Originally Posted by Lyelle
Originally Posted by JandK
Larian characters are talked about all over the internet. Some of them have fan clubs.

I think they're pretty good at making characters. Shrug.

I think so, too, I think they are all very interesting and well written.
Even if my character would often disagree with some of them, I'm invested in the characters and their stories.

I can understand my Tav's emotional turmoil, for example, of feeling sorry for Astarion when we learn about him being tortured and basically mind-controlled for 200 years, and then being angry at him for acting selfish or saying something cruel again. And my characters will definitely tell him when they disagree.

Or being annoyed about Lae'zels commanding tone and behaviour, and then realizing that she has never experienced anything else in her life, that she grew up completely isolated from other influences in her crêche, indoctrinated to follow her queen blindly.
But my Tav will still tell her to shut up when she starts to humiliate poor Zorru.

A party with different views works fine for me. And since we all have the same condition, I think we also have strong external motivation to work together, even if we don't agree.

And I can see a potential for each of them to take slightly different paths, and this the most interesting part for me. I think - or I hope - that there is some room for character growth.

But I can understand very well that this more "difficult" party is not everyone's cup of tea.

It doesn't matter that much to me who will be the final origin character, but I hope for everyone who would like to have more classically "good" characters that the mystery origin character is revealed to be a "good" character.

I'm looking very much forward to having wild magic barbarian Karlach in my party, especially with my wild magic sorceress. Finally someone who can understand when my Tav unintentionally blows up everything 😂 I think they're going to be best friends.

And her description of having a heart of gold and seeking justice for the opressed does sound like a "good" character. I like her already.

The thing is, if you play a character that's not straight forwardly good then immediately you're on the same page with everyone. Be out for yourself, be violent as you need to be, don't give a damn about anyone else. Gale approves of us being good but he doesn't really push us to be. Wyll, for all his talk of being a hero falls back to violence and cruelty whenever it comes to finding Mizora or dealing with the goblins. Shadowheart only cares about being cured. So we only have Karlach as potentially advocating for the party's better angels on a consistent basis. Does that not seem imbalances and a problem? They only clash with a character that tries to be stalwartly good.

I'm also very annoyed at the concept of good characters being written off as simple or incapable of being morally complex. The fact that we lack that sort of firm good character just tells me Larian lacks the interest or ability to unsersrsnd what makes one interesting, which to me is a mark against them. I think most of the nuance these characters have shows up accidentally underneath the frustrating need to make everything "edgy" and "cool" and "morally gray" and that for example, Larian has considered the moral questions of Astarion's character far less than you and I have. They just wrote "tortured vampire" and accidentally walked over depth.

That much seems proven to me by the fact that they don't even take advantage of the clashing personalities and ideas in the party. Everyone seems to get along with everyone else just fine, it's only us they clash with. If Lae'zel weren't a githyanki and she was the same in all other ways I don't even think Shadowheart would have a problem with her.