How do you handle a poorly balanced party?
>Two stealth archers
>One sword and board fighter
>One summoner
>Two crafters (Alchemy/Enchanting)

>>96161346 (OP)
>Running for 6 players
I collect the payments in advance then ghost them.

>Real answer
Not every plot arc needs to be combat. You've got an alchemist in the party. Do a plot arc about needing to find a cure to a plague or something. The rest of the party can still help gather ingredients. You've got a Summoner, do a plot arc about another plane bleeding into this one, with very specific creatures or artifacts that the summoner knows how to deal with as the cause. You've got fighters, have some noble ask them to train their kid so she can defend herself if she's ever targeted by an assassin. It's not hard to come up with things for players to do besides just a dungeon slog of combat encounters.

How is this poorly balanced? And what system is this?

>>96161346 (OP)
Depends on what system. Which is?

>>96161346 (OP)
Maybe base the campaign on what the characters can do and are good at? If the team consists of healer clerics or doctors, do a medical based help the injured type campaign. If it consists mostly of barbarians, knights, mech jocks or tank crew, do a warfare campaign. If the team is mostly merchant traders, do an exploring and trading empire building game. This is especially important for games that have the players roll up random classes and skills, like in Traveller.

>>96161346 (OP)
>poorly balanced party
>Two Strikers
>One Defender
>One Controller
>Two crafters (Alchemy/Enchanting)
Tell one of crafters to focus on healing (Leadering) and another to do some more Defending.

>>96161346 (OP)
Throw somewhat less combat challenge at them than I might otherwise. Give opportunities to shine for all the different builds. Shore up widening power discrepancies with custom gear that can't be passed around (race/religion/class locked).

Absolutely elementary tier DMing.

>>96161346 (OP)
>how do you handle
>poorly balanced party
By not playing shit-tier games that pre-requst to have some sort of well-rounded party to function at all.
Have you tried that yourself? Because clearly, you need to do so.

Also
>That party
>Poorly balanced
1/10 work on your bait

>>96161474
>>96161513
UESRPG3E
(Unofficial Elder Scrolls Role Playing Game 3rd Edition)

>>96161346 (OP)
What system?

>>96161825
Well, just turn down encounter difficulty, like another anon said. You don't really have many other options besides letting their characters get got. Which you go with depends on your players and what sort of game you're running.

>>96161346 (OP)
Poorly balanced is mostly a purview of how the game is run/what the players are trying to do. If they are trying to hustle magic items, this seems like a fine party. If they are trying to do standard adventurer stuff where the latter two are largely dead weight, then its maybe better to tell them they need to pick up some relevant skills to the campaign instead of retooling the whole thing to sideline what the other 4 clearly want. If somehow the later 2 are circumventing all the problems through item crafting, reduce the amount of time they have to solve problems.
If you want better advice, give a better description of what is actually going wrong. I suspect you haven't actually played a single session of the campaign yet, else you would surely think of an example where the party over/under performed due to its composition.

>>96161346 (OP)
Let them hire one or two guards to beef up their frontline

>>96161346 (OP)
With an equally poorly balanced rival party.

>>96161346 (OP)
There's 6 players, that's a miniature army. How hard can encounters be? Even if 2 are not direct combatants, that's still 6 people. Maybe more if the summoner does his job.

>>96161346 (OP)
Can all these classes participate in combat? Not familiar with the system enough to know if the crafters are useless.

If they can all participate in combat, do combat. If they can't, swap spotlight between them frequently (probably also do this even if they all can participate).

"Balance" isn't real, players care about whether what they are doing matters, not whether John has 20% more DPS than Jane.