Reputation stuff

Pokota

I remember at one point - I think it was because of a character dialogue improvements mod - that there was an NPC in the tavern at (I think) Nashkel who you could pay to lower your reputation if you didn't feel like murdering folks or committing petty larceny. Does anyone remember what mod that was, and if it's compatible with BGEE?

Gallowglass

I've heard of that mod, but sorry, I don't recall the name.

However, there are plenty of ways to reduce REP by choosing Evil solutions to various quests ... I remember listing lots of them somewhere on this forum, a year or two ago. If I recall correctly, you can get about -15 REP by quest methods alone, which I've found more than enough for any purpose.

ThacoBell

BG1 NPC mod. It adds bards to several locations that will lower your rep for you.

Pokota

@ThacoBell Thanks - I didn't want to comb through gigabytes of mods just to find the one that I actually wanted. I wish that the -REP Bard Bribes could be made into a standalone mod, but I don't have the modding chops to do it myself.

@Gallowglass - I'm running a mixed reputation party for one of my chars (Imoen, Viconia, Dorn, Garrick, and Neera - We're about to start on the Nashkel mines for real) and my instincts keep going for the +REP responses. Funnily enough, I should have taken the -REP for lying to Oublek since I'd already killed Greywolf for his sword, but I know if you do that he won't give you the time of day afterwards (and I usually come in from the Brage sidequest for a quick GP infusion...)

Gallowglass

Well heck, @Pokota, this is a role-playing game! Role-play is (and is surely meant to be) the key to managing a mixed-alignment party.

If you always behave as a goody-two-shoes, then of course your Evil companions will get fed up with you and walk away, and that's as it should be. Getting around it by modding in a feature which avoids the need to role-play is merely cheating, you're supposed to keep your REP in the viable range by REP-affecting actions and/or by finding -REP quest solutions. That can be a little difficult, but it makes sense that holding together a mixed-alignment party should be more challenging than a party who all agree.

ThacoBell

@Gallowglass Its Pokota's game. If they want to mod in a reputation manager, then they can. The reputation system makes little sense the way its implemented anyway.

Tresset

C:Eval("ReputationInc(-1)")

BillyYank

Pokota said:

@ThacoBell Thanks - I didn't want to comb through gigabytes of mods just to find the one that I actually wanted. I wish that the -REP Bard Bribes could be made into a standalone mod, but I don't have the modding chops to do it myself.

Most mods are divided into components. Check the readme, you may be able to install just that component.

former_customer

Gallowglass said:

Well heck, @Pokota, this is a role-playing game! Role-play is (and is surely meant to be) the key to managing a mixed-alignment party.

If you always behave as a goody-two-shoes, then of course your Evil companions will get fed up with you and walk away, and that's as it should be. Getting around it by modding in a feature which avoids the need to role-play is merely cheating, you're supposed to keep your REP in the viable range by REP-affecting actions and/or by finding -REP quest solutions. That can be a little difficult, but it makes sense that holding together a mixed-alignment party should be more challenging than a party who all agree.

If you are bringing evil characters wealth and prestige, I'm not sure I see a compelling reason for them to leave, unless they have an emotional investment in being perceived as evil. I just watched an election season in which some pretty evil people were basking in their supporters' mistaken perceptions about their goodness.

It would seem a rather teen-angsty version of evil that wishes to be recognized as such. Wasn't Sarevok's entire plan to present himself as the hero who would save the Sword Coast?

Francois

former_customer said:

If you are bringing evil characters wealth and prestige, I'm not sure I see a compelling reason for them to leave, unless they have an emotional investment in being perceived as evil.

I think the Reputation is an abstract measurement of how you character acts in general. The Evil guys may not object to a specific act that increases your reputation, but if you only do good things then it's a sign that you won't get along in the long run.

The great exception is Baeloth who will automatically decrease your reputation whenever it gets too high, so evil NPC will never leave when you have him.

Pokota

@Gallowglass: From what I saw from your post, most of the -REP stuff is in Baldur's Gate proper. Kinda doesn't help me when I can hit 20 before entering the Bandit Camp.

Question: How is donating to temples to raise rep any different from bribing bards to lower rep, anyway? We have one in vanilla, but not the other.

E: Missing Oublek's free -REP is weighing on my mind. I think there are a few things I can do north of FAI to drop my rep; I've already returned Brun's son to him (I don't think anyone can pass up 10 ankheg shells and the ankhegs that wore them) but didn't do anything else with that because I remembered it was a REP thing, and doesn't the quest from the three "farmers" on the same map also have a -REP thing?

ThacoBell

@Pokota who specifically do you want to keep in your party? Some evil characters don't complain if your reputation is already at 20 when they are recruited. So long as its not decreased to a number above 17.

UnderstandMouseMagic

Just shoot a begger.
Quietly, at night when there's nobody watching.

RP wise, it's a momentary lapse because you haven't got a handle on the Bhaal essence yet.
Very understandable considering the circumstances, no court would convict...........temporary insanity.

Pokota

@ThacoBell For this party, if I'm forced to pick between Viconia and Dorn, I'll take the Drow. Dorn may be a blackguard but really all I need him for is a front liner so that Magnolia can pump arrows into whatever's attacking.

ThacoBell

Ah, then the trick won't work for them. They force reputation down 2 points just by joining.

AdaJ

If you don't want to deal with the headache, you can just copy the happy.d2a file into your override folder and modify it.

Gallowglass

Pokota said:

@Gallowglass: From what I saw from your post, most of the -REP stuff is in Baldur's Gate proper. Kinda doesn't help me when I can hit 20 before entering the Bandit Camp.

You can hit 20 before the Bandit Camp, yes, but you don't have to. The solution is simply to leave aside some of those +REP quests until later, when you can more easily alternate +REP and -REP quests to stay within the necessary range.

Pokota said:

How is donating to temples to raise rep any different from bribing bards to lower rep, anyway? We have one in vanilla, but not the other.

You've answered your own question. The difference is that temple donations are part of the game and bard bribes are not.

With skill, you don't need the bard bribes to succeed, and the game expects you to develop some skill if you want to succeed with a mixed-alignment party. Merely modding away the additional difficulty is just faking it. If you wanted, you could just install a "Win!" button on the opening menu to jump directly to the end credits without ever actually playing at all. If that's your idea of fun, then go right ahead, but then don't pretend that you've really "won" the game.

Pokota

As it turns out, the NPC mod doesn't play well in BGEE+SoD, so it's back to doing things the hard way.

I'll probably start Magnolia over and be more careful about reputation stuff this time.

@Gallowglass: I get that the devs only put one of them in the game but there's really no safe way to lower rep outside of the -REP rewards (by "safe" I mean "won't instantly spawn some form of guards"), whereas to raise rep all you have to do is throw some money around. If I had a time machine I'd probably bring this up to the original devs as a feature request for TotSC.

E: Or hell, even just a Temple of Talos or Umberlee (or in BG2, Shar or Llolth) outside of BG proper to donate to. They did that in Might and Magic if you donated to a Baa temple.

ThacoBell

The NPC mod should work perfectly fine, I've never had problems. Which release of the game are you playing?
*EDIT* modding reputation tools is not even remotely close to typing in a code to win. Paying money to lower rep is no more cheating than paying money to raise rep.

Pokota

@ThacoBell I'm running 2.3.67.3 Steam with the Siege of Dragonspear DLC added. The NPC Mod's banters were pulling from SoD instead of what they were supposed to be pulling from, which makes me wonder if there's a collision that only exists because of SoD. I'll have to check that later once I put the non-Steam version on this machine.

E: See also this post on Gibberlings Three; virtually the same as what happened to me (plus the Defamation Bard was throwing item description text at me instead of his "shall I defame you" stuff).

ThacoBell

@Pokota I know what the problem is. Because of the way Steam and GOG handle dlc, you need to run modmerge to make any mods compatible with bgee+SOD
This link should help: https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/50441/modmerge-merge-your-steam-gog-zip-based-dlc-into-something-weidu-nearinfinity-dltcep-can-use