Imoen leaves party when increasing reputation

Jofre

I managed to get some bad reputation inside Candlekeep by killing guests on the inn, and the guards that come to protect them. This obviously gave me some bad reputation.

Nevertheless, Imoen joined me after Gorions death, and we adventured around.

However, if at any point I renounce my evil ways and increase my reputation, it seems to trigger Imoen's reputation check, and when she discovers it's negative, she leaves.

I would expect Imoen to not join initially if my reputation is bad enough, or to stick with me while the reputation increases, and only leave if it goes even lower.

Is this a bug? Should Imoen's behaviour be more consistent? Or is this a known behaviour and there's no way to fix it?

I looked around and this does not seem to be reported (point me to where it's discussed if I missed it).

I'm playing on the latest version available in Steam.

(I never tried to lower my reputation further after Imoen joined my party, but I assume she would also leave.)

jastey

Oof, this sounds like not intended issue. Here I was, thinking Imoen doesn't leave the group because of rep at all?

Jofre

I don't know if in normal gameplay she won't leave (although I've read some threads about Imoen leaving evil parties, so I guess it's intended).

When my rep increases, she says this and leaves my party (note the blue circle around her, meaning she is no longer part of the party):




If I then I try to speak to her again to re-recruit her, she replies with this:



Whick means she will no longer join the party.

I guess I can go and increase my reputation a few points and re-recruit her, but it's still confusing and looks not intended.

Jofre

Apparently, the bahaviour is the same with Khalid. If I get him into my party while having negative rep, when I increase the reputation, Khalid complains about the evil and leaves the party.

FredN

Umm, I know this is a pretty radical suggestion, but ... maybe you should NOT run amok and go around killing innocent people? I know, the concept of a serial killer committing mass murder having to endure consequences is foreign to you, but try to entertain the notion, extreme though it is, just for a minute or so.

FredN

.....Note that similar machanics apply in the later modules, SoA and ToB. Those chapters, however, do have a fair number of evil NPCs whom you can recruit, if you want to indulge in such actions without your crew bailing out on you. There you can run into the reverse problem; if you do too many good things and the party reputation increases, you will start to hear grumbling from your less than honorable followers.
.....In fact, if you do enough horrible things, there are times when local law enforcement will seek your group out and attack you. Heck, if you recruit Dorn in SoA and help him in his personal quest line (Dorn's Bloody Path), lawful good clerics and paladins will come after you. And if you keep up your evil ways into ToB, Lawful Good Planetars, Paladins and Knights will start intercepting you whenever you travel between game areas.
.....Mind you, this isn't the total disaster it sounds like. I have done an all evil run through twice now, and there is a way to rectify that perilous situation, which I won't go into here due to spoilers. All I am saying is that to some actions there are consequences, and this is intentional.

jmerry

I can see the mechanic involved; the game checks when reputation changes, and good characters leave at reputation 2 or less. So if your reputation increases from 1 to 2, good characters leave ... if you somehow dodged the check to get them into your party at reputation 1 in the first place. Imoen doesn't check when she first joins - she won't take no for an answer.

Regarding Imoen, she has an effect "Ignore reputation breaking point" ... in BG2EE. She doesn't have it in BGEE. And she does have the appropriate dialogue for leaving when the party's too far out of alignment with her morals.

Even in my evil run, I didn't go around at reputation 1. I spent most of the time with middling reputation, only occasionally slipping down. It's far too much trouble dealing with law enforcement coming after you all the time. Though there was one amusing incident in the BG2 portion ... I was at low reputation, and Anomen got the bad news about Saerk so he ran off to confront the man. I followed, he murdered Saerk's daughter (act of plot, not under my control) causing the party's reputation to drop, and that drop to reputation 1 disgusted him so much that Anomen left forever. He couldn't stomach his own actions.
Then I reloaded and retconned the whole thing, because Anomen was part of my long-term party.

FredN

>>" It's far too much trouble dealing with law enforcement coming after you all the time."<<
And I always thought that it was terribly hypocritical of the supposedly good deities that you could bribe your way back into favor by tossing one of their priests a bunch of silver. Deific greediness? Mind you, you cannot bribe the Planetar of Justice, who comes after you in ToB if you have Dorn in your party. This leads to an interesting situation where you can literally storm into Heaven ... well, ok, here they call it Elysium ... and wreak all sorts of havoc.

jmerry

Who says the gods have anything to do with it? The priests have plenty of social influence, and they can certainly put out the word that you're not so bad. Remember, that stat is called "reputation".

FredN

You would think that the gods would keep an eye on what their priests were doing. The Christian church, prior to Martin Luther, engaged in a similar practice; namely selling "indulgences", which were supposed to absolve you of your sins ... for a price. This was one of the things Luther objected to, and was one of the reasons prompting him to start the Reformation.

jastey

@FredN you are kind of derailing this topic, to be honest.

To me, this sounds like an oversight. Imoen should not leave the PC in BG1, either. Clearly the effect to ignore party rep is missing.

..And here I was, wanting to check whether this is covered by the BG2Fixpack when I realized this is a BGII fixpack, duh.

You know what, I think I should address this in Imoen4Ever. I'll note that down. Imoen can't just leave!!

@Jofre for what it's worth, at least the NPCs do not go away forwever, which was the original behavior. I guess increasing rep and asking them to join again is the way to go.
In short: it seems intended NPC behavior, but not for Imoen, who doesn't have a dialogue for it.

Jofre

jmerry wrote: »

the game checks when reputation changes, and good characters leave at reputation 2 or less. So if your reputation increases from 1 to 2, good characters leave ... if you somehow dodged the check to get them into your party at reputation 1 in the first place. Imoen doesn't check when she first joins - she won't take no for an answer.

This seems to be exactly what is going on. It looks like Imoen never gets to check the reputation when joining (even outside of the scripted join), since the workaround I did was:
- Remove Imoen from the party
- Finish a quest/action that increases reputation
- Re-invite Imoen to the party

This seems to work even if the second reputation is 2, so apparently Imoen only checks when the reputation changes, not when being invited.

I did not go further enough in my testing with Khalid, but in this case I'm also sure there is no check for initial joining. I'm guessing the scripted party joins (Khaled, Imoen, ...) might face this issue.

I'm not against Imoen/Khaled leaving my party if I'm too evil, but it would be nice to have a check that the reputation is actually going down. Otherwise, the very few lines of dialogue related to this make no sense (talking about how I'm getting eviler after my rep increases).

For anyone wanting to test this, note that leaving Candlekeep with 1 rep is hard, since the flaming fist will be hunting you, and fighting them off at lvl 1 is not trivial. It's even harder trying to get into the friendly arm inn to test with Khalid.

There are several ways to fix this (if anybody is wanting to fix this), but I guess the one that makes most sense to me is to avoid good characters joining if your reputation is 1. This is not an issue with reputation 2, since any increase takes you to 3, and they will no longer leave when increasing, which is the confusing part.

jastey

I fear in the EEs, the way the rep checks / leaving works is kind of hardcoded, and it's done differently as in the originals.
It's also why a mere script override does not work to let them ignore rep, but an effect on the NPC creature file is needed. But I'm not an expert there, so maybe therere is something that could be done about it.

For them leaving when rep goes up is hilariously stupid.

EDIT: my experience with rep in EE was, if the rep is too low and the NPC is in the group long enough, they will eventually leave, though. It's kind of a random timer for te check while they are in group, too. Maybe your rep increase was sooner than that.
Leaving for increasing rep is still hilarious.