People who don't take characters into their group cause 'oh no, Astarion is a vamp spawn/tried to knife me, therefore he is evil' or 'Shadowheart follows Shar, therefore she must be evil' are either ignorant, or choose to role play their characters in a shallow way
Way to kill your credibility. Anyone who doesn't do things your way is ignorant and shallow. What a load of bull.
I might've worded it better, english being about my 4th language learned. But still, it's up to the person to roleplay how they see fit, I'm not here to pass judgement on people 'not doing things my way', hell it wasn't even the intention of my post, but it also shows quite a bit of your character that you grasp at anything possibly perceived as negative/offensive to try to insult someone. All I was doing was trying to explain it to Abits that there are different ways of playing with alignments, more nuanced or less so.
To me, murdering people in games, for the sake of 'goodness' is still murder. Whenever I play D&D games I like to think things through (like 'what would my character do in this situation?') and I do my best to try to talk my way out of difficulties rather than attack on sight (that's what zealots do), or in case of characters like Astarion/Shadowheart give them the benefit of doubt.
You, as the player, know that Astarion is a vamp spawn or that Shadow is a priestess of Shar, but your character doesn't. Astarion doesn't introduce himself as 'hi there, I'm Astarion, a vamp spawn and I'd like to suck your blood' or Shadow doesn't say 'I'm Shadowheart, priestess of Shar' it's up to your character to figure that out. Altho, I still think the name 'Shadowheart' is such a stupid name. And on top of that, she doesn't really act like a classic priestess of Shar, you can tell she's quite conflicted inside. My prediction is, if you let her live and don't murder or toss her away for being a Shar priestess, that she might somewhere down the line be swayed to the light.
from the way she intreduces herself I'm pretty sure it's not her real name. The game itself heavily implies it when it let you have the dialog option "what is this name".
about alignments and shit - I stand by what I said before, It might be a very good system if we are starting a game and want to summarise what a character did before. but once the game starts it is kinda hard to predict what will happen to a character. By the way I agree with you about what you said about BG not enabling players the option to start bad and become good, while to opposite is possible.
