A RP heavy campaign with all characters playing the same niche. Can it work?

Question

I recently joined a homebrew campaign with only 3 players including myself. From the sounds of our session 0, the game will be very rp and intrigue heavy.

Maybe not surprisingly, all of the characters have ended up with roughly similar niche, background and stats, even personalities. Though we aren't playing the same class, they are all caster classes related to enchantment/ psionics. All of us have high charisma and are built to be a "party face".

I'm wondering if this can work without us constantly stepping on each other's toes? And even surviving battles?

Answer 1

This works, so long as the players want it to work.

Session 0 is going to be crucial here.

Combat is only one part of the game. To some people, it's an important part. And to some of THOSE people, they want it to be an important part that they have a unique skillset.

If the group is invested in their characters being different, then their character sheets don't matter as much.

Compare how different Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn are, despite likely just being 3 fighters.

If Mechanical differences are important to the players, then they have to coordinate the characters to reflect that

If the 3 players need their 3 charismatic characters to be different, then they need to figure that out. Deception, Persuasion, and Intimidation (and Performance, I guess) are the Charisma skills and each imply a very different way to interact with the social world the characters find themselves in; think Good Cop / Bad Cop / Weird Cop or something.

As I mentioned, in addition to other skills and backgrounds. A Street Urchin with Deception and Sleight of Hand implies a very different character than a Sage with Persuasion and Arcana or an Outlander with Survival and Intimidation.

Assuming all of that, then the only thing left is for you to work it in. Make notes in your book/DM board/notes app/etc to cater to each specialty. You don't have to perfectly hit each thing every encounter. And combat might be tricky; you might have to have them befriend a local shopkeeper that gives them discount potions for helping him rekindle his lost romance, or whatever. I don't have their stat sheets, so I'll leave combat balance as an exercise for the DM.

My experience

I'm currently DMing a game with 4 fighter-healers and it's fine. They have different mannerisms and play to those.

• One is more academically religious, he'll go searching the local churches for clues and contacts
• One is more fanatical for their deity, she'll try to use their guild and church contacts to get more information and talk about her deity
• One is more 'fell into it', she'll use the library and try to sweet talk villagers
• One leans more heavily into their combat side, but he'll still beat on doors and demand answers

I'll admit this is a little more diverse than you're saying, but each of them would handle the prompt "You've found out about a derelict demon temple" in a different way (samples listed above), despite all opposing it for various religious reasons.

Years ago, I ran with all martial characters and even they managed to make their characters sufficiently different (think again to the example of Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas). It wasn't their combat acumen that set them apart, but rather what they did outside of combat. And beyond even their mechanics (stealth, intimidation, knowledge, etc), it was their personalities, the life given to them by the players.

Personality; that's what sets characters in the world, not their dice rolls. A player that only rolls dice to play the game doesn't have a character in the world, they just have a character sheet at the table.

It's your job to give them prompts and a world to interact with, it's their job integrate those characters into the world with each other.

and

It's everyone's (players and DM) job to work together to create an enjoyable experience

Answer 2

Yes, this can be made to work but it is work

A friend of mine ran a group that consisted entirely of dwarfen fighters. You may have be careful of the challenges that they have no resources for solving. I think this can actually pose some interesting, and entertaining experiences, but will require extra work from you to adjust existing printed modules. (In particular, if there are only 3 PCs, most of them are intended by default for four, and I think the average group size in AL is five).

There is also evidence from other game systems, like Call of Cthulhu, where all the characters typically are mundane and just differ by skills that do not matter too much. However, in those cases the adventures are obviously calibrated for such characters. Again, I think your major challenge will be to find fitting adventure modules.

Answer 3

Can it be done? It has been done successfully, or at least so people say.

I repeatedly encountered the mentions of someone's campaign centred around a thieves' guild (with all PCs being guildmates), back during the prior editions' eras (I haven't played the system at the time). Unlike the all-thief parties, I haven't encountered an all-spellcaster campaign premise discussed in the D&Desque traditions, but there are other games built around a circle of mages (e.g. Ars Magica for the more medievalesque era, Mage the Ascension for a contemporary and with a looser definition of a mage; there are probably more).

Your situation of everyone being casters with an enchanting leaning seems to be comparable to 'everyone is a thief' or 'everyone is a mage'. So it can work. Whether it will work in your case of course depends on many, many other factors.