent today: Some RPGs allow you to choose from a cast of characters in your party. Some force you to have a certain party at any given point. Some have certain characters you can and can't take out. In your opinions, which of these methods work the best for creating a coherent story while still providing an interesting gameplay experience?

Googleshng: I've always preferred games where you're always using your whole party all the time personally, if you want customization, make the characters customizable. I've always found the whole concept of "The four of us will go save the world, you other 16, uh, clean the house up while we're gone" a bit weak.

Alan: I feel that fixed party members are the way to go: despite being forced to use a certain party, enough interesting characters can prevent a game becoming boring, while the fixed party allows for a plot where the writers can say for certain that a certain combination of characters will be at a certain point of the game, and design events around that.

Justin: That's very true. I remember some of the most moving scenes of Final Fantasy VI could only be seen when certain characters were in one's party, and it disappointed me that people could miss those just because they didn't like those specific characters.

David: Well I feel that as long as the characters are interesting, I don't mind which method is used. I generally dislike when I am forced to use a character for 100% of the game and then they are removed, because then you have under-leveled characters you are forced to use. Also, I hate the whole 3-4 party members with 1-2 forced members idea. I dislike having to choose between party members sometimes.

Michael: Modern RPGs have placed more of an emphasis on plot development, hence not having characters in your party fails to move the plot forward and develop characters critical to it. Unless the characters you completely ignore are still integrated into the plot somehow, the overall story will be quite unfulfilling. Not to mention, a low number of characters keeps the game less confusing.

Googleshng: Forcing certain characters into your party at times is always annoying. Especially in games like Suikoden or Chrono Cross, where you have this huge roster of characters you'd presumably like to try, but so few open party slots that it's really only practical to pick a handful of favorites.

Michael: And sometimes you have to force in characters who you might not have developed in battle, creating even more of a barrier against using them.

Alan: I personally find games such as Suikoden or Chrono Cross flawed in that the actual decision of who to choose from the roster of 50+ characters becomes too long and tedious. Too often characters get thought of as just 'mage' or 'fighter', and by having so many characters you're detracting from the overall plot by oversimplifying them.

Googleshng: CC also has that little catch that switching a character into your party means you have to stop and spend 15 minutes tweaking your spells again.

Justin: Final Fantasy IV handled its very large cast of characters extremely well. It managed to find reasons for people to leave and join your party, and yet had enough characters that the game was still interesting. I'd like to see more games use that approach. CC, on the other hand, handled it very poorly, as others have just said. There were so many similar characters in CC that I basically just thought of them as whatever elemental color they had and just picked the one with the highest level.

Googleshng: It's also nice when a game gives you more characters than allowed in a fighting party, but then always keeps your party split up, so nobody is ever left twiddling thumbs. Of course I've never seen anyone follow through with it completely.

Michael: Not many gamers enjoy losing a character they spent lots of time leveling up in battle. And if the developer doesn't drop any hints that it will happen, then they'll be angered for sure.

Googleshng: Unless of course it's a character they'll be glad to be rid of, like with a certain early Genesis game I could name. 8)

Justin: Michael, I think they'll get over it. Plus, adding a new character into the mix to replace the highly leveled one would be an interesting way to involve the player's emotions directly with the game. It also increases the difficulty, since they'll have to protect the new weak character.

Michael: Of course, some gamers do develop emotional attachments to characters. Aeris comes to mind. The sheer number of revival code hoaxes proves this.

Justin: Right, and that's what I'm saying - because the developers removed a powerful character without dropping any hints that it would happen, it involved the players emotionally. Now imagine if they replaced Aeris right after that with a low-level, relatively weak character. That could provide an interesting "redemption"-style story, since the player would likely despise the new character for taking an old favorite's place. I think that would be really cool if it was handled well.

Googleshng: If characters just have totally level based stats, losing one isn't too big of a deal. When you have something like, say, FF5 though, it's quite comforting to see all his job levels carry over.

David: I don't mind forced losing of characters as much as forced using. Although I hate when you forcibly lose a character and lose their equipment for good

Googleshng: That was one of the better things about Grandia. When characters left, not only did you get their equipment, but items that passed along most of their experience.

Justin: I would like to see more games that left the tradition of the above-average hero that's always forced to be in one's party. Allowing a player to select characters with more defined strengths and weaknesses would allow for much more strategy in the game.

Googleshng: Yes, the god-like main character is getting a bit out of hand lately.

Michael: That above-average hero is usually critical to the plot, though.

Justin: True, but you could always do a Final Fantasy VI-ish thing, where it's difficult to pinpoint the main character out of several main characters.

Googleshng: Or the Wild ARMs thing, where each character is central to a different thread of the plot.

Michael: I think that is just a result of today's more plot-oriented games.

Alan: It would allow more strategy, perhaps, but most RPGs tend to be centered around one or two people primarily rather than an entire group. Final Fantasy 10 tried to rectify this, but it only turned battles into a game of matching the character to the enemy.

Michael: FF6 did force you to carry some characters critical to the plot at certain points. Mostly in the first half of the game.

Justin: That's true, but for most of the harder dungeons, you were allowed to select a group of characters, or even multiple groups of characters. That was really cool, because you also had to set up a B-team with other balanced strengths and weaknesses.

Michael: The final dungeon allowed you to take all your characters except two. And even in the end Square managed to let those final two you leave behind in the ending.

Alan: There's still an attachment, though, be it story or stat-wise, to one god-boy character. You know, either through plot or through their being significantly harder than everyone else, that they're the hero, and that makes you attached to them.

Justin: See, I disagree, Alan. I think that having multiple main characters provides a better story than only having a single main character. That way, the chances are greater that the player will relate to one of them. For instance, I liked FFVIII's story. A lot of people didn't. But there were some aspects of Squall's personality that I related to, which helped me get into the story more.

Alan: Oh, I agree that multiple main characters make for a better story, yes. But there's often a pull of enthusiasm towards a really strong or really heroic character. Tales of Destiny's Stahn was a thick-as-a-brick heroic-type fighter who didn't do a whole lot but scream "Ya-HOO!" at the end of fights and have hair the size of his body, but people loved him because he was your major fighter guy.

Googleshng: Recent over-focusing, though, has given us a lot of games, however, where only one character even receives any development.

David: Plus, with multiple main characters you have to juggle the threads of their stories, which means either one will be underdeveloped, or be lost completely.

Googleshng: Not with a competent writer. On a similar note to all of this, am I the only one sick to death of the recent trend of only allowing 3 characters in a fight? In the days when you saw parties of 6 everywhere, leaving characters out of your party was not nearly as much of a concern.

Michael: Also, some people would rather have the hero defined for them, rather than have to decide on a primary one among many heroes. As with a book, it all depends on each person's individual tastes in plot and character development.

Justin: That's true. But I know all of my favorite literary works are those in which I relate to a character in it. I wouldn't like FF6 anywhere near as much had Terra's story or Cyan's story or Celes' story been the only ones fleshed out. But really, the general consensus seems to be that having too many characters in the game and too many choices to make is a bad thing, but so is having no choice or a limited choice to make when it comes to taking characters into one's party. It really does depend on what type of game the story calls for.