Weird gender bending question

Kneller

I started a female char in bg1 and played quite a ways. If I use the girdle of masculinity/femininity, then import to bg2, would I be able to do a romance with a female npc?

I want to take a stab at the Aerie romance (though I just might end up stabbing Aerie if she's too annoying), but don't want to restart.

Francois

I am not sure, but I checked with EEKeeper and your *actual* gender is still considered to be the original when you have the girdle on. Same thing with a sex change from a wild surge: it's considered an ''effect'' and your real gender is still the same. I am uncertain whether this would affect romances, but if not you could always use EEKeeper to really change your true gender to male.

Neverused

I believe I've had Neera start a talk with a female CHARNAME after she had a wildsurge, so I think that this should be possible. There's another option: if you use EEKeeper, there should be a column with "GLOBAL", with all possible romances either a 1 or a 0. 1 means eligible, 0 ineligible, so swapping the appropriate one to 1 should do it as well.

TheArtisan

Here's how romances usually work: when you start/import a fresh game, the game sets a bunch of variables, including whether one is eligible for a romance. If you start the game valid to romance, say, Aerie, then you'll be able to screw with race, gender, etc. and it won't affect the romance in the least.

I have no idea how temporary gender change works, but if you want to start a same-sex romance with Aerie, you have to start male and EEKeeper yourself to female. Maybe importing a PC with the girdle will set the variable then remove the girdle, changing you back?

Gallowglass

The various variables which control romance status work slightly differently for the romance characters who were in the original game and the new romance characters added by EE, so the rules aren't quite the same for both sets of romanceable companions. However, I'm not an expert on the details of this.

Kneller

Meh. I just SK'd everything over. It would have been cool to pull it off in-game, though.

Yulaw9460

Deleted.

Tresset

Once you get your sex changed, forever will all romances be open to you... (at least in BG2)

islandking

So if my character used Girdle of masculinity/femininity once in BG1 then changed back, then when s/he gets imported to BG2, s/he will have ALL romances options? For sure?

ineth

No idea about the girdle. But if you want to have all romance options, just install the "Romance Cheats" component of the Tweaks Anthology mod and be done with it...

BelgarathMTH

I used to sometimes create a "gay" character by creating a "female" character and then using Keeper to change the avatar, portrait, and voice to male. The drawback was that the spell casting voice would still be female (apparently that can't be changed), and the romances aren't really written for it. I stopped doing it because I got tired of being called "my lady" and "beautiful woman" and that sort of thing.

Now I just install Faren if I want a (well-written) gay romance in my game. But mostly I just find romances in Bioware games to be an unwanted distraction, and I ignore them. I'll go through the dialogues until they stop sounding like friendships (which most of them do at least 75% along the way), and then I shut them down.

If I'm not given a polite way to try to tell them I want to be friends, but I don't feel romantic interest, I just use whatever badly-written cruel way Bioware has in there, and pretend I said something kinder.

I generally don't play games anymore that have every person in your party hitting on you. (Looking at you, Dragon Age.) I find that completely ridiculous. When did we give gaming developers the idea that we like that? I guess maybe too many of us do, but not I.

islandking

Thanks @ineth, but probably won't try other mods, don't want any protentical incompatibilities with v2.3+SCS+Acestion

Gallowglass

BelgarathMTH said:

When did we give gaming developers the idea that we like that? I guess maybe too many of us do, but not I.

You are not alone.

I usually play through a romance for my protagonist in most runs, because it's a part of the game and I'm rather completionist ... but really, I think the quality of these games would be higher if the developers had left out romances altogether.

Most of the in-game romances drag down the overall quality of writing because romance writing is a different genre (in which fantasy writers are often very amateurish because it's a different skillset), and even the better-written romances are still at best an irrelevant distraction from fantasy adventuring (which is what players enter the game to do).

But perhaps we're drifting off-topic!