Introduction
We’re taking a look at building single-class parties. Building a party around a single class presents unique challenges often due individual classes’ limited capabilities. DnD is fundamentally a game about a party of diverse characters pooling their abilities to become more than the sum of their parts. The single-class party flips that on its head, introducing fun new challenges.
The Druid is fantastically versatile and a ton of fun to play. With wildly varied subclasses, a broad spell list, and a ton of built-in utility, Druids are among the easiest single-class parties.
The Rules
- No multiclassing
- 4 party members
- Must attempt to cover all party roles
Strengths and Weaknesses the All-Druid Party
Druids are full spellcasters with a diverse spell list providing a ton of powerful options. Any spellcasting-based role is easily available to the Druid simply by changing their spell list, though they don’t have as many direct Blaster options as the Cleric or the Wizard. The Druid really shines as a Controller and Utility caster, though they do have options for Blaster, Striker, and Support.
Wild Shape gives us a built-in Scout. By turning into innocuous local animals like bats, mice, and small birds, any Druid can effectively explore an area either unnoticed or in a form that leads enemies to ignore them.
Where druids fall short is their non-Wisdom skills. The Face and Scholar roles will be difficult.
The Party
Member 1: Circle of the Moon Druid
Circle of the Moon’s natural tankiness makes it a great choice for our Defender. However, as we move into mid and high levels, our beast form’s lagging attack bonus can put us into a Tank Fallacy situation. Wild Shape falls off offensively long before your giant pool of hit points stops keeping you alive.
Since we’re reserving Wild Shape for combat, this is the only member of our party who will explicitly not serve as a Scout. We’ll also reserve our spellcasting for self buffs, healing ourselves, and for preparing any situationally-useful Utility Caster options which our other party members don’t have space for.
Member 2: Circle of Wildfire Druid
Circle of Wildfire adds several fire spells from the Wizard’s spell list, curiously omitting Fireball, but otherwise giving us more direct damage options. We also get a cool pet that can shoot enemies at range and do some cool teleportation stuff. This adds some Blaster, some Striker, and some Support. We’ll consider this our primary Blaster and Striker.
This build is also very simple, leaving us plenty of room to pick up other roles. In this case, we’ll take the Scholar role. We’ll sacrifice a bit on Dex and Con to put some points into Intelligence so that we can support crucial knowledge skills.
Member 3: Circle of Spores Druid
Our second melee character, Circle of Spores scales slowly and takes some time to become effective in melee. Conveniently, it becomes effective right around when Circle of the Moon stops being dangerous offensively. Once we hit this point, we can be a good Defender and Striker, especially with options like Polearm Master.
Member 4: Circle of the Shepherd Druid
With four druids in the party, there’s a lot of room for pets and summoning. That makes Circle of the Shepherd a terrifyingly powerful prospect.
We’ll also make this our party’s Face. A little bit of Charisma and a Background like Courtier or Noble will get us the skills we need, and we can make up the lack of Charisma with buffs like Guidance.
The Report Card
We just barely managed to cover every role, but it’s definitely a stretch for some of them.Role Member(s) Blaster 2 Controller 2, 4 Defender 1, 3 Face 4 Healer Everyone Scholar 2 Scout 2, 3, 4 Striker 2, 3 Support Everyone Utility Caster Everyone
Biggest Strength
4 full spellcasters is a lot of power, especially with the ability to summon an army of superpowered cows to hide behind if the party’s front line is feeling lazy. We can totally control the battlefield, slowing and restraining enemies, forcing them into dangerous positions, and wearing them down with area damage from afar. Even in melee, we’re much more durable than our AC would suggest.
Biggest Weakness
Our AC is bad. Druids have terrible armor options and can rarely afford to max out Dexterity in order to boost their AC. Our best magic option to solve the issue is Barkskin, but it’s awful. We’ll need to rely heavily on temporary hit points and tactical positioning.
Our skills also aren’t fantastic. Aside from Insight and Perception, we’ll struggle with a lot of things. Fortunately, we have Guidance and Enhance Ability readily available.
Conclusion
Druids are one of the easier single-class party options until something decides to attack you. Even with just d8 hit dice, though, a party of 4 Druids is still entirely capable of facing whatever the game can throw at them.
