Investigating the idea: The Flex NPC

Pantalion

So there I was, thinking how IWD had never appealed to me since there was basically minimal character interaction between party members, whilst at the same time thinking about the fact that I'd probably never craft a gloriously overpowered full custom party in BG, and I thought of an idea.

Flexible NPCs.

Basically, at character creation for characters after the first, much like you can select a voice set, instead you can select an entire NPC personality, noting that character as an NPC in the eyes of the game, for banter, subplots and so on (or dialogue at the beginning of the campaign).

Personalities could be available based on gender, race, class and alignment flags.

So for example a Korgan personality would have:

Male.
Races allowed: Dwarf (adding other races as a possible if their dwarfiness never comes up as a plot point)
Alignments Disallowed: Good (meaning any mix of Lawful through Chaotic, Neutral or Evil is allowed)
Classes Disallowed: Cleric. (the dialogue excessively mentions axes)

So any evil Dwarf you made could be marked as Korgan, so long as they weren't Good and weren't a Cleric.

The Coran personality (Coran doesn't, from memory, make much class or race specific chatter) would instead have:

Male.
Races allowed: Elf, Half Elf, Human, Halfling, Gnome, Dwarf, Half-Orc
Alignments Disallowed: None.
Classes Disallowed: None

So a Coran character might potentially be attached to any male would-be NPC (or just the elves/half elves, depending on backstory concerns). A Jaheira nature lover character could be any non-evil Elf, Half-Elf, must be Ranger or Druid... And so on.

Meanwhile, you would be free to stat them as you pleased, giving you full control over your characters and party composition (and power level), whilst still giving you the personalities and NPCs you were interested in interacting with, and they would interact with your party leader, and one another, accordingly for the full plot experience.

Any thoughts?

klatu

Have you tried IWD NPCs?

It's not really flexible as such, but it adds some personality to the game. Maybe you can DaleKeeper the NPCs more to your liking.

If that's not your thing, I'm afraid you're SOL for now.

The modular personalities you're talking about would be difficult to implement. It might be possible to some extent, but it most likely wouln't be possible to assign personalities to newly created characters without ludicrous amounts of scripting in the background.

Shin

Not sure if you mean this as an option for IWD or BG, but when it comes to BG you can already externally customize any NPC pretty much how you want in regards to power gaming. So rather than giving your custom dwarf a Korgan personality, you could just give Korgan custom stats/class/skills etc.

Pantalion

@Klatu

Neat, I'll have to try it out, that might actually allow me to successfully play IWD.

@Shin

Well, in theory, both and more.

Essentially Shadowkeeper customisation backwards - create the character you want, and then choose a personality, rather than the reverse, for Multiplayer, or, for any potential game like Eye of the Beholder (which always populates four members of your party with PCs from the beginning), it would mean your team was as much as possible defined by who you wanted to be in it, rather than who you needed to be in it (or hindered because you can't stand the NPC personality of the role you need, or they're only available in Evil/Good....).

It would work for people who view Shadowkeeper as cheating, whilst being automatically the best of both worlds between story and optimisation for people who always play multiplayer for the optimal party and those who play single player for optimal characterisation. It might be awkward to implement (especially with the IE engine in its current state), but would that be a game mechanic that would be worth implementing for the future?

From the perspective of a modern game engine spanning multiple works, an NPC's personality might well be flexible enough to successfully include as an option in several different campaigns with the same engine (talking a theoretical BG3 engine as an ongoing series of modular campaigns with characters and NPCs here), with the system just calling to check if a character personality traits trigger at certain events.

Tetraploid

It's an interesting idea. Not sure how fully blown pre-set personalities with subplots and so on would work out...that basically is just an NPC where you choose the stats, right? But a smaller idea would just be to set some dialogue variables based on alignment, class, race etc and then fill in the gaps with your imagination. For example, a character designated as 'Good' by their alignment could have some injections if you do something evil, and vice versa. A character that is a druid might have some nice things to say about Kuldahar. It's a much smaller scale than what you were suggesting, of course, but may be enough to make the characters just a little less lifeless. And might be more easily implemented!

Pantalion

Tetraploid said:

It's an interesting idea. Not sure how fully blown pre-set personalities with subplots and so on would work out...that basically is just an NPC where you choose the stats, right? But a smaller idea would just be to set some dialogue variables based on alignment, class, race etc and then fill in the gaps with your imagination. For example, a character designated as 'Good' by their alignment could have some injections if you do something evil, and vice versa. A character that is a druid might have some nice things to say about Kuldahar. It's a much smaller scale than what you were suggesting, of course, but may be enough to make the characters just a little less lifeless. And might be more easily implemented!

Basically, yes. And from a DLC perspective, you could quite easily create any number of NPC "Profiles" - basically interesting characters to play with, and then include them without any concerns as to whether they'd unbalance the game or something like that (or even have each NPC come with their own minor ability, as NPCs in the BG series do).

Actually I'd love your "smaller" suggestion too, in Eye of the Beholder your PCs would pass (very simplistic) commentary based on their class/alignment, a slightly more robust version of this would be neat to include, and would be comparatively simple.