Reputation management and general villainy

deejK

Hellooooo, and hi! I've just arrived in Nashkel on my first run of BG:ee ever, and I've got some questions... one being whether or not I'll miss out on much story if I play an 'evil' party? I'm hoping that I don't get turned away by potential quest-givers--unless the quest-in-question is to rescue a baby from a burning house or something similarly saintly--simply because my reputation is super low.

Speaking of, right now it's either -6 or -9 and the only bad thing that has come of it is being ambushed by like 5 Flaming Fist Enforcers and one Flaming Fist Wizard upon entering the Burning Wizard (lol I know) in Beregost. I had to console>ctrl+y them and then make up a story about Tiax's greatness preventing our party from certain death. What's the lowest I should aim for if I don't want to lose my evil members but keep cool questlines from being inaccessible?

My party consists of Xzar, Kagain, Tiax, Kivan, and Rasaad (listed in order of personal affect). Jaheira and Imoen ditched me... Neera died by a skeleton's dart, Montaron by a hobgoblin, Khalid by an ogre. Will I have issues assembling a party or continuing into the next game even though I'm not really paying attention as to whether or not they'll appear in said sequel? I'm reading bits out of a strategy guide by Haeravon to determine who to recruit, but I don't really have a solid group that I want to play with. I just wanna keep Xzar alive, hopefully see him exceed 4 hitpoints. I'm playing a fighter-mage as charname.

Sorry if this is all long-winded but I'm just excited to be playing this and hope I come out at the end of the second game with a wonderful story and fun experience in my memory. Also, since I just bought BG2:ee since it was on sale, would starting a new run on that using Tutu or whatever yield a more enjoyable play through this series?

THANKS for reading all of this junk. Smiles, everyone, smiles! This is like some great fantasy.

Zagacious

The important factor is Reaction (under Ability scores in the character sheet), which is based on Charisma of the character, and party Reputation. A high Reaction score is required for a few quests, and a few quests give better rewards if your Reaction is high, but none of it is anything major. I believe there's only 1 or 2 magic items that you can't get with an evil party. I estimate there's only about 7-8 quests in the entire game that are affected by Reaction score, but I'm not certain.

A character could also have high Charisma, but bad reputation, and his reaction score might balance out. You can donate a lot of money to Priests to get your reputation up for quests, then go back to being evil.

If you're going to go evil, make sure you take advantage of some people who are high exp. The priest and nymphs in Temple give a lot of exp, they don't give rep loss but i consider it evil. You can also kill Thalantyr in High Hedge after you've bought all of his items and done his quest. Once your party is high enough level you can kill Elminster (multiple times) and Drizzt, both I believe give a huge reputation loss, but are worth a ton of experience. Drizzt is hard to kill but he drops 2 of the best 1H weapons in the game, and some other nice things. Elminster you can't kill without abusing the dialog system a bit (I'll let you figure it out for yourself) but he gives huge amount of exp, something like 26,000 xp and you can kill him multiple times as he keeps showing up later in the game even if you kill him.

There are a lot more quests where Reaction score matters in BG 2. I'm not as familiar with BG 2 as I am with BG 1, but I don't think Reaction score is incredibly important in BG 2 either, I think it's mostly better exp and gold from quests.

Gallenger

The game will certainly be different, as some companions won't join with you, and you'll miss out on the "good-guy" resolutions to quests, and some quests only offered to folks with high reaction - but there are also quests only offered to people with low reactions - and you'll typically be higher level than a "good guy" party due to the bounty hunters and flaming fist attacks you'll run into lol.

deejK

@Gallenger Lol, I figured that the extra killings miiiiight balance out the lost quest experience, but then again, I do rather enjoy a nice quest.

@Zagacious I wasn't sure what the Reaction stat signified, thank you! I thought it was something to do with combat rolls. I'm thinking of using Rasaad as my party's face because he's got the highest Charisma of the bunch, but he's not likely to stick around for a while so I'm going to need to come up with another plan. Perhaps I'll throw coin at local temples in attempts to leverage my character's influence.

UnderstandMouseMagic

For a first run playing evil, I would say, is not recommended.
At the very most, play clever evil, quiet psychopath, no mindless slaughter.

To get an overall impression of the game, it's better to play how you were expected to play.
However, that doesn't mean you have to play good, neutral is acceptable and except for worrying about rep, it won't affect anything.

Also to me it makes more sense. You may feel ambiguous about Gorion/Candlekeep, but let's say you were classically "evil" chances are that would have been noticed. You are 20yo at the start after all. All those cats you kept on killing would have been noticed by now.

To keep evil members in party, just keep your rep below 18. Easy to do, when it approaches the limit, kill a person quietly and out of sight so nobody else turns hostile.

Valci

Dorn has decent charisma if memory serves... Also you might consider the bg1npc mod as it has a component (among other nice features) that adds 3 bards in different taverns that do the opposite of donations to the temple. You pay them to increase your infamy which translates into negative reputation... As far as I recall anyway. I'm just starting a play through with the mod myself so you could try that...

Gallenger

Playing evil can certainly feel harder in certain places, because if your rep totally bottoms out shops won't be that useful to you - but you can live off of the land, so to speak, just as well, plus it helps that most of the most powerful NPCs are evil

You get the 2 best mages in the game hands-down, the best cleric, the best 2 fighters... lol.

UnderstandMouseMagic

Valci said:

Dorn has decent charisma if memory serves... Also you might consider the bg1npc mod as it has a component (among other nice features) that adds 3 bards in different taverns that do the opposite of donations to the temple. You pay them to increase your infamy which translates into negative reputation... As far as I recall anyway. I'm just starting a play through with the mod myself so you could try that...

It does, the begger in Nashkel (just outside the Belching Dragon) has an extended life expectancy since I installed NPC Project.

Thing to remember is that you can only use each once or twice, they do disappear when you have paid and used them. So it's better to go for the expensive three point hit if you need to.

deejK

Good info, thanks everyone... there is a lot to consider. I'm not doing a psychopathic evil, so I'll not be killing people for the fun of it necessarily. I do wish that low rep helped with negotiation as high rep does... it seems more reasonable to discount a terrible, murderous band of villains out of sheer fear than to discount a group of happy, lawful heroes.

Should I start my run over in BG2, or will importing a BG1 character be pretty much the same experience?

Gallenger

the BG1 character may have some different, not so important, starting gear, and will typically have better statistics, and more EXP, especially if you play through SoD too (in the more xp department). Also if you choose to initiate a romance (mods or Neera/Dorn) the story will continue from game to game.

OrlonKronsteen

If you're playing smart evil, you can still do quests. Some actually do have evil dialogue strings, but for the others you can role-play that you're doing good to keep up appearances and to gain wealth. I played evil my first time (in fact, I never tried good until the EEs came out) and it was a hoot! Another thing that can help: with the good dialogue responses, imagine that your character is saying them with a really sarcastic tone.

I know what you mean about reputation and discounts. Fortunately, there is a mod that can fix that. I know it's your first run and most people (me included) usually wouldn't recommend using mods right away, but Tweaks Anthology allows you to change certain things you may not like, and it includes a component that grants discounts for low reputation as well as high reputation. You can find the mod here.

Have a look at the readme and you'll get an idea of the changes you can make. You get to choose which components to install individually, so even if you just wanted to change the rep discount right now, you could. That said, I'd avoid other components until you've played the game a couple times, unless there are things you notice that annoy you right away that Tweaks has fixes for.

Zagacious

deejK said:

@Zagacious I wasn't sure what the Reaction stat signified, thank you! I thought it was something to do with combat rolls. I'm thinking of using Rasaad as my party's face because he's got the highest Charisma of the bunch, but he's not likely to stick around for a while so I'm going to need to come up with another plan. Perhaps I'll throw coin at local temples in attempts to leverage my character's influence.

Yeah it is kind of weird where they chose to put the Reaction score, I never knew what it was for until I started playing this again recently.

To give you an idea of what a good Reaction score is, I'm gonna spoil you a little bit on a minor quest. There is a quest fairly early on, where you need to rescue a child's cat, if your reaction score is between 8 and 14, you get the 'default' reward. 15 or higher, you get better rewards. If your reaction is 7 or lower, she accuses you of killing her cat and you get no reward at all. I can't remember what the requirements for other quests that need reaction score, but I think if you're 15 or higher you should be good on all quests.

Here's a little more info on reputation, charisma, and reaction scores: http://baldursgate.wikia.com/wiki/Reputation

EDIT: I just noticed its actually pretty hard to get a 15 reaction score, and that seems to be the 'optimal' score needed. Using a Bard with Friends spell to get 24 Charisma, and Reputation 18, on a True Neutral Bard I had a Reaction of +16. So it's pretty hard for a character besides a Mage/Bard that can cast Friends to get that high of a reaction score. Without the Friends spell, my Bard has 18 Charisma and 18 Reputation, but that only grants +8 Reaction score at base

deejK

You all are great! This is super helpful, lol, okay. About to start playing this morning, I'll be sure to reach out if I have any more questions. >:D