Four's Company, Two's a Crowd

"The death of one is a tragedy
The death of one is a tragedy
The death of one is a tragedy
The death of millions's just a statistic!"

Marilyn Manson - Fight Song


So, Christopher Baldwin's been running a new installment of Spacetrawler. Can't blame him for falling back on a cash cow I suppose, after his more interesting attempt at hard SF comics, One Way, got unfairly panned by most readers for its theatrically restricted setting and rather grim twists. The new Spacetrawler's so-so. Obviously less thought went into it than into the original. While it maintains some high points he's leaning quite hard on the crutches of simple running gags like "Nogg's a loser" and walk-ons by the old characters. It doesn't help that the new cast's personalities are less defined.

I've also been playing Divinity: Original Sin. Not quite enamored. For one, its core gimmick of being designed around duo play online pisses me off. You create two characters right off the bat and can recruit two more NPC henchmen (one for each "you") along the way. Now, a party size of four works quite well for a class-based party cRPG. Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenera both made an excellent show of it. In D:OS though, having two main characters ends up splitting the team down the middle somehow. The second playable character simply comes across as intrusive, and the NPC party members as extraneous in any roleplaying sense.

This does beg the question of what exactly constitutes a good party size. Multiplayer games impose their own necessities, but in single-player the main reference point for cRPGs, the old Infinity Engine games, ran on a party of six. This being one more than the stereotropical five-man band, it admittedly yielded some unsatisfying redundancy. Not a terrible thing allowing me to double up on spellcasters, as is my wont. Still, I must admit lowering the party size to just one less than a five-man band makes for more meaningful strategic choices. Do you make do without a Big Guy or a lead guitarist? Do you not recruit Beast, Iceman or Angel?

Naturally, the right number varies according to a particular game's possible roles. Hard to expand upon the prototypical fighter/mage/burahobbit without cluttering the place with three extra hobbits and a token martyr. The five-man band, however, seems to hit a deeper archetypal precept of a functional group. Even in multiplayer, the tank/nuker/healer holy trinity was supplemented (before WoW dumbed everything down again) by crowd controllers and buffers to bring the number of playstyles back up to five. For single-player, in addition to clerics and mages, fighters quickly got split between sword-and-board tanks and zweihander barbarian offense, and a little thieving makes five.

And, as the endless examples on TVTropes demonstrate, it's even more difficult to move away from the five-man band in other media and still have yourself a workable action team. Spacetrawler's original human cast was basically a five-man band plus comic relief in the form of Dusty. Martina as leader, Emily as lancer, Pierrot as the heart, and Dimitri/Yuri swapping places as big/smart guy after certain torturous plot tangles. For the comic's continuation, the new four official members of the human team are joined by Martina's brother and a half-human hybrid for an Infinity Engine total of six interstellar adventurers. The new team lacks a true leader and as its lancer / ranger advances he begins to blend in with the role of the smashy-smashy barbarian (to the point where the barbarian calls him out on it.) The role of team wizard / cleric are blurred among multiple characters. While it's always good to move away from simple tropes, the comic's original cast at least knew themselves. The new crew lack any sense of personal identity. Where the original cast split off into solo side-quests, the new bunch tend to pair off into duos to bounce introspection off each other, yielding more stagnation. Given the pervasiveness of the effect, I'm willing to assume Baldwin's going somewhere with this greater emphasis on co-dependent self-discovery and he's certainly given readers ample reason to trust his artistic panache over the decades, but so far it's a bit of a wash.

Which brings me back to Original Sin. The role of the player in a single-player cRPG is almost unavoidably that of lead vocalist. Occasionally, some of the best written games (Planescape: Torment, V:tM-Bloodlines) can move the player off center stage without losing themselves in triviality, but it's a short-lived occurrence even then. Whether as a lone hero or leader of an army, you're still driving the action forward. Somewhere between there, between soloist and band leader, computer games and especially RPGs fall into an uncanny valley where the relationship of the player to his tagalongs becomes unrecognizable.
One character? Great!
Four or more? Great!
Two or three? Help, police, I'm being followed by a creepy stalker!

The first Neverwinter Nights game dove into this pitfall and Original Sin, by splitting the group of four into two types of two or giving me only two controllable NPCs, duplicates its failing. Who's leading this bunch, me or my Shadow? Who embodies the party's decision-making ego? It interferes with playing my role in this roleplaying game. It waters down my identity more than even Icewind Dale's setup of creating an entire party, as the five-fold weight placed upon the second player character bites much deeper into the central me's personality.

A similar uncanny valley manifests beyond the 5-6 character limit. Mount&Blade is a sandbox FPSlasher/RPG in which you command armies of dozens to over a hundred soldiers. Some of these are recruitable, customizable NPCs with better stats, minimal dialogue and some quest involvement but they're allowed to blend into the greater army in most situations. It works beautifully. Truly beautifully. Yet between M&B's scores-strong warbands and Baldur's Gate's adventuring parties we wouldn't know what to do with only ten or fifteen NPCs. Am I supposed to give a shit about them or throw them into the meatgrinder? "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic" as a certain mass-murderer famously put it. And in between? Not much of anything. The intriguing if flawed zombie apocalypse RPG Dead State skillfully split the difference, giving you both a dozens-strong tribe to manage at your shelter and letting you pick your small foraging group from among these.

Between those experiences there's nothing. Between personal identity and five-man band hunting pack dynamics, between the pack and large-scale tribal leadership, there is no functionality. Only familiar familial inertia, the stagnant gemeinschaft of (in)decision by committee. Yet a game should be a purposeful enterprise whether that purpose is self-determined or story-based. Any game trying to make me trudge those boggy valleys in between purposeful levels of organization is asking me to care less about the action on screen. And if there's nothing to fight for I won't be a slave to a world that doesn't make me give a shit.