Originally Posted by Niara
Your character was always just an addendum to Larian's Mary-Sues, from day one. They are inconsequential and there is no legitimate reason for all these special awesome amazing magical people to be kow-towing to your decisions and following you around like the leader. They mostly exist to be the fall-guy to feed Larian's origin characters the lines they need to spring board off of to make themselves sound more awesome, or to have the final word over.

I don’t mind my companions having awesome back stories as long as my custom character gets to be just as awesome as them in the game, which admittedly they don’t yet. I’ve found this a problem with other games with strong companions (eg BioWare ones) so I don’t blame Larian for struggling. I just hope they can solve the issue by making our custom characters cooler rather than by making companions more boring. I’m happy to invent an epic back story for my custom character if I really want one, but that’s not going to help unless they can also be as impactful as the rest of the party on screen.

Though of course it’s also a valid choice to play a random joe who has been thrown into a difficult situation and to want to form a party of similar individuals, who then develop their awesomeness throughout the story rather than having it pre-established. That unfortunately doesn’t seem to be the sort of story Larian are going to support in their single player game, which doesn’t really bother me but I can understand why it might frustrate others.

EDIT: Regarding the initial topic, that is interesting. I’ve never tried leaving my main character dead for long.

"You may call it 'nonsense' if you like, but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!"