Are there any recent, good D&D type games where you actually build the whole party? I Loved the old Gold box games, and the original Bard’s tale et al.
Obviously the last couple decades have moved toward the create one(or zero) characters and the rest of your party are encountered pre-made, so that they can have voice acting, and plot points and betray you etc. And those games are good as well.
But,I am having a bit of nostalgia for a game where I can roll an architected team of ass-kickers and stomp through some dungeons. But I can’t think of, or find any.
You can only make one character from scratch, but you can heavily customize the rest of the party (subclass, skills/spells, gear). Yeah, it’s not perfect, but was trying to pick something in a more modern vein. But yeah, if full party complete customization is your thing, it’s not there.
KotOR and KotOR2 use a system of attributes, feats, and abilities based on the D&D model.
You don’t get to choose the race & class of your other team members but they are highly customizable. You can easily convert a character intended for melee to ranged and vice versa.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker lets you fully customize your main character, and then recruit a bunch of voiced, pre-generated characters to fill out your party, BioWare style. But, once you get past the intro dungeon, there’s an NPC at the tavern that lets you roll up an entire party from scratch. The catch is, she charges you gold pieces to do it, and it’s not really cheap. And you miss out on a lot of content if you don’t use the pre-generated characters, as they all have their individual plots and backstories. In my last playthrough, I found a mod that lets you completely re-roll the stats of all the NPCs, so you can remake them into whatever you want, and still get all the extra quests and stuff.
Also a damned good RPG, based off the Pathfinder rule set, which was an extension of 3rd Edition D&D.
Wasteland 2 and 3 have fully customizable core team members. It’s sort of a hybrid, actually–your team can have 4 fully custom characters, plus 2-3 “recruits” that are pre-made (which you can swap in and out from a larger pool). You don’t have to bring the recruits along if you don’t want.
Another vote for Solasta. It uses the D&D 5e engine (albeit with some homebrew) and you can generate your four-man party from scratch of you don’t want to use the pregens. It’s not a perfect game and a little janky in spots but I had a lot of fun with it.
One nice thing is that you can customize almost everything in the game. Turn monster crits off, double their hit points, turn off random travel encounters, turn on variant encumbrance, disable needing a free hand for somatic spell components, etc. I played largely stock but did adjust a few things that were just fiddly like ration consumption.
Essentially you build a party of D&D players, whose characteristics spill over into the dungeon and world they play in. There’s also a fair bit of cheesy humour in the games, not unlike my old D&D games!
Though it’s D&D-adjacent, “Divinity: Original Sin 2” has recruitable characters that will adopt whatever class you ask them to when you first recruit them, and can be respecced and twiddled-with to your heart’s content.
It’s “recent” as in 2017, but it does have ample dungeons and fights for you to get your blast on.
Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin are similar: you can use the provided plot characters or you can recruit your own generic companions from a recruiter for a fee.
EDIT: Didn’t realise this was bumped by a spammer.
And they’re currently working on BG3. I think there’s a way using fake multi-player to create all of your own party already in the beta and I’m sure full party mods will come out eventually too
But yeah, if full party complete customization is your thing, it’s not there.