Something Ive pointed out before is not saying "Can I narratively justify this?". You could very easily justify them being super nice because youll all die if you dont work together. Do NOT go off of justification, its too easy to do for whatever thing you want.
Ask what is fun while still making sense. What gives the player the best time? I am a DM of 15 campaigns, 40 players, thousands of hours, years of doing so. I can tell you right now, if this was a party at a D&D table theyd have quit the campaign. If I made all the NPCs like this, theyd have quit the campaign. In a game, the NPCs themselves are puzzles to solve so you make them harder to reach, less accessible and unlock. There is a difference between personality and person, though. A personality is someone who has thoughts and you can interact with. They can be a horrible evil monster but will still tell your zipper is down on your pants. So, to humanize these people, if you want to leave them spicy, there need to be other normal interactions where you get thoughts, feelings, hopes, whatever. Simple as "I hope it doesnt rain today, my cloak got a hole in it that last fight". Then in the morning its a downpour and you hear them grumbling occassionally.
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I actually agree with you. More interaction and "normalcy" would be a nice touch. Astarion complaining about the environment of camp more. Maybe Laezal helping set up camp while complaining that we lesser races don't know how to properly set up camp etc. I think this would add a lot more life to it.
I will say though that I am having fun with these companions and NPCs. The dice roll gets my heart racing. Though maybe it is because I'm heavily a single player and want to interact with these characters and not part of a group that wants to have fun together facing the odds. There is a lack of comical DnD humour so far or even the standard Larion humour in general except for a few instances.
I reloaded a *lot* to go through all possible conversation trees with them to see what they all did. The problem, like you said, is a weighting towards normalcy. Right now most options do not increase, but might decrease, your rep and with me rolling 8,2,4,2,1,6,4, 10, 4,6 before I got the 15 DC - pretty consistent experience based on the hours in the loading screen ive done - to only have the follow up, seemingly innocuous choice having one of them start screaming at you that they will kill you in your sleep for that...
Im on good footing with all of them now that ive done some quests and made decisions theyve liked and persuaded them to open up a bit and also been the cool "yeah man, you worship the devil, cool, tell me more" guy. However, I am concerned with wanting to actually RP a character and choose as they would and my party would be me and the mage right now in that case. I like the Mass Effect style companion unlocks when you get trusted but right now it feels like youre doing a Cliffhanger hand hold over a chasm trying to make them not open your neck up in your sleep lol
