So after finishing my first play through of Act 1 with a Co-Op buddy I decided that I want to write the good and the bad I experienced
Context
So I had our party's "talker" basically made myself, fighter first for that sweet generic human action, then found out Warlock (14STR 14DEX 14CON 16CHA Goolock because I wanted to play an actually Eldritch E.Knight) is much more fun to roleplay especially as a H.P Lovecraft influenced works fan. (Background is that I was a basic dude who got some kick ass persuasion powers from a GOO-pact with some physical augmentation)
I usually play a 75% good 25% with a tendency to try to get as much information out of characters in a single conversation so I got to know quite a lot I think.
So lets get to it, I'll start chronologically from encounter to encounter.
[Obvious spoiler alert is obvious]
Learning to love failed rolls
So, Warlock should tell something about me already, absolutely love Astarion, so on the second time seeing him I failed my STR roll (You can handle it -> Roll)
And at that point I was hooked. The conversation, even though it failed to favor me, got so much more tension and sweet social juice in it for it. At that point I didn't know if I should embrace the style of D&D storytelling or not, and here it really worked, stopped caring about excessive rerolls since you could seemingly play out conversations with a multitude of ways while having the same ending.
Also when we first found the fishermen my friend jumped in on the occasion, found out the men were racist to his Tiefling.
Well they weren't as we found after slaying the lot of them, a Mind Flayer huh.
At this point my friend was locked into a conversation, a battle of the minds, roll successful roll and then a fail.
We ended up laughing so much at him giving the Flayer a kiss and then blowing my brains out the next.
Even failure can be fun huh.
What is the value of a human life?
Now this is a treat, I love the straight up question about personal philosophy, don't know yet if it affects anything but as I played "myself" it really hit hard and made me think again of a question I had pondered before.
This is exactly why I love to make myself first into a video game as it opens my world-view so much more even when it is purely fantasy, and it will be even more fun when I start to think with actual characters I make up.
There's a fear of adding real life subjects into video games as a whole, but encounters like these just make me value them even more, it's a safe way to experience all kinds of sides of life.
Reminds me of the lonely woman in Fort Joy who has a story of her family, if you're willing to listen.
After this I'll focus mostly on the negatives, but it's because I loved the writing and conversations nearly equally as much as these later on, so the worse ones just need more words I think.
But when you manage to create a character like Guex who is so much fun to talk to that I want to save scum his training and would prefer him as a companion, you're doing something right for even the side characters.
We need a "step in friend" button though
There's not a lot of conversations where this is too important, but the most important one is when an NPC starts to walk and automatically talks to a player.
Our characters are built differently and we want to talk to different people, it's awkward when a boss walks next to the most socially inept member and we would prefer to be able to change the main talker.
Obviously a clearly hostile enemy wouldn't care, nor a rapid animal, but there are still cases where it would be nice to be able to switch characters to talk to certain characters.
For example we teleport up together, I've read all books we've found, yet my friend is locked into guessing how to act out a play that I knew the answers to, or I get asked a question about things my friend is proficient in.
Getting to Kagha
So, there are two major side-quests that I think would use with more dialogue options.
My character is well mannered an lawful to an extent, so getting to see Kagha by acting like a jack-ass alone is quite annoying.
Our group, whole group, we four, me my friend, Astarion and Shadowheart here did the job. I don't want to discredit them yet the only way to make sure we get the "Kagha wants to see them let them through" is by hogging all the glory for yourself.
Also this may have a thing to do with my general hatred of Druids (Not Druid players we can be friends, just Druids in fantasy usually) so the annoying and unhinged aspect of Kagha got on me even faster that I did not even give her a chance.
Would like to see her be a bit more reasonable a bit sooner, also seeing how Halsin forgave me, it just touched my hatred of Druids again, I think you're right about my nature but don't let me go so easily big bear boy.
The second quest where this was annoying was "Hunt the Devil" where you need to pick a side, yet you are forced to pick the side of the "Devil" there and then when you meet her even if you haven't gathered enough clues.
You cannot express a hint of trust in her so she could let you go to gather some, and when going back the Zariel fanatics offer a great deal of understanding to you if you do to them, locking you into killing "the Devil"
Well I guess it's what she deserved if she has the backbone to throw away the support of a whole group hunting her.
We would have most likely supported the Zariel forces anyways, but it would've added some interesting back and forth if the Devil would've offered a deal in return or offered us a chance.
Overtuned rolls are overtuned
Like the last paragraph I have a couple instances of "overtuned rolls" in the game.
I had a +5 bonus to persuasion, a whopping 25% increase in the ease of doing it, but in some cases seeing a whole 15 target for rolling even with the bonus is just ridiculous seeing who I was persuading.
A Goblin, and a fanatic Fishman.
What, hello? Are you saying a Goblin has a perfect persuasion check that you would expect from a godly being?
I could understand that I needed to roll from 15-19 even with +5 if I was trying to win over a demigod.
But persuading a Goblin guard to let me through a door when I had already shown myself to be a "true soul" before was clearly overtuned, leading me to give some brain space I didn't want to lose to the worm.
If the roll was anywhere from 5-8 (Meaning base 10-13) and I rolled a 4 or a nat 1 I would've not minded, but if the Goblin guard has a base 20 check I just can't understand the mean for it other than forcing to use the Illithid.
The fishman encounter is not that important, but after the fight we had there we both had a sense of "This would've been much more epic if we save-scummed out rolls wouldn't it?"
Sure the fight was fun, quite simple, but all the good stuff in it was in the conversation, the loot was trash and had nothing to continue the BOOOAL storyline.
So again having a 20 base check for some actually good content seemed like a let down.
I'm a bit forgetful
I was quite ready to write another paragraph here for another subject, forgot it though as I was editing the other ones, but it means it wasn't that important right?
Well I'll update if I remember it, but until then do tell if this was a good read and you would want to see my "Combat/Gear" and "Breaking from Divinity's style" feedback.
Also some feedback for better formatting would be appreciated, I tried to break it up a bit but it's still barbaric n my end.
