By the way, you know if you side with Minthara, and have the Goblins Celebration.
There's a Cage here, during Celebration Cinematic where Volo is emprisonned...
(so the cage CAN be present at camp, and is "already there" in a way)
Sooooo...
Can't we Defend the Grove ? Put Minthara in that bloody cage ! Force her to witness our celebration and deal with her fate next morning ? (Volo out of the cage ofc, celebrating his freedom since we saved him)
She'll have the night to think about everything that has happened.
And then again, another compelling fact that already fits with the story :
Since she's captured at camp with us, she's de-facto protected from the absolute by the prism. (just like she says during her romance, without knowing why)
So you CAN convince her from that point, that the absolute sucks, reveal the artifact to her, show her how wrong she was, and therefore recruit her ! (Gatekeep it with dice rolls if you want, big disapprovement from some party members, etc)
It would just make sense to be able to :
- Defend the Grove.
- Spare/Capture Minthara after battle.
She has info on what's next for the party, knows the shadowlands, once convinced would probably want to infiltrate moonrise tower with the team and bring down the absolute out of revenge, (Vengeance Paladin remember ?) for all the things it made her do.
She has all the arguments to get saved and be recruitable.
I don't know, if you wanna spice it up, she could manage to escape her cage during the night while everyone is drunk, and so her trial can still happen at Moonrise, as it supposed to happen the regular way.
Save her from Prison > Meet at Camp > Have her Romance start here instead.
There are so many ways it could be done. (although I would personally love to travel earlier than act 2 with her, feels late, but that's just me)
I think Larian's gonna do it, no matter how, you just lose wayyy too much on every fronts, just by recruiting her right now. Just losing the tiefflings makes you lose sooo much content in itself.
I'm okay, and I love choice and consequences, but losing 4* party members to gain a member that has 1500 lines of her dialogue currently bugged right now is not fulfilling, I can't play my run right now :\
*(and by the way if you do go the true evil route, beginning to end... you have then lost : Gale (unless persuaded), Wyll, Karlach, Halsin. And then you WILL LOSE Jaheira because you kill "x" story cleric character spoiler. And therefore Minsc since Jaheira not here. That's 6 for 1 man...)
