"To me the incentive is just the act itself. Killing the bird, should have had more repercussions, because you're openly doing it while Nettie is pretty much standing right next to you in most circumstances."
I both disagree and agree. The act itself being an incentive doesn't really work, when you consider the whole package. You just kill to kill, which is fitting for the Dark Urge. However, there are two problems. You don't get anything for it and nobody really cares, Nettie especially. It can also run into this trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForTheEvulz .Basically, you are doing evil stuff just for the sake of it, without any long term planning. Even Bhaal didn't do that, as there were often long terms plans set in motion. Not a mindless beast that just killed everyone. You can accomplish the very same thing with any character, by just killing everyone you come across. There is a difference between smart evil and stupid evil.
"To me, the Dark Urge just feels like a normal character with some additional dialogue options you can easily ignore."
Same here. I often saw those dialogue options, but then I looked at other options and with the help of quicksave and quickload, I checked some of those options out. As I suspected, you don't gain anything by falling into Dark Urge, which I mentioned earlier. You can choose those dialogue options, you can resist them easily for the most part and nothing comes out of it.
"I'd argue, that if you don't like playing as a potential evil character, you shouldn't be choosing this character. I myself, by default, don't like playing as the bad guy. What I do like and what I wanted this game to do, is forcing you to do evil, when you'd normally not choose to do so. This is especially interesting when combined with a Paladin, who's one bad roll away from being an Oathbreaker. Yet, nothing of the scripted evil acts, break my oath and the dialogue options, which I think should, can simply be ignored, which I think are missed opportunities."
There is difference between playing evil character that actually makes sense and doing evil stuff for it's own sake. Because at that point, you are playing just Murderhobo, which you could do before. However, you aren't locked into being evil. Dark Urge is not evil path, it's different path. In previous games it was just the same. You could choose to be evil, but you didn't have to. To me it seems like you want to play an evil character, who is evil from the very beginning. And you can already do that with any of the characters. You basically want to change the Dark Urge into the Darkest Urge, where you kill, have got no control over yourself and be the worst thing that has ever been in Faerun. That seems something like a mod or another origin character.
"I'm not really in it for "rewards", but rather just being potentially forced (via failed ability checks) down a darker path, I wouldn't normally choose myself is more than rewarding enough for me."
As I said before, the Darkest Urge, like the hardest difficulty of Dark Souls/Darkest Dungeon/Any game that allows that. And I don't understand your point here. As a Dark Urge you can choose to be evil, you can kill everyone you meet, you can do anything you want. You can do that with any character, really. But you are not happy, because the game doesn't force you to roll a saving throw to resist your urges at every point? It sounds dumb as hell and connects with this next comment:
"I honestly fail to see why that would get annoying very soon, as you don't have that many Dark Urge dialogue options to begin with, plus there are many more dialogue options that require you to roll an ability check for Persuasion, Deception or Intimidation, which occurs way more frequent than Dark Urge dialogue options. And forcing those ability checks before anything else would simply better convey the Urge part of the character you're playing. I'd argue if you don't like Urges forced upon you, you shouldn't be playing a character who's name implies it has those urges."
You are missing the forest for the trees. You don't want Dark Urge, you want the Darkest Urge. A Dark Urge++. Because, as I have written before you can choose to be evil or not. I agree that Dark Urges should be more frequent, definitely. As it is, there is a single bloody cutscene, where you resist in whole acts 1 and 2 combined. And narratively speaking, your character thinks of doing horrible shit to others all the time. And at this point, I have to ask, have you even watched the Dark Urge opening cutscene, you can watch during character creation?
Here it is. And a very relevant quote: "Injured beyond repair, I know nothing besides this: I must resist the Dark Urge, lest it consume my mind!"
And as someone who played Dnd 5e a lot, let me tell why your having a saving throw when talking to ANYONE is as dumb as it is.
-Natural 1 exists, which is auto fail, no matter your bonus. So, you rely on RNG/save scumming to not commit a Dark Urge or reroll like crazy. -Making it a part of every conversation would get really annoying. Like this: I would like to talk to someone! ROLL A WISDOM SAVING THROW. I would like to switch my companions! ROLL A WISDOM SAVING THROW. I want to say something nice. ROLL A WISDOM SAVING THROW!!! If this was tabletop, I would say the DM is a sadistic asshole, who just wants to screw over a player that wrote a tragic backstory, no matter how little sense it makes. It's not fun either from gameplay perspective or narrative perspective. The way I see it is that it should come up when there are perfect opportunities for it to do so: An injuried bird, a paralysed tiefling, a prisoner who can't fight back! Then yes, Dark Urge calling in circumstances like and forcing a wisdom saving throw or something similar would make sense.
However, if you want to roll a wisdom saving throw each time you talk to NPC, then download a mod for that, because that sounds absolutely dreadfull to me and not a character I would want to play, as my own choices as a player would be striped away over tiniest things, which sounds like a terrible DND session.
