Playing NPC quests with custom Party

Atarb

I like to make my own characters rather than using the NPC's. But I still enjoy the quests and dialogue.

Is it possible to leave one slot open and take the NPC's one (or two) at a time to do their quests?

Is there a way to do this for maximum dialogue benefit?

Or do they have to stick around for an obnoxiously long time? What about romances?

PaulaMigrate

You can explore the NPC's script (or sometimes the readme) to see the conditions for their quest to trigger. Either you take them into party at the right time or you manipulate the globals via console.
You can do the same for romances however it will be more complex.
In either case, you will rather be in a *testing* mode rather than roleplaying.
What to do exactly for each case can be quite different and can only be accesed on a case-to-case basis.

Atarb

Nah, I don't use the console. I was wondering if it was worth trying to do just off the cuff.

PaulaMigrate

For quests, if you know exactly where when and how the quest is triggered, unless it is one using a timed event, you can pick up the respective NPC when you are about to meet those conditions.
Example Tiax quest in BG1 - knowing that the quest starts in BG City harbour area, you can make him wait at Friendly Arm until you get access to the town.
Romances normally play out over long time with triggers and dependencies. etc. So without console or other tricks there is little you can do, except for BG1NPC romances. There is a pdf file in the mod folder which tells you the conditions for the next romance banter, e.g *outdoors after party rest*. You can then try to meet those conditions at the right time.

There are all types of walkthroughs and guides that allow you this kind of pre-planned gameplay.

jsaving

Yes, it is possible to grab the joinable NPCs "one at a time" to do their quests. Just be aware that player-rolled characters are generally stronger (sometimes much stronger) than the joinable NPCs, so you may want to up the difficulty level for such a run-through.

Jidokwon

It takes a bit of work, but you can fully customize the joinable NPCs to your liking using the EE Keeper found in the General Modding page.