Standard groups can be up to six characters. Characters gain experience by completing quests. Killing monsters, destroying breakables, finding hidden doors, and disabling traps can increase the experience reward, but is not always central to the reward. In some cases, simply running through a quest from one end to the other grants an XP reward.
Raid parties may be up to 12 characters. They are usually high level adventures with multiple tasks to complete. There is usually a specific method of unlocking them. DDO supports solo play with a level of difficulty on some low-level quests. Since the "Mod 9" update (September 2009), "Normal" difficulty scales well for solo players when "Solo" difficulty’s not available for any given quest.
A more typical party consists of multiple characters filling roles such as "tank" (melee types specialized to hold the monster’s attention, but deal little damage), high damage-per-second or DPS (melee or magic DDO Gold users that do most of the damage to the monsters, but try not to grab the attention from the tank), healer (clerics) and caster (magic users that either perform "crowd control", cast useful spells to enhance themselves and allies, "nuke" the monsters by doing many high damage spells in a short amount of time, or a combination of all three).
The quests in DDO Gold are organized by character level, difficulty, and length. Each quest has a base level, and the XP reward increases if all of the party members are below that level, and decreases if any of the party members are above that level.
Characters more than three levels below the "base level" are not allowed to initiate a quest, however they are able to join a quest started by another party member.
Most quests have an item or monetary reward when finished, but the character must talk to the quest DDO Platinum giver to receive the reward. Some dungeons require several visits to the quest giver to complete the entire quest chain. Speaking to the quest giver allows players to repeat the quest. Completing a quest multiple times reduces the amount of XP awarded.
