Is there a common immortal stance on ganging? Like

a) Ganging is good because it's realistic. Why work hard to kill someone alone when you can just gank him?

b) Ganging is bad because it's boring and overpowered.

My answer, and there's a range of opinions on this:

c) Ganging is complicated.

- Ganging helps prevents runaway trains- if someone is dominant, and their reputation spreads, people will gang them to put a stop to them. This prevents any one character from dominating for very long, and allows for retribution on rampant killers.

- In a similar fashion, the threat of ganging makes being in a group safer, which promotes interaction. The plus side of this is that if you're ranking or exploring, one guy is probably going to not be a threat unless they play their cards right, and you don't get interrupted as often. The minus side is that your group of three can spend all your time hunting for lone guys and creating fights which they'll be hard pressed to win.

- We don't want a system that makes no sense. Fighting someone two-on-one should be a significant advantage. If you played the realism card, it would be more than twice as easy- two people with weapons can encircle you, and it should be harder to parry/dodge/block a second attacker. But just like we don't put a penalty on defense as you get wounded because it rewards someone who is already winning and prevents heroic comebacks, I don't see us doing this.

- A blunt system that messes with ganging messes with balance in a big way. Conjurers don't often fight you alone. Necromancers and druids may not at the higher levels. Most ranking is done by 3-on-1 ganging an NPC. Etc. All of that means that a simple "counting = parry" type system will cause problems.

- Counting isn't even simple. Some fights have more than two sides. An out-of-range person might swing the fight (healer, paladin), stand around staring blankly (shifter, warrior), or anywhere in between (druid, ranger). Maybe you're fighting 3-on-1 because you just beat down that guy's 4 groupmates and are trying to close a 3-on-5. Maybe you're fighting 2-on-1 because the thief keeps fleeing to return and knife. Etc.

- If you bitch about it on a forum, don't do it in the game. Not you, but there's some other people who I've certainly seen in a gang often enough when it wasn't necessary.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com