Nobody likes tedious battle activities. The larger the party, the more risk of tedium and mundane repetition. That is perhaps the big advantage of real-time play, that the computer handles the blow-by-blow details quickly so that you can watch and enjoy the swooshing sounds and exploding bodies. In tabletop D&D, the combat process is tedious, but it is still fun because there is a lot of live interaction between the players sitting at the table. D&D is a social game, but in a single-player computer game, the social interaction is hard to simulate. That is why I advocate the increased use of NPC's who may fight with the player character, suggest courses of action, complain, etc., but who are not controlled by the player. The Narlen Darkwalk quest was my favorite out of the entire BG series thus far for precisely this reason, oh and uh, also the hilarious Cant dialogs, eh?
I don’t think NPCs outside of the player’s control would be an adequate solution, but would rather amplify the problem. The danger of bloating the number of characters in a battle is increasing turn length and creating long stretches where the player is waiting for their turn. I would say the only fight currently in the game that approaches this is fighting all of the goblins outside of their camp. If you added a few NPCs to fight alongside the player these goblins would die more quickly, but each round of turns would also take longer. Having the battle potentially end sooner doesn’t do much to get rid of tedium if it means more time spent waiting for your turns.
