[Tyhm]

What would balance this is if a mage could make friends with a knight or a barbarian, and thenafter that friend is always available to help on dungeoncrawls. When the player is offline, a petlike NPC replaces them. The knight NPC moves always to a position roughly 10 paces in front of the wizard and attacks anything that threatens his friend; the wizard NPC follows 10 paces behind the knight and casts whenever he hits max mana or whenever the knight is in deep trouble. Partied for all intents and purposes, the knight and wizard both get experience even when offline from this venture...but if you gain experience I suppose you stand to lose by dying, so perhaps no gain and no loss to prevent false friends getting you killed and stealing your stuff.

Still. That would be cool.