Oh, I'm not saying no stories should even involve any kind of drama - but rather that writers shouldn't see it as a "necessary for good writing" checkbox. Same with character development - it's widely believed that if "a character is the same as it was in the beginning of the story, it's bad writing". With which I completely disagree. (Of course, there's also the matter of the definition of "character development". I'm not saying characters should learn absolutely nothing from their experiences - but some great shift in personality/views should be reserved for the stories where it actually has merit.)
So what you're saying is that well written characters are good and poorly written characters are bad, I can agree, if you're writing characters just as a flaw to artificially add drama to a story, that's a problem.
As a fan of Star Trek you'll find no argument from about 'character development' being necessary for a story, Star Trek is a show about ideas, it's about the interplay of philosophies and how men and women of reason deal with problems, that said if a character from Star Trek doesn't change after years on the frontier of space, that's development in itself, it takes a lot of effort not to change too. I'm also a fan of Star Wars, which is all about a fantasia and the heroes who hero in it, if the characters in Star Wars didn't grow and develop during the course of their quest, then the story being told is a big waste of time.
Dragon Age II has an A plot and B plot, 'A' plot is about the Hawke family's struggle to make it in Kirkwald, 'B' plot is about the growing tensions between first the City and the Qunari then the Templar's and the Mages. 'A' plot requires character development because it's story about characters, 'B' plot doesn't, because it's a story about conflicting ideas, how your MC interacts with B plot should, if written well, be informed by his 'A' plot development.
I do like stories which have subtle thematic connections between the main characters. Though it's hit or miss for me when it comes to the execution - as much as I love Brandon Sanderson's work and The Stormlight Archive in general - I can't stand the ridiculous amounts of emotional drama and trauma all the protagonists go through. It's very clearly the theme of the series (when it comes to main characters), but it's something I suffer through while rolling my eyes every time a character has a mental breakdown (read: often). Especially disappointing that the author had previously written about how it's not fun to read such stuff. (To paraphrase in short.)
I think we're talking about the difference between drama and melodrama, a melodrama is about empathetically connecting with a fatalistic narrative, drama is about a struggle against fate...I'm making that up, but it sounds good...right?
I did have my Hawke sarcastic. But the dialogue wheel was a huge step back, along with voiced protagonist. It kind of worked for Hawke since it was "half-origin" (so to speak), but I still found most of the "nice" and "aggresive" options quite caricatural. Of course, it's still better than to only have "good" and "evil" choices...
Don't get me wrong, I like the dialogue system in DA II more because I saw a germ of something that could make the railroaded nature of Bioware conversations more mutable. Old RPGs were about blank slates that you project you're own roleplaying onto, they're cyphers, that's their strength and their weakness because it also means the world has to treat them as everything, which ends up meaning they lack any real depth. The modern RPG takes a middle route between fixed MC and a Cypher MC by making your character a limited number of states, you don't get to make them whatever you want but you also get more interesting interactions with a world that can be written around them more, like a refugee from Ferelden or a commander in the Terran Space Navy. I could really go on about this because it's very interesting to me but it's a little off topic now.
