Reputation - Evil Party
Cyberlisk
Member Posts: 29
One thing that has always been bothering me is that the way reputation works with evil parties doesn't really make sense.
Even if you are evil, it still makes sense to have the best reputation possible because that makes it even easier to get away with whatever you are doing behind the scenes. This is literally what Lawful Evil people do in the real world - they donate to charity or otherwise present themselves in the most philantropic way possible to divert from e.g. questionable business practices.
Long story short, is there a mod that remedies this? I know you can disable reputation effects on party members with a component from the Tweaks Anthology but what I'm looking for is something that disconnects the 'High Reputation = Good-aligned Party' relationship entirely. Not as in external NPC reactions, but e.g. someone like Edwin, knowing that you are actually evil on the inside, should compliment you for smartly acquiring a reputation as a hero.
Even if you are evil, it still makes sense to have the best reputation possible because that makes it even easier to get away with whatever you are doing behind the scenes. This is literally what Lawful Evil people do in the real world - they donate to charity or otherwise present themselves in the most philantropic way possible to divert from e.g. questionable business practices.
Long story short, is there a mod that remedies this? I know you can disable reputation effects on party members with a component from the Tweaks Anthology but what I'm looking for is something that disconnects the 'High Reputation = Good-aligned Party' relationship entirely. Not as in external NPC reactions, but e.g. someone like Edwin, knowing that you are actually evil on the inside, should compliment you for smartly acquiring a reputation as a hero.
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there you will see the alignments good, neutral and evil and you will see the 20 reputation points
you will notice that if the value is 80+ the NPC will be happy
if it is around 0, they will be neutral
if it is around -80+ they will be unhappy
if it is around -160+ they will be very unhappy
and if it is -300 or higher they will leave your team forever
so if you want your evil team mates to act the same way as good team mates would based off of your REP, just replace the "EVIL" values with the "GOOD" values and you should be good to go
and ironically doing that, evil team mates will never leave your team if your REP gets to high if you do that
Too bad you can't change the reactions for individual NPCs. E.g. Korgan would get upset about reputation 20 but Edwin wouldn't.
True enough I suppose... He is CE though and he doesn't seem to show any intent to hide it. He seems like someone that, rather than thinking why I could be beneficial, would just have the gut reaction that being seen as weak goody two-shoes is bad. Then again, his Intelligence isn't that low. Chaotic Evil is an alignment I basically never choose because the concept of being evil solely for the sake of being evil is difficult to grasp for me.
I guess I could understand it for some characters, it would require a very specific set of circumstances though. E.g. someone that was horribly disfigured as a child and is now set on destroying all beauty in the world.
Neutral Evil has always made a lot more sense to me for characters that are basically pure evil. NE chars are willing to do anything as long as there is a benefit. No codex, no emotion, just calculation without any regard for ethic concerns.
Lawful Evil is the most interesting evil alignment to me because LE characters can actually be selectively very good people (loyal to their friends/allies, clear rules and principles) but there can be one or multiple aspects to them that make them evil, e.g. complete disregard for anyone that isn't in their "inner circle" or punishing even the smallest slight against them with death. There are basically endless possibilities for interpretation when it comes to LE characters.
E.g...it's NOT that the evil characters are saying "we are well-respected throughout the lands...that's unacceptable and I shouldn't be with this group!!"...
It's more along the lines of "I can't believe you spared that person's life instead of just killing them, that puts us all at risk and for no reason other than your holier-than-thou moral beliefs" or "we put our lives at risk in that dungeon and you didn't even push for the larger sum of gold as a reward? You'd rather be well-liked instead? Pffftt!!"
And while it just so happens that these things ALSO lead to a reputation increase, that's not what the evil character is concerned with. More of a correlation than causality thing.
That's an interesting take and it does make sense. However, it stops making sense very quickly once you donate to charity to raise your reputation. Yes, donating could also be considered stupid or useless by an evil party member. However, one of the trade offs is actually getting lower prices from merchants, which is a real and immediate economical benefit. And even if it wasn't for that, having a good reputation makes many evil deeds a lot easier to execute and/or hide.
Obviously no game is perfect and BG2 was already ahead of its time in many respects. But I feel like this is something that could have been addressed pretty easily with a few (Lie) dialogue options here and there or the ability to explain to credibly explain to your evil companions that you are playing the long con.
Fall-From-Grace: "Is Advocate Infernus Forked-Tongue implying that we tanar'ri are a crude people?"
Fhjull Forked-Tongue: "Feh! To say that tanar'ri are crude is to insult crudity. Any lesser race that revels in chaos, allows itself to be pulled and drowned in its stagnant tides, and calls it 'evil' are not a race at all. They are beasts."
Fall-From-Grace: "Surely you simply object to the implementation of evil, rather than the degree. Many among the tanar'ri would claim that the closer one is to the primal nature of evil, the more true they are to the ideal."
Fhjull Forked-Tongue: "Feh and double feh! The tanar'ri beasts want to strip law and order from the face of evil! Inexcusable! Intolerable! I cannot --"
Fall-From-Grace: "From a baatezu point of view, it may indeed seem intolerable. However... Advocate, many tanar'ri philosophers would argue that the baatezu are to be no less excused for excising passion from violence, excising passion from the very essence of evil. The baatezu would replace rage with cold methodical cruelty. And thus, the old debate continues: Which is the greater evil? Efficient evil or passionate evil?"
But in fact, it's all moot. You can only give gold away up to a reptuation of 18--no evil-aligned characters will leave your party at 18 reputation, so giving away gold shouldn't be an issue. Yes, you may have to listen to them gripe, but come on we gave away 5,000 gp of our hard-earned cash so we can get a 25% (instead of a 20%) discount on Imoen's Robe of Vecna.
And as far the "other" benefit of having a high rep, such as being able to cover up dastardly acts--I mean, you really can only get reputation increases by doing the "right" thing. So what you're saying is that you will balance out evil acts with good acts every now and then? It sounds like more of a neutral character than an evil one. Behavior is more important than intent.
My main point is that if evil characters get up to a reputation of 20, then they might not actually be evil, and the NPCs may realize this quicker than the actual human player. If you're completing the quest of every commoner you run into, saving every town, dumping money into the church...I don't know, maybe you ARE a hero!
I think of the Thunderbolts from Marvel Comics. A team of supervillains brought together to masquarade as a team of heroes after the real Avengers disappear from Earth...they end up becoming good once they save the world a few times.
I could write a paragraph addressing every point you make again, but I think at this point it's more reasonable that we agree to disagree here.
Suffice it to say that we are talking about completely different things here. All I'm saying is that - for various reasons - it can make perfect sense for an evil character to get as good a reputation as possible. In fact there are even scenarios where a very evil character that is determined and disciplined enough can act like a completely good one for years until that one moment when he finally reaches his goal, e.g. getting into a position of power that makes him untouchable. If you don't like that example, just use your imagination.
At the end of the day, the reputation system in BG2 is deeply flawed and doesn't even remotely cover all the bases which, again, is perfectly fine. No game gets everything right. I get what you are trying to say, there are still ways to handle it (e.g. keeping it at <18) but these are still just workarounds for a system that is insufficient for me personally as a player. Like I said, a few (Lie) dialogue options here and there would have gone a long way because as you said, the way the game works there is no way to differentiate between an act that is truly good and a calculcated act with evil intentions that is only supposed to make you look good to the public.
Like I said, almost everything can make sense from a certain perspective. The problem is that the way you want to play your character doesn't shape the game, it's the game that sets the limitations for what type of (evil) character you can play - which is almost exclusively the greedy, in-your-face type of bad guy. There are not many options to play an evil character that is actually deep and complex, or at least there are not many ways to manifest such a character via game mechanics.
Exactly, good example. He despises the slavers but at the same time he gets mad about the reputation bonus you receive for freeing the slaves. Makes zero sense. The way reputation and alignments are implemented in BG2 is just inherently flawed. I know some people consider every kind of criticism to this legendary game to be blasphemy, but it does have its weaknesses. Doesn't change the fact that it's one of the, if not the best RPG ever made.
Regarding the issue of wanting to have a bad rep, I can think of a number of reasons why this might be the case for a Chaotic Evil character. Think of a ruthless prison inmate who wants people to fear him. Such a character would have no interesting in masquerading as a good guy, nor would he have any intention of associating himself with good guys. On the contrary, he wants to send a clear message to the rest of the prison population: "I'm the one you don't f--- with." He would occasionally associate himself with the worst lowlives and scumbags that he can possibly find, ruthless people like himself. Which doesn't necessarily mean that they would turn into a mafia or a gang ruled by criminal codes of conduct (that would arguably be Lawful Evil). Instead, he simply maintains close ties with brutal individuals like himself for no other reason that there is strength in numbers. You could argue that this would make him at least Neutral Evil, but I would argue in turn that the character in question is not primarily motivated by selfishness, rather by the desire to induce fear in other people. He might enjoy beating up, torturing and brutally murdering other people simply because he is a psychopath, or in D&D terms, because he is Chaotic Evil. And he has no interest in scheming or in hiding this fact, quite the contrary, he wants everyone to be fully aware of it.
I always like RPing my character's way around the canon best I can--but just the same, sometimes I get frustrated that you simply CAN'T in certain circumstances.
I think a faction-based reputation system would have been cool. Or two reputation scales, one for "fame" and one for "notoriety", and they both work in conjunction with charisma. A 1D scale DOES subtract from some of the other intricacies of the game.