WHEN DO YOU THINK IS A GOOD TIME TO BE ABLE TO CHANGE YOUR PARTY?

Well I'm currently making a game and am having trouble deciding when to let you choose your team, you'll play as 3 separate groups(humans and moogles, Animans(humans born with magic) and Elves)then at the end they'll form a small group trying to unite the races(17 PC's)

My point is when do you think is a good time to be able to change party members, I wanted to make it similar to Final Fantasy IV where your forced to use the party I choose, but before the final boss of the game you have the freedom to choose the characters you want to use. I want to know if this would annoy people people and if it does what would you think is the ideal time for being able to change your party. Do you like being able to choose within the first few hours(final fantasy 7), halfway point(Final Fantasy 9) or what? The reason I want to do it like this is because having to experiment with 17 different characters takes a long time if your forced to use them throughout the story you'll pretty much know what their strengths and weakness' are, but I can easily just change the story so that their choose-able as soon as they form the group.

It's going to be similar to the suikoden games, your going to have a base and all.The characters aren't going to have a deep backstory, but you'll play through all of them then after that is when you fight the final boss.I guess you could say half the game is backstory because at the end tons of sidequest are going to open up and stuff.
I know that sounds weird, but, thats how I want to make it.

Yeah but thats not possible in Rm2k3's battle system,unless your using a cbs.

Cool because I wanted to make it so that you can take 6 characters with you and switch between the extra ones in battle but I figured that would be impossible in rm2k3 so my ideas scrapped.

Yes,because he told me it's inefficient.
i actually just said that because I'm playing Persona 3 Portable right now and orpheus just said the same thing when he was summoned.
But whatever I changed it anyways.

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Definitely don't let the player choose their own party until ALL of the characters have had characterization and backstory. Basically, the player has to bond with each character before being allowed to choose the ones he or she wants.

But unless I read wrong, you have..... 17 party members? From one writer to another, trim that down. You're spreading yourself too thin. You should limit yourself to 10 MAX.

By the way I took your advice and gave some characters double jobs(Example a chemist that has steal).
I now have 9 characters plus a chocobo(which attacks by itself in battle) that has no relevance to the story.
I've had to make a lot of changes to the script but thanks to that the story move a lot faster.

I'm just gonna to do what ashriot and dratio said but I'm going to make it that your leader will change depending on different points in the game, so you'll pretty much get to use all of them.
Thanks for the replies!

thats what I'm doing,you play as 3 different groups and they all meet up for the final battle.