Astarion is evil, not stupid. He is trying to not get himself killed or brought back to his master. Take him and go murder or do act of cruelty and see how he enjoys doing that. He loves bloodshed and killing people. He's ultra happy after you help the Goblins wipe out the grove. He's how chaotic evil should be role-played instead of the acting stupid murderhobos too many people believe evil is supposed to act like in D&D.
Which is really the entire problem with the discussions in this thread. Way too many people think:
- evil = murdering everything that move
- good = helping people and being nice
- neutral = money, money, money
That's not how D&D define the alignments. The D&D alignment system was based off virtues. Lying fall under evil, even if you are doing it for a good cause under D&D alignment system.
Hm... makes sense I suppose, though I wasn't really speaking in terms of DnD. I don't really have a DnD brain, as prior to BG3 I never touched any sort of DnD so I don't look at characters through a spreadsheet of oldschool RPG alignments and what they're supposed to be according to them. I look at characters in a videogame just like any other and make my observations based on them as a person, which is why to me none of them are bad people.
I also do not think Larian wrote them with oldschool alignment in mind and to me the whole old-school alignment RPG thingy was always kinda meh, an arbitrary RPG gimmick.
