What Kind of Co-op Partner Are You to Play With?
The Anchor
You are the person a co-op run is quietly built around. You hold position, you wait at the door, you slow down without announcing that you are slowing down, and you would far rather the group finished together than fast. People who play with you may not compliment you much, because your contribution is largely the absence of problems, which is the nature of the role. If there is a risk, it is that you under-ask. You take the boring job so often that nobody realises you might want the interesting one.
“I am the one who waits at the door, and the run works because of it.”The Scout Who Never Waits
You are already three rooms ahead. Curiosity gets you moving before the plan is finished, and you genuinely see more of a game than anybody else in the party, because you refuse to travel at committee speed. Played well this is enormously useful and a good group learns to treat you as reconnaissance. Played badly it is two people shouting each other's names in an empty corridor. The fix is one sentence before you go, and the sentence is where you are going.
“I am three rooms ahead and I promise to tell you what is there eventually.”The Shot-Caller
Somebody has to say the plan out loud and you have decided it may as well be you. You assign jobs, name the route, explain a pattern once and clearly, and you own your own mistakes quickly enough that nobody else has to raise them. Groups with a shot-caller waste far less time than groups without one. The thing to watch is sheer volume of instruction, because past a point it stops adding information and starts adding pressure. Leave gaps. The quiet ones usually know something.
“Someone has to call the plan out loud and I have decided it is me.”The Quiet Support
You play with one eye permanently on everyone else. You hand over the healing items, take the tedious job, notice when somebody has gone quiet and ask about it, then apologise roughly four times more than the situation requires. That attentiveness makes you the partner people request by name, especially the nervous ones and the beginners, who play better around you because they stop worrying about being a burden. Remember that co-op is meant to be fun for you too. Take the good weapon occasionally.
“I hand over the good loot and apologise for things that were not my fault.”The Chaos Gremlin
You are here for the bit. Pressing everything in the room, dying in the funniest available way, pinging at nothing to check your partner is still awake: the run is a stage and you have decided to do comedy on it. This is not a lesser way to play. Enormous numbers of people remember the disasters far more fondly than the clean clears, and you are usually the reason those stories exist. The only skill worth adding is reading the room before you start.
“I am here for the bit, and honestly the disasters are the part we remember.”
