People have been going on about the idea of having to battle through a dungeon to get to a mining point and whatnot, but that's not quite what I mean. That's battling, then it's gathering. It's not both... at least, not simultaneously.
My idea is having crafters/gatherers do their work while being defended by their party members. For example...
A crafter is making an extremely important piece of equipment in a remote location. They are, for example, constructing a cannon in a warzone. But they can't do this without people attacking them, and our dear crafters simply can't manage to defend and craft. So he hires a rag-tag pack of adventurers to help him save theworldcannon.
The crafter would not simply have a tiny little thing to do, though. It would make sense that he can't just Hasty Hand and be done in a second! The crafting would take, say, 10 minutes. During that time, stronger enemies would attack, in a larger quantity, and the crafting would increase emnity slightly so the fighters may have to on occasion split slightly to stop any of them from damaging our good man/woman. Once crafted, the crafter could continue to improve the device's quality at no cost to anything. But the fighting would become even more severe over that time, of course... the higher the final quality, the higher the reward. But death of the crafter would mean you lose everything. This would be great for end-game content, as it means you could always be trying to out-do your best result, and SE could add in higher rewards as time progresses, to see if anyone could possibly get something to a high enough quality.
Gathering could work in similar ways. A miner is trying to get valuable resources in a monster-infested world. Botanist, the same thing. A fisher, the same again... fish are resources, after all!
You could even set it up so that you have six people fighting, one gathering resources and one crafting those resources simultaneously. When a gatherer gets something, it adds to the durability of the crafter so he can keep going, perhaps?
Thoughts?