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I just want to know your opinions on this litle topic. I have been playing a bit lately, and noticed that alot of quest require my team to act all good and hero-like in order to continiue some quests. I mean sometimes I get the feeling I should not be a loud mouth, greedingly asking for payment, as the quests seem to end quicker.

Take the Anomen quest in egzample - if you choose the evil path, he gets less exp, and the whole quest ends quicker. Also the Valygar quest - if you just kill him and turn him in- the quest ends, and little exp is obtained. It all boils down to the easy relation - you help, are all good and lovely-dovely, you get exp, and alot more quests (at least I get such a feeling)

SO in terms of roll-play, being evil means missing some aspect of the game, right? And is it just me, or being all good and hero'ish makes the whole game alot easier?

Opinions pleas! As I am planing to start over from scraches, and am considering building up an EVIL team, but I get this feeling, I might not enjoy the game to much with it.

True, I see this in all kinds of games. Perhaps the scale is wrong, maybe it should be good-bad instead of good-evil. In the real world there is no real evil anyway, just.. our choices and the inability to take responsibility for them.

I usually in CRPG's consider my protagonist a shameless opportunist. A guy willing to do pretty much anything for money (rewards). Whether good or bad. And I also consider that he'd be willing to act nice if he believed that it would be more profitable in the end...

Basically a character that has no moral qualms about doing pretty much any quest. It works better in CRPG's without alignments though. Hard to think of a paladin like that...

I played a character like this in Oblivion until I decided that the game was too flawed. The one thing that annoyed that character (me) was that he couldn't sell stolen horses anywhere...

I can't really say that I like the concept of alignments anyway.

The thing I like about Baldur's Gate is that you have completely different elements of the story for being good or being evil. Take Valygar's quest, for example. The good party can take the man himself to the sphere and do all the stuff. The evil party only needs to take his body for pretty much the same result (Korgan's reaction to the situation would sum it up well, if you have him in your party). I haven't had a party who would take the body back to the cowled wizards yet. AFAIK, there is no benifit to anybody for doing that.

There are aspects to the game that a good party, if played correctly, will never see. For example, a good party would be very very unlikely to ever even see Edwin (no spoilers here, but it would be pretty unlikely given what you have to do to get the guy).

Although, I've never had Anomen in an evil or neutral party. I always stick with Vic, as I consider her the better cleric.

But I do tend to take to the evil characters in BG2 better. The first time I ever beat ToB was with an evil party.

Thats the small problem with BG2, there's no such thing as Evil and most quests you have to do the good thing anyway. Likewise even the evil NPC's are pretty tame. Take Viconia for example: she almost got burned at a stake for being drow and openly said she wasn't going to attack anyone, Korgan says he would never enslave children and gladly fights the slavers ect.

As for quests you almost always end up doing the "good" thing for example you can't side with the tanner in the bridge district, you can't destroy the evidence against him or help him out

Spoiler alert!





But you can kill the tanner, steal his identity and get his fabulous magic resistance giving human-skin leather armor. I wouldn't exactly call that good.

Sure, the "evil" people don't always do the evil thing, but the opposite holds true as well. A "good" party is forced to help the local thief guild gain full control over the city. That can't exactly be considered good either. Every character is constantly killing, which also isn't considered good by most societies.

Last playthrough I was a Paladin goody-two-shoes. This run I am the complete opposite...I am a halfling Chaotic Evil Fighter/Assassin (played with SK a bit) and whilst he is a really nasty S.O.B., he is smart enough to realise some of the benefits of playing nice. He has a wizard to go and "interrogate" and he needs all the money and assistance he can get at the moment. I am also having him get 'gradually' evil...the more powerful he becomes the more evil he gets.

If you want experience for being evil...try running around Athkatla with a reputation of 1...:speech: :speech:

Spoiler

The Guard and Cowled Wizards attacking me at every turn for a good bit of XP

That was a very difficult time for my PC and made him realise the really sucky part of being evil... I loved it, there are high points of being evil...

on the nature of good and evil

even the 'good' characters are neutral - they are being 'good' for reward, not out of inherent goodness. you get xp for completing quests and completing quests usually means being 'good'. all complete self interest.

imagine if you sacrificed xp for some kind of 'strength of alignment' - so that reputation was instead of xp. that would sort out the truly 'good' from the opportunist.

as for 'evil' ? killing civilians or 'good' characters should get more xp - blackmail etc?

Celacena wrote:on the nature of good and evil

even the 'good' characters are neutral - they are being 'good' for reward, not out of inherent goodness. you get xp for completing quests and completing quests usually means being 'good'. all complete self interest.

imagine if you sacrificed xp for some kind of 'strength of alignment' - so that reputation was instead of xp. that would sort out the truly 'good' from the opportunist.

as for 'evil' ? killing civilians or 'good' characters should get more xp - blackmail etc?

How do you know why my paladin acts like he does? If the rewards aren't the motivation and he did it because of a moral obligation then it's back to good again.

Anyway this is ethics as according to Kant. Utilitarianism has an entirely different way of looking at it.

I was thinking in computer-game terms rather than RPG.

Who knows why your Paladin does what he does? perhaps he has a blood lust and killing 'evil' things satisfies it; perhaps he wants to make the world a kinder place; perhaps he wants reputation or has a need to be liked.

in a computer game that rewards actions with xp, if the priority for the player is to maximise xp, they will usually adopt whatever strategy gives that result - whether the required actions appear nearer the norms of 'good' or 'evil'. alignments are of use in dealing with religion and alignment-based weapons.
there is also an argument for restricting certain castings for particular alignments and also classes/kits.

it could be argued that if a criminal believes that "if you can't do the time, don't do the crime" their alignment is 'lawful' because they accept penalties as a hazard of the job. similarly, a law-maker who does not care about the consequences of a bad law, could be said to be 'chaotic' rather than lawful.

the whole alignment aspect is fraught with paradoxes, but we need to just regard it as yet another artificiality of the game.