Alignment and NWN

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Guys,

Bear with me- I'm a little confused. I am running through the first campaign with a Druid. Alignment True Neutral. I suppose
I was doing too many good deeds I guess because the other day the game said "Your Reconciler Status is Revoked!"
Sounded kind of harsh and made me wonder what had happened. I did a couple of evil things and I checked my alignment points. It says "Neutral, 50; Neutral 45" or something like that.

Question is: does doing too many good or evil things actually change your alignment? If so, will it show on the character and where? Can you do evil things to eliminate a good alignment and the other way around?

Sorry, hope that's not too unclear. I guess I am asking for someone to illuminate me on alignment in general as regards to this game.

 

Yup, Reconciler status is a very fragile thing. One point stray from 50-50 and you lose it.
Yes, you can raise your alignment up the two axis. Law-Chaos and Good-Evil. So, as you said, if you do a good deed it raises your alignment to Good, and if you do any evil one you progress (regress? ) towards Evil.

Of course not all quests have alignment change inbuilt. Some do, others dont, no sure way to know it unless you try it and then reload. But unless you're playing the game for testing some build you've imagined, it'd be best to just leave it alone and see how things are going when you're just RPing your druid.
Bear in mind that if you stray too far from Good-Evil and Law-Chaos axis (not Neutral in any axis) you will be unable to progress as a druid. Could take ranger or barbarian levels thereafter, or whatevers seems appropriate to your former upkeeper of the balance.

 

To add to what Gothmog already said, in the OC you can only make changes to Good/Evil...Lawful/Chaotic affecting actions only were included in the expansions.

Bad scene to be playing a monk and slip out of Lawful...it is easy to lose, but hard to get back.

As far as alignment effects on your character...it can obviously affect advancement, some powerful items have alignment restrictions on them, and in some instances your interactions with NPC's will be affected. There are even a couple of places in HotU where evil characters don't gain any XP for doing the same action as a neutral or good character.

 

Will the game let me know if I stray so far either direction that I can no longer progress as a druid? If that happens at some point, is it fixable?

Gothmog, so if I understand correctly when I look at my character:

Neutral (50), Neutral (46)

The first Neutral point value shows my Law/Chaos rating, the second shows points for Good/Evil.

0 is lowest, 100 highest correct?

Brad

 

Yup, it goes from 0 to 100.

If you stray, you'll have a tough time getting back, as Hacken Slash said. The game is pretty much linear, so you'll have to wait a long time/not await it at all to find a quest or two that can restore your alignment back to its previous value.
The message always appears in the message box when your alignment changes.
Alignment though, is a very complex thing and the game simply cannot cover it by predetermined alignment changes. Different characters may do the same thing, yet according to their personalities/causes/intends/... it can change their alignment into a completely other way.
So it cant be that wrong to reload if it changes your alignment in a way you think it shouldnt.
In this aspect playing online with a DM around is much more accurate and satisfying.

Might wanna see if you like ALFA?
scroll down the main forum page - Online Adventures. Most of the topics are ALFA oriented anyway. ALFA Adventures offer a nice view (if somewhat confusing) into what was going on and still is.

 

The ranges run as follows:

Chaotic / Evil: 0 - 30... Starting at 15
Neutral : 30 - 70... Starting at 50
Lawful / Good : 70 - 100... Starting at 85


It has always seemed easier to make a shift toward Evil than Good...kill a villager and you shift 7 point toward evil...help them out and you shift 3 points toward good.

You should always get one warning...it sounds like "so-and-so has move three points in the direction of 'evil'. If you continue in this path, you will no longer be able to advance as a ____". The second time you hear about it is when you have crossed the line.

 

Hmm... does the loss of reconciler status mean the character can't advance as a druid? From what I understand, it shouldn't be a problem if the character kept within the range 30-70 to maintain neutrality and so a little stray from the 50's shouldn't be a problem?

Next, if it's on just one axis, why would a druid lose powers if druids are required to be neutral on only one axis and so they're barred only from LG, CG, LE and CE alignments, the other five being open to them?

 

Indeed, to support chev, who is right in this. In the OC, there is (almost) no shift in Law/Chaos, you should always remain in a Druidic alinment. If this helps, in NWN, the allowed alignments for a Druid are the same as those that were allowed for a Bard in BG (1 and 2) and IWD.

 

Actually, turns out that quests are not the only way to shift your Good/Evil balance... I'm lawful neutral, and I really didn't want to wind up lawful good, so I had to find some ways to do some evil if it looked like I was fulfilling too many "good" quests (since they generally have better rewards than the evil quests, so far).

I discovered that in Chapter 1, you can

1) extort money from a lot of "regular citizens" to get some evil points;

2) kill innocents (the guy who burned down his own house, all those doggone doomsayers, anyone whose house you rob who is in fact home) for a few points in evil per murder (this is how I discovered that you can't change your lawful rating in the OC-- it's pretty funny to go around flatly murdering people for no reason and still be considered "lawful");

3) give diseased hookers and Milly the cleaning lady a lot of money (to their perspective) for a few points in good. There's probably another couple of "random acts of kindness" I'm forgetting, too.. oh yeah, like reporting people dead to their loved ones and returning the items you found, and refusing a monetary reward from Aribeth once or twice. That will also get you a few extra points in Good, should you happen to be too evil this month .

Interestingly, double-dealing most characters (like Meldanen, or some of the escaped convicts in chapter 2) does not seem to swing your good/evil rating either way (keeping your bargain is not "good" and breaking it is not "evil"). Anyway, when I get too far out of balance, I just go randomly murder somebody, or do something nice for somebody (much less often, as you get plenty of Good points just by doing the quests), to stay more-or-less neutral.

I'm just glad that so far I haven't noticed that killing the animals (or pixies!) in NW Woods gives you any log messages of the "Your alignment has shifted X points towards Evil" variety (though I hate to do it, since it's not the deer's fault they've become insane enough to attack me and my Reaver +1 heavy flail with cold damage)-- in fact, the nymph goes to great pains to tell you that the deaths among her slaves are her fault, not yours. I do wonder if druid PCs get in trouble for this, though, as they are presumably held to a higher standard in this area.

I'm in chapter 2 now, and so far I haven't seen any major good/evil modifiers (just one, which I don't remember what it was atm, unless it was not killing a shapeshifter but forcing him to be cured instead). Maybe in Luskan there will be more ability to modify my alignment (I'm at 37 Neutral, which is a little lower than I want, though I could live with being Lawful Evil if it came to that).

 

Sorry for resurrecting this thread but no one really answered this question. I'm currently playing a druid and just did a quest that made me shift 3 points towards good and it said "You have been stripped of your title as reconciler". What does that mean ? What is reconciler? My alignment, before I shifted 3 towards good, was 50-50.. so now it's 50-53 I guess.. can I still advance as a druid?

 

The title (reconciler in your case) doesn't really mean much, as I understand it, as long as one of your alignments is neutral (either neutral good, neutral evil, lawful neutral, chaotic neutral) you should be able to carry on advancing as a Druid. Otherwise, try & shift your alignment back towards true neutral in the way motub suggests.