The problem is that the game only recognizes players assigned to a specific player as being in the same party. Players controlled by other players are not considered to be part of the party (at least in terms of reward sharing, oddly enough the inventory management tools seem to be able to acknowledge that all characters, regardless of who is controlling them, are in one party).
Let's go back to the example given earlier of "Elodi" in Fort Joy.
Bob is controlling characters A & B, and Sue is controlling characters C & D. If Bob speaks to Elodi with one of his characters, he can receive a massive positive attitude adjustment (but Sue's characters will not).
Thing is, there's a way around it (albeit a very annoying one). If Bob goes to the party management screen and takes control of Sue's characters (in other words, A, B, C, & D all belong to Bob), then all four characters will receive that positive attitude adjustment. Then the fight starts, and at that point Bob can reassign characters C & D back to Sue.
Except this workaround really stinks, because while Bob has control of all the characters Sue can literally do nothing, not even see the conversation that's taking place. On her screen she's staring at the game but without any kind of interface to use. We shouldn't have to resort to this, not when we had a much better (and more fair) system in D:OS EE.
