I think my biggest problem with comedy in the game is that I don’t feel I can play an amusing, witty PC because the protagonist lines either aren’t there or aren’t well-written enough. I really hope that’s going to be addressed in the full release as it’s not fun feeling my charismatic bard, for example, is too often the butt of others’ jokes without having the wit to dish it out in return.
I will say that your concern with your character not having witty lines (while the lines seem to be reserved for everyone--with weak writing-- but the player character) may be a product of how Larian handles Tav and the PC in general. You and I disagree as to how pivotal to the narrative Tav currently is, but we can (probably) agree that the roleplay options which aren't voiced should be plentiful, complex, and extremely well-written and revised.
I do agree that the lack of witty lines for Tav (or possibly an origin character as protagonist) is part and parcel of what currently feels like throwaway writing for our protagonist as a whole. But, much as I appreciate your effort to find common ground
, I don’t think the ideal solution to being able to develop and express our custom characters is to have plentiful unvoiced roleplay options as I desperately want our protagonist to be voiced, which isn’t about good writing but for me is incredibly important to making my protagonist present in the world.
As a voiced protagonist in practical terms limits the number of dialogue choices, my solution would instead need to emphasise quality over quantity, so I do agree protagonist lines need to be well-written but also very cleverly chosen. For example, we don’t need a joking response every single time (I’m definitely not asking for DA2 here!), but there should be enough of them that I feel I can pick sufficient such lines in appropriate places that will convey the impression of my character as irreverent, sarcastic, dry, or funny in whatever specific way that I want. This, I’m sure, is
extremely difficult to do without the dialogue tree getting out of control once you chuck in all the other possible character traits we might want to express for our characters along with all the decisions and race/class/background stuff, but I think is what would be needed to make the writing in a RPG that gives the amount of freedom in character creation that BG3 does truly great.
