Multi-romance party
Moonheart
Member Posts: 520
I've been challenging myself to make a playthrough consisting to build a party only made of romanced characters, without using any mod nor changing a single variable during the game
My goal being to see how the game reacts to having several completed romances in the party during all the love-related discussions and events.
The starting plan
The original plan is like that:
- Hold with Jaheira only in the party long enough to complete her romance.
- Throw her out of the party
- Recruit Aerie and hang with her long enough to complete her romance.
- Thow her out of the party
- Rescue Imoen and kick her out
- Use the Slayer form to lower my reputation
- Recruit Viconia and complete her romance.
- Throw her out of the party
- Pay the temples to get back a neutral alignement.
- Recruit Neera and complete her romance.
- (optional) Throw Neera out, romance the gay interest
- Get back Jaheira, Aerie, Viconia and our optional gay member
- Play all the game with that party and see which happens
I'm truly interested to see the events of the Drow City, of Bodhy, and see if Aerie and Viconia can get along in the same party if they are currently in love with CHARNAME
My goal being to see how the game reacts to having several completed romances in the party during all the love-related discussions and events.
The starting plan
The original plan is like that:
- Hold with Jaheira only in the party long enough to complete her romance.
- Throw her out of the party
- Recruit Aerie and hang with her long enough to complete her romance.
- Thow her out of the party
- Rescue Imoen and kick her out
- Use the Slayer form to lower my reputation
- Recruit Viconia and complete her romance.
- Throw her out of the party
- Pay the temples to get back a neutral alignement.
- Recruit Neera and complete her romance.
- (optional) Throw Neera out, romance the gay interest
- Get back Jaheira, Aerie, Viconia and our optional gay member
- Play all the game with that party and see which happens
I'm truly interested to see the events of the Drow City, of Bodhy, and see if Aerie and Viconia can get along in the same party if they are currently in love with CHARNAME
1
Comments
After a long time with Jaheira (recruited everyone except Cernd and other love interest), I noticed that people saying that romance is real time-related are wrong.
Romances are based game-time, but many love banters have also conditions that you need to meet to trigger, making that most often, those love banter seems to happend "randomly" after a given amount of real time. They are not.
Once I found a method to check about conditions, I completed Jaheira's romance which has been only advanced by 30% of the total banters in 2h
Kicking her out and recruiting Aerie, I had been able to check this method by doing the whole romance of Aerie in 40mn, including Haer'Dalis interferences.
This also allowed me to check that you can complete several romances without messing with any game file.
However, another discovery I've made is that Jaheira doesn't like at all to be kicked out of the party, even after you complete her romance. I currently have no way to check variables on my Android to check that the "romanced" variable is still active for Jaheira... but she got her Harper Pin.
Thanks to @Arunsun, I've been able to import the save of my Android tablet on EEKeeper, and Jaheira appears to have her romance variable set to 3. I'm taking over another previous save, and I screw the love dialogue on purpose to compare them... yes, that's 3 too.
So the rule about not kicking Jaheira's out is still valable even once you completed the romance with her.
There are two things I must check to see if there is a workaround for that:
1- Is kicking Jaheira out before the first love banter actualy prevent us to start the romance later?
2- Is kicking someone else out set her romance to 3, despite the dialogue not showing it?
I'll update the post later after performing the in-game sequences needed to check all those things
2- Not that I am aware
I'm going to try to check neverless because I don't want to do 20h of play on unchecked assumptions, but here is what I think I'll do if everything goes that way:
1- Kick Jaheira out early, so she doesn't get upset (probably just after she saw the corpse of her husband, I'm such a monster)
2- Rush the recruitement of Aerie, Viconia and Neera completing their romances one by one
3- Get Jaheira back, complete her romance
4- Get Aerie, Viconia and Neera back
5- Start the chapter 2 seriously ^^
Attempt n°2: A new beginning
So, I've been through the dungeon of Irennicus without getting any dialogue from Jaheira.
For that, I've cleaned the whole dungeon with our dear Imoen, and only got back to free her and Minsc when nothing was left do to.
As soon we reached the surface, every member left in the party was asked to wait in the Copper Coronet.
Checking Jaheira's variable, everything is good to start her romance later.
So, I'm now free to perform as I wish to conquier the other, but first... I need to prepare something to speed up the love banters.
For information, most romance dialogues are triggered by entering into a peaceful area, like Akathla's streets, by a "hard" transition. And bt "hard" transition I call any change of area where you can't transfert only one party member (a.k.a "You must gather your party before venturing forth")
Having a place where you can rest at will, without being interrupted, and which only separated of the town's streets by a hard transition allow to chain every love banter that is not related by special conditions.
So I need to find a place like that to work on my party building
And where can I found this marvelous place?
Well I know one: The Mage Stronghold, which means I'm first going to rush Valygar's quest....
As it is not the goal for me to spoil and explain how to do quests in this playthrough, I only explain things that are relative to my multi-romance party and events.
Valygar's quest is a very rewarding quest in money and loot. 10.000 gold can be found on the way, and enough loot to fill 3 inventories.
I used this wealth to buy the Robes of Vecna, which will prove useful when I'll have to do the Harper Quests for Jaheira, which will simplify my party building.
Then, I had to chose my first romance.
Jaheira is to be the last due to her special "I cannot be removed from the party" condition, which let me chose between Aerie, Viconia and Neera.
As a bit of information, the ideal reputation for each romance is something like that
- Jaheira 14+ (if you don't have 14+ Jaheira won't get a special reward at the end of the romance, which is pretty good...) or even 16+ if you want to avoid a death fight between Jaheira and an old friend of her
- Aerie 12+ (it doesn't matter much on the love banters, however)
- Viconia 10- (positive reputation gets on her nerves)
- Neera... any reputation will do
As my current reputation was 12, I choosed to start with Aerie romance, which is a really easy one. As with all the romance, you have to decline to sleep with her when she ask for it... that's about the only thing to remember.
At some point we got a messenger of her uncle Qayle which needs to be answered for the romance to contiue... but answer it actualy only requiers to accept the quest from Raelis Shai, not to complete it... so I choosed to rescue Haer'Dalis later, when my party would be built.
After romancing Aerie, I've gone for Viconia, since the simple fact to free her from the angry mob lowers the reputation, which puts my CHARNAME just fine in reputation level for her.
Viconia dialogues are more complicated that the ones of Aerie, but mostly, like with every other char, the most important thing is to refuse to sleep with her when she seems to do it for bad reasons.
This is a leitmotiv of BG2, and Viconia, despite of her kinda slutty behavior, doesn't make exception.
I had to sought for some gear for her, since at some point of the romance, she get assaulted, be render helpless by a script effect, and will permenantly die if her hitpoint hits 0. But overall, everything had gone fine.
By the end of her romance, I checked for the global variables, and had a bad surprise. Reaching the "comitted relationship" status with Viconia actualy ended my relationship with Aerie (AERIEROMANCEACTIVE =3), even if no dialog has been shown on the topic.
Aerie just start to act like if no love relationship happened between CHARNAME and her... which probably is the way the game handles case of players attempting to romance several characters in a too-cunning way: the last romance takes "precedence" on the old love, even if you avoided conflicts between the love interests.
More or less, it means that I will probably never see any multiple romances active in my party... but I'll check for Neera and Jaheira's romances first, to see if no exceptions are made.
So, it has been confirmed with Neera: any romance reaching a status of 2 (comitted relationship), automaticaly put a end to other romance with a status of 2.
After having done all the love talks needed for Neera, Viconia romance has ended, even if the love talk still have to resume post-spellhold.
This basicaly answer the question for which this playthrough has been made "What happens if you romance the girls one after the other, so they don't get in conflict":
- You can do all the romance talk
- You will, however, only keep the last romance comitted as a lover, including love interests from the extensions
I'll now change the direction of my playthrough, since I did all the romancing besides Jaheira, got my stronghold and a whole assortment of bags, but still have almost all the quests of the chapter 2 to do.