Drama Drama Drama!

Just a quick one today as I'm eager to work on this 40K project, and then get some more gaming in.

One of the best parts of any RPG are the characters.  From the witty companions who provide comic relief, to interesting villains you can't help but root for a little, good character writing can make up for a lot in a game.

Baldur's Gate has had its share of memorable characters.  From Boo and their ever faithful companion Minsc, to the cunning and menacing Jon Irenicus, the original PC games are full of interesting souls to fight along side and against.  Baldur's Gate helped cement this, not just through memorable cut scenes and dialogue, but was also one of the first games to popularize party banter.  This meant that while it was more powerful to travel with your own party of hand crafted PCs, it was almost always more fun to craft parties around your favorite party members.

However, this does come with some downsides.  In order for characters to be realistic, they have to have their own goals, motivations, views, etc.  If two characters conflict with each other, that conflict needs to be present in the game for the characters to feel real.  This is great for writing and entertainment, not so good when you're trying to put together your dream team.  Additionally, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 used characters to provide some balance to alignment.  Nearly all the best characters in each game, often both in power and writing, were evil.  So while being evil tended to be harder, you got some really good parties from it.

This second point seems to have been addressed right from the start by Larian.  At no point so far has the concept of alignment reared its complicated head.  The designator isn't in character creation or on any character sheet.  Even spells like Protection from Good and Evil refer to supernatural creatures and not alignment.  It feels much more like character interactions are determined organically, rather than just, "Your evil, I don't like you!"

The first point is a little bit harder.  As I mentioned before, I'm playing a pretty heroic type of character.  But at least two of my current party members are all business and don't have a lot of patience for my desire to help people, even if I argue that it'll benefit us in the long run.  Additionally, if characters aren't getting along, that can severely threaten party composition.

Here Baldur's Gate III has a few answers too.  The first thing you can do if you don't want to deal with a party member disagreeing with your tactics, is the classic table-top method of going behind their back.  If you can't get the Paladin to closely examine the fine yet rustic architecture, then what they don't know can't hurt them.  In BGIII, you can send party members back to camp by talking to them.  They can be a bit snippy about this, but so far it doesn't seem to affect relations.  That doesn't mean they won't have anything to say about my Paladin deciding to pursue an alternate objective, but it might keep them from being mad about the actual conversation.

I do somewhat wish BGIII had a more modern party interface though, if only at your camp.  It would be really nice if we could change party members through a menu when we leave camp and swap items freely between everyone while we're there.

Baldur's Gate allows you to address party composition too.  You can gain an NPC that travels alongside you and can respec your characters.  Simply get 100 gold, then talk to them with the character you want to respec.  This allows you to keep the original characters and still have a custom party, if even for a price.  There are apparently some narrative issues here though, as the game's story and dialogue will still treat them as their original class.

So there you have it!  Just wanted to talk about some fun ways BGIII let's you keep a lively, well written party, without having to suffer mechanically.  For now, I've still got a ton of data entry to do!