Party Coherence Factor

i have seen this called the "D&D problem": when you have a large cast of disparate characters going adventuring together, how do you actually make it make sense for them to stick together?

the classic case is "why the fuck is the lawful good paladin traveling alongside this chaotic neutral rat bastard sorcerer"—and while you can come up with plausible near-term rationales for this ("the town you both were in was suddenly under attack, and thus you banded together to fight a common enemy"), it's reaaaally hard to stretch some plausible reason over the course of an entire adventure.

in D&D, folks tend to just kinda "go with it" because, on a meta level, we just wanna play a goddamn game with our friends.

in JRPGs, we are often also asked to kinda "go with it", but to varying degrees involving various slights-of-hand, and i find it super entertaining to squint at games and figure out, how much of a fast one is this game trying to pull?

( ITT i rate various games that i love by this metric )

anyway at this point i got bored of assigning ratings, but, feel free to share your own Party Coherence Factor scores in the comments or w/e