Basic Trope: The player can only have a certain amount of characters active at a time.
- Straight: Bob can only take the field with four of his allies at a time, despite having more than four friends.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob and the rest of the Player Party are always together, yet only five of them can take the battlefield — the rest just wait on the sidelines, even if the current team gets defeated.
- If a member of the default team is dead before at the start of the fight, they "enter" the fight the same. Still dead.
- Downplayed:
- Bob can take all 6 friends with him, but leaving a few of them behind behind will grant a bonus.
- Bob can take all of his friends with him, but he can only directly manage 4 of them at a time and has to leave the rest to their own devices.
- There is no hard cap but adding more than the recommended amount is discouraged mechanically by increasingly punitive penalties.
- Justified:
- The Heroes require Magic/Mecha/Armor/ect. to operate on the battlefield and there is only enough for five.
- Bob's ride can only carry five and there is not enough time for multiple trips, so the others have to be left at their base.
- Only five members ever join the party.
- The party rotates throughout the story.
- Only the five main characters are actual party members - the others are uncontrollable guest stars.
- The party is currently on a stealthy mission, where moving around in such large numbers would draw too much undue attention. Bob would then have to determine who would be best to come along.
- The mission is very dangerous and the addition of an extra person won't help mitigate the danger much, so it's just not worth the risk to that extra person of letting them join in.
- There's only enough food for five people.
- The Supply Cache can only hold enough for five villagers: Mayor Bob and his friends. Once Cassie learns Carpentry, though, then you can support more.
- Inverted: There is an arbitrary minimum number of characters, 5 in this case, that must be with you at all times.
- Subverted:
- You are told in the tutorial to put 5 units on the field and no more, but you actually have no limit...
- The heroes are purposely holding back, only bringing along everyone who is absolutely necessary for the quest. Under special circumstances, however, more people can be brought into the active party.
- Double Subverted: ...However, you only get a handful of units to begin with, so it's functionally the same as a headcount limit.
- Parodied: Bob hires a bureaucrat to join the party so as to accurately determine the most efficient makeup... but the otherwise-worthless bureaucrat can only do this when in the party.
- Zig Zagged:
- The game allows the player to use all of their characters at once; however, several characters enter and leave the party due to various plot-related events.
- Different mission types have different limits. Defensive missions let you use the whole army, skirmishes using a small squad and infiltration missions limit you to only two characters at most.
- Averted: The game allows you to use all your units at once.
- Enforced:
- All attacks are loaded with special effects, and characters are extremely well-detailed. Having all characters in battle at once would put a serious strain on hardware.
- The game is being played on a portable unit and only three characters can fit on the screen.
- The game engine could technically handle it but playtesting found it resulted in boring gameplay as tedious and cheesy tactics were the only viable ones.
- The programmer had little experience with page swapping and thus left the more critical code sections limited to using only a single page to keep the game running smoothly, at the cost of limiting the active team to only 8 units as he couldn't squeeze more into a single page without sacrificing quality.
- Lampshaded: "You'd think that 5 men fighting 5 men wouldn't count as a war, would you?"
- Invoked: Bob shoos away most of the party, because it's traditional to only use a handful.
- Exploited: The Big Bad sends a large army of Mooks to crush the party bit by bit.
- Defied: "I'll be damned if a single one of us doesn't help in the battle! Alice, get back here!"
- Discussed: "This isn't a game, soldier. You don't need to spawn more overlords. Just send in the whole army."
- Conversed: "Why do you suppose they always go in four at a time?" "Game balance, probably. Maybe it's just less complicated that way?"
- Deconstructed:
- The army is weak, due to using no more than 5 men, and is defeated quickly.
- The 5 man army is easily capable of wiping out an entire enemy regiment, but other regiments take different routes and destroy the poorly defended capital while the 5 man army is out.
- Reconstructed:
- The five-man army is insanely powerful thanks to Applied Phlebotinum that the enemy does not have access to, but is in very limited supply.
- While Bob and his team are off doing their thing, the unused party members have their own jobs to do in the meantime. By the time Bob gets back to base, they'll have gathered intel or useful equipment that they wouldn't have had the chance to if they went with Bob.
- Bob's mission is centered around infiltration and sabotage, rather than outright confrontation. The five of them are enough to handle the handful of patrols they encounter, and they are able to do massive damage to the enemy's lair and military capacity.
- The enemy regiments realized that Bob had actually planned for something like this to happen and had trained the unused party members to a similar level as the 5 man army.
- Played For Laughs: During battles, unused characters are on the sidelines, having tea and playing badminton. In fact, they're always a little disappointed when duty calls.
- Played For Drama: Bob lost a comrade once when he committed too many of his troops to one fight. He's learning to fight more conservatively, and to trust himself to heavier responsibilities vis a vis human life.
Choose party members for Arbitrary Headcount Limit.
