What Is an Adventuring Party
A Familiar Story
A tabletop roleplaying game, or TTRPG, is an interactive storytelling experience where players take on the roles of characters within a shared world and collaborate to tell a story about those characters. Daggerheart is meant to be played by three to six people...with one person taking on the role of game master...
Daggerheart, Page 4, published 2025
DAGGERHEART is not the first game to describe the concept of an RPG to its readers, but it was, alphabetically, the first book in my hard drive of PDFs to use this definition we know and hold dear. I love playing a game with three to six friends (or enemies) and I think, in general, if you are playing a tabletop game by choice then you are incentivized to play socially and be a good sport. The following diatribe is not here to moralize about good sportsmanship in tabletop games that I like or love, it is to talk about how some games that I play either do or do not set groups up for collaborative storytelling success.
This is a TBR Problem Not a TTRPG Problem
One of my neuroses about fantasy games is how to make parties "sticky". There are a lot of ways to start an adventure or a campaign, but the stickiest ones involve some level of player buy-in and a hook for players to insert their character into the fiction of the adventure. Mysterious disappearances around the town of 13 Rivers? Maybe your gruff and tough level one wizard who is also a fighter with a heart of gold grew up in 13 Rivers, or she traveled into town because of a shadowy benefactor. Whatever, I'm a bad sport on backstories, but it gets your player character in the door to meet three other socially maladapted magicians and you save the town from the dragon cult.
So what next?
Hopefully the players all had a fun time and want to keep playing in two weeks. What happens if, after that adventure, they start asking why their character should stick around in the adventuring business? I know that I have had to retire characters from a fantasy campaign because I couldn't justify why they would stick around a chaotic group. I knew it would be true to character for my dear ranger Oasis Wonderwall to return to the wilderness and make way for a freaky little wizard to join the crew after the newly-minted-level-5-Fiend-Warlock friendly fireballed the party. Luckily this was a casual coworker game, so no one cared about players having a bench of oddballs to support troupe play.
I don't think many people are as bothered by the "stickiness" problem as I am, but I want to talk about how some games incentivize sticky parties more or less than others, and then maybe I'll get around to describing what I am writing for the UNTITLED POKER RPG.
Adventuring Parties in Fantasy RPGs
I own rulebooks for a lot of fantasy games with similar framing so I might do a quick rapid fire here to whet our appetites on how this pillar of the hobby supports group cohesion
5e D&D
I'm going from memory on 5e because it probably has the least scaffolding to support group-creation-at-character-generation. When you make a character in 5e, you have spots in your character sheet to record Bonds, Ideals, Flaws, and Personality. In the digital character creator, you can usually pick some sparks for these based on your character Background. Bonds is a place where you should be able to record relationships to other PCs, but to my knowledge this is entirely left up to player discretion and the only rule in the book that incentivizes this is the ability to award Inspiration for good role playing. This is a game with which I have a lot of experience and it is the game where I personally have had to retire characters most frequently because the group was not "sticky" for my character concept.
Daggerheart
I haven't played Daggerheart but I already had the PDF open when I started writing. The ninth step of Daggerheart is when you create your Connections to other PCs. This is basically the same prompt as provided in 5e D&D, but Daggerheart is a little more upfront about its OC-Play expectations in character creation, so it encourages more conversation between players about how they relate to one another. This is only stickier than D&D because it is wearing its intentions more clearly on its sleeves.
Draw Steel
To cut right to the point, identical to Daggerheart except Connections is Step 10 instead of Step 9. Bonus points that it gives a list of questions as prompts for what the connection might be like. One scooch stickier than Daggerheart.
Fabula Ultima
Ooh baby, this is the real deal. Fabula Ultima asks the gaming group to not even think about players before they have collaboratively made the setting and decided on themes of the game. Then, they work together to decide what type of group the adventuring party is. Only then do they start making characters. Super sticky even if it's not necessarily my style. Nice work Fabula Ultima.
Quick Aside for OSR Games
A lot of old-school inspired fantasy games don't expect characters to coexist for long enough that this really matters. Golden Age of Khares, Outcast Silver Raiders, Electrum Archives, all cool games that do not waste precious page count on group chemistry. Leave group formation to the adventure scenario, we only as sticky as the blood on our faces!
The corollary to this is something like Trespasser or other games that start with a peasant funnel - it is intentional that the party starts as random strangers who trauma bond into fellow trespassers. Sort of negatively sticky but in a cool way.
Two Fantasy Games Where the Party Matters Thematically
This is sort of a "guy who has only seen Boss Baby" comparison but I think games who take the next step from what we read in Fabula Ultima -- deciding what the party is like before you even start character creation -- are inherently stickier. It guides character creation so you don't accidentally make a character who just...doesn't fit the party.
His Majesty the Worm
Yes, I started this post with HMTW in mind. His Majesty the Worm is about the party as an entity -- like, as a legal entity in-universe. Guild creation is an intentional part of character generation and at the very least makes sure that PCs are all fantasy coworkers. But more importantly than that, Bonds are a formalized step in character creation and they are mechanical aspects of the game. If you do not role play your Bonds, even the "default" option of Ally, you will die in this game. Role playing your relationships and allowing them to grow and change over time is a key mechanical part of surviving the underworld. Extreme stickiness, even in a game where the goal is for adventurers to outgrow the group and retire. A+ to Rise Up Comus.
Mythic Bastionland
Mythic Bastionland is a game about Arthurian legendary knights. You can't know about King Arthur without being aware of the knights of the round table. The idea of the party being a Company of knights is thematically important in a way that makes the gameplay inherently sticky. There is no "sure I'm a fantasy adventurer, but I really just want to be a baker". No, wrong, bzzt, get in the armor Shinji or else the Mock Knight will have to go again.
Quick Looks Outside Fantasy
I realized when I started writing this that I mostly have Fantasy games on my computer, so I am probably missing a big sector of games with varying stickiness in other genres. I'd love to hear what games you like and how you make them more or less sticky! Reach out on Bluesky :) Before you do reply, I know that I am missing Blades in the Dark and its cousins, which are super sticky games, I just haven't played them!
Flying Circus
Flying Circus is my white whale. I want to play it so badly but I don't know when I will convince another human being to fly imaginary biplanes with me. Flying Circus is a Powered By the Apocalypse game; I didn't dive deeply into "story games" beyond mentioning a few classic trad-style games, but I'm inclined to think that games which primarily emulate narratives are going to have different axes of stickiness than the OSR/POSR/NSR games I mostly yammer about.
Flying Circus is a game about a Company of mercenary pilots, and creating the moral compass and aesthetics of the Company is a part of character creation like it is in HMTW. I'm going to guess that it is mega sticky, although another part of character creation is vices, so I'm sure intentionally/narratively un-sticky characters who dramatically threaten to quit are a part of the fun.
Cypher
I stuck Cypher outside of Fantasy because it's generic, but I can speak more intelligently to Old Gods of Appalachia in specifics. OGOA's stickiness is like a more focused and intentional version of the list of questions in Draw Steel. When you select your character's Focus (the verb in your character sentence), you are prompted to pick a specific other player and answer questions about your loyalty or suspicions directed toward that player's character.
This doesn't incentivize an adventuring party as much as it sets up a web of odd relationships that still give players interesting things to role play against and justify sticking together after the starting adventure. Medium stickiness. First-party adventures tend to directly suggest that PCs have a pre-existing relationship with core NPCs to add stickiness, but that's a standard across most of the games we've discussed today.
Triangle Agency
Sort of like HMTW, player characters in Triangle Agency are fantasy coworkers. It's lazy to do this but I'm going to generalize Delta Green into this description too - by virtue of being characters in this game, you are members of a common agency. You can skip the awkward "meeting in a bar" scene unless it's happy hour. Sticky enough to just move past the question.
What Can We Learn?
This post stems from an irritation with the paradigm of ostensibly multiplayer, party-based games that don't provide good structural tools for players and GMs to hang their hats on. I obviously neglected something like Daggerheart's campaign frames, which give a more cohesive theming for PCs, for example. When I still ran 5e D&D, I made sure that my character creation prompts were about characters joining a party, an expedition, a company; basically creating the natively-supported structures of MBL or HMTW. I find it important!
I think games that either take a thematic stance on what a party means in-fiction are my preferred type of stickiness. A close second is games that encourage the players and GM to make that decision for themselves, because it still enables the GM to prep around the party's stated goals and values. The least sticky form of game makes party dynamics an afterthought of character creation or offloads stickiness to adventure/campaign design. Like I said before, this may not bother other people!
BUT
Party stickiness a weird sell for the game we have been writing here! We are set in some parallel version of the modern day and we know that our player characters have at some point gambled their literal souls away. There are not a lot of groups of adventuring adults in the modern day. I have friends that I go canoeing with sometimes but, for better or for worse, this hasn't resulted in any civilization-defining battles or undiscovered loot. I thought about a framing like the very fun Jordan Morris comic Youth Group but it wasn't quite gelling for me. I took that friction and decided to push through it to take a harder and weirder stance on character creation, and I will see how my stance changes through playtesting.
Grannies? Grannies.
I live in a town of 1500 people and here, like a lot of places, the fierce little old ladies at church are the spine of the community. They know everyone, they bless everyone's heart, and they are a hoot and a half when you get them talking. If player characters have gambled their souls away to some booger or some devil, then they have a contract by which they can eventually get their souls back. But Grannies know that you've got a soul shaped hole and they are looking out for you, sugar, and they've got a little support group that meets up once a month to play some euchre and talk about what's going on in your life.
Whether or not your player character in UNTITLED POKER RPG has a preexisting relationship to the other PCs, they have a friendship with Granny that goes way back, either to when she taught at your college or when you did a paint and sip class downtown together. When she noticed the light in your eyes start to flicker, she invited you to come meet up with her and some of her other friends. This NPC acts as a hub for all of the players and provides a mechanical downtime phase of the game where the party gets back together after adventures. This step allows your characters to catch up and tell her about your experiences doing favors for her or following up on odd stories that she heard through the grapevine. I think this process of sharing experiences with Granny is going to directly correlate to how players choose their progression tracks as well, but I haven't fully fleshed out that idea yet.
This idea has been tickling me since the hike I took around the county this past Saturday so I'm excited to see if it resonates with anyone else as strongly. My mental model has essentially been this image that I'll leave you with from Little Bubby Child, so let me know what you think!
