Once More Unto The Breach Of Etiquette (ToB)

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Okay, opinion time here.

Wally the Male Worm (a not-so-affectionate nickname received from Viconia, but then, Wally appreciates insults) is ready to take on ToB. However, his NPC situation is that by the end of the game, Wally was only on speaking terms with five living NPCs: Minsc,
Viconia, Aerie, Imoen, and Haerdalis. (Yoshimo had betrayed him; Nalia killed herself in despair when Wally insulted her aunt; Korgan, Anomen, and Keldorn all attacked Wally; Cernd and Edwin never became available to join Wally's party due to his personality problems; and Jaheira, Mazzy, Valygar, and Jan all left him forever when he insulted them.)

So Wally has a six-person party, and it's ready to go. However, this party, by definition, contains the characters too patient, stupid, masochistic, and/or devoted to care if Wally heaps insults on them. Everyone with any sass or self-esteem has already left the party for good. Viconia is the only one left with anything even emotely resembling a spine, and since Wally screwed the romance up, she doesn't talk to him much anymore.

So my question to you, the faithful readers, is this: should I go ahead and run with the companions who survived Wally's leadership
in SoA, or should I use that ghost to summon up a bunch of the feistier characters who might get into some more good insult matches
with Wally?

Opinions quite welcome before I launch the quest...

 

Run with who you had in Suldanessalar and Hell. If anything happens to some of those, Wally can summon some of the others. Don't forget Sarevok. What will Wally think of him?

 

Wally would definitely take Sarevok, unless Sarevok objected strenuously to being mocked, that is...

...which I hope he doesn't, because right now everyone in Wally's party is made of tissue paper but Minsc, who kills all the others whenever Aerie takes too much damage...

(-:

It's just, you know, Imoen and Aerie put up with being insulted. It would probably be more fun to summon Korgan and Jaheira for Wally to fight with, know what I'm saying?

But on the other hand, he alienated them fair and square, if there's only five guys on Faerun who'll still talk to him and all five are boring, he made that bed...

 

I sorta agree with bigB.. At least start with the same five you finished with... Then just deal with it as Wally insults each one anew...

--or---

You could take the line that now that Wally has the "power" to bring them back, he could offer them the chance to "learn" from their previous mistakes vis-a-vis being insulted...I mean, hey, they each ought to have a clue that Wally is a deity/deity-related being by being brought into the extra-worldy sphere knowing what Wallly will tell them upon their arrival (and after what he has learned about himself in SOA & BG1). So, pick them one at a time as you think might help Wally to survive TOB ... Or, (chaotically) randomly roll the dice to selct which ones might be given this "second" opportunity to bask in Wally's company and be insulted...

Looking forward to seeing how YOU decide to solve this particular riddle.

[This message has been edited by Kailynne Johanne (edited October 03, 2001).]

 

Ahhh, the welcome return of Wally (although I doubt he'd be similarly cordial in my shoes, were shoes not shunned by halflings. But I digress...).

Its inevitable really, isnt it? With all the power gained in their post-Wally travels, I doubt any summoned npcs would stand for yet more lip from the diminutive demi-deity. Ahh well; the pending bodies littering the pocket plane will doubtless give Cespenar something to clear up while Wally continues his travels with the same group of poor saps who have become desensitised to Wally's verbal flagellation. Heh; I;m just intrigued to find out how Sarevok reacts to Wally. Keep up the good work!

 

i cannot be-lieeeeeeve aerie is still there in wally's party! full credit!!

 

Aerie's a doormat, man. At least she had the gumption to dump him.

Okay, we're off to the races! For those that may not have been following Wally's saga, he is a halfling barbarian with an 18 intelligence and a 3 charisma, whose mission in life was to complete BG2 despite always giving the rudest possible response to every NPC in the game. Other than his mandate of verbal cruelty, Wally is a generally decent sort who does complete quests and choose the good path whenever it doesn't involve ass-kissing.

Wally's obnoxiousness took a terrible toll in SoA. Only five of the fourteen available NPCs are still both alive and talking to him after his continuous insulting of them. (Nalia killed herself, of all things; several of the others attacked Wally and had to be killed in self-defense, and most of them either left the group forever or wouldn't join in the first place.) Wally was stymied from a good 40% of the quests in the game, because many questgivers and integral people in quests wouldn't talk to him or turned hostile at his tone, and most of the NPCs with quests wouldn't put up with him. His reputation was chronically low, not because he committed any murders, but because he couldn't complete most of the rep-raising quests and you lose points for threatening certain people. Wally also had to cheat once. When he mouthed off to Mae'Var, the invincible Arkanis attacked us. I used ctrl-Q to remove Arkanis from the picture and killed Mae'Var, failing that quest and losing some subsequent ones. By rights Wally's quest should have ended there, but by then I was too curious to see it through to the end. Finally Wally turned evil in Hell, because of telling off Sarevok. He completed all the other quests in the 'good' way (though he did go through all the 'selfish' doors but one, just to make Aerie sweat).

And now, we're starting ToB. Though the game has deemed him evil, Wally's attitude has not changed: he will still do good deeds whenever it doesn't require his being in any way polite. Wally's team consists of Minsc, Viconia, Aerie, Imoen, and Haerdalis. Frankly, this party kind of sucked. Each of the characters in it is one I've used to great effectiveness before, but all together they are so fragile that someone is constantly in need of resurrection, and if it's Aerie, Minsc goes crazy and kills a couple more of us, usually forcing a reload. However, Wally's problems were all solved by the appearance of his old nemesis Sarevok. Despite being insulted and force-fed a piece of Imoen's soul (Wally just thought this would annoy him more), Sarevok still asked to join the party. So now Aerie is cooling her heels in Hell, solving the fragility quotient and Minsc's hissy fits in one fell swoop. Wally's money is on her having given birth to Cespenar's love child by the time we get back from Saradush.

Wally did summon all his old friends, even the dead ones, just to get the chance to insult them all again and see what they do. Not a single one of them attacked or refused to join. They all seem to have lost their backbones completely. (Korgan, Jaheira, and Mazzy did insult Wally back, but this was pale compared to their previous bouts with him.) This does not bode well for Wally's final chapters being especially interesting. I have the sneaking suspicion that insulting everyone in ToB is going to be irrelevant, and Wally is going to still get all the same options and information as anybody else I've taken through. Illasera and the solar, the two map characters who've talked to Wally so far, certainly gave him the exact same lines they gave all my politer characters. Time, I suppose, will tell.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

 

Once more into the breach, my hero! I am not really surprised that no NPC refused to join up - would have screwed up the basic premise of the expansion pack, wouldn't it? Looking forward to reading this.

 

Wouldn't you think they'd refuse if you called them names and told them to shut up and get in line, though? Most of them attacked you or stomped off in a huff if you acted like that in SoA...

 

Yes, but they are in hell! what are they gonna do, they cant exactly walk out can they!

 

Darth Gnomer (the bloodthirsty solo gnome, check it out if you wish) actually got Mazzy to attack him, exactly what he wanted. He chose not only the rudest responses, but also the most evil.

 

As I suggested before, I think they may have learned that Wally shouldn't be messed with - heck they either died or were "abandoned" by this soon-to-be deity (even if they thought it was/had been their choice to walk away from Wally in SOA).

As also suggested before, I think the developers probably didn;t carry forward the variables relating to their departures forward into TOB. Simple as that.

And doesn't everyone deserve a second chance anyway? 8)

 

Wally'll drink to that! (-:

Well, it certainly is possible to make good NPCs turn on you in ToB by making evil choices in the plot. (More on this later!) But you can't make any of them attack or leave you when they are summoned to Hell, for Wally tried his damndest.

All right, then: Saradush!

Saradush was kind of boring for our hero, actually. He didn't have the option to be insulting or suspicious towards Melissan. (Wally hates supercilious women like that. How glad he was to get to fight Ellisime in the challenge room! None of my previous characters got to do that... you have to be evil-aligned, apparently.) Wally called the kid with the dead daddy a sniveling brat, but he still told Viconia to resurrect the dad. (He's a jerk, after all, not heartless.) Yelling threats at those brawling dwarves and humans made them
break up their fight and gave Wally the XP from that, too. He solved the book quest easily, and then his 18 intelligence offered him a clue for how to rescue Viekang (I'd had to figure it out myself in my first
game with a less mentally endowed character, and hadn't realized a clue was available.) Speaking of intelligence, Wally used his to inform Kiser that his grandiose vocabulary was a pathetic overcompensation for an insufficiency in the nether regions of his anatomy. This was the high point of Wally's stay in town. Then, noticing Wally's low reputation, Kiser made the mistake of admitting his guilt and trying to bribe Wally into killing off Errard and the countess. (Sarevok was quite bemused by this.) After stringing the guy along for a while, Wally broke into his basement, stole all his stuff, freed his captive, and killed him. That's what you get for trusting a guy just because he has a low reputation. There were opportunities to insult a few other people in town (Wally particularly enjoyed
telling that weird prostitute she was lousy in bed and he wanted his money back), but none of them seem to notice they're being insulted, giving you the same standard lines they give you if you pick any of the
conversational options. This takes a lot of fun out of being insulting. Wally misses SoA.

Anyway, that priestess of Waukeen didn't want to give Wally the key because his alignment was evil, so he had to blackmail her by threatening to reveal her relationship with the sleazy bar owner.
Next, Gromnir's castle. The only piece of experience Wally didn't get in the entire town of Saradush was the XP from finding a safe place for those elven refugees to hide their attractive women. Feeling bored at how
little Wally's Saradush experiences varied from my previous run-throughs, I decided to have him taunt the elves rather than the guards. This egged the guards on into attacking the elves. Well, Wally kept the guards from killing the elves by killing them all first, but the elves, understandably enough, ran away without giving him their little quest. More notably for Wally's saga, Minsc became infuriated and turned hostile, even though no actual elves were harmed in the filming of this scene. In the end the brain-damaged ranger had to be put down.

So this leaves Wally scratching his head over another quandary. Pick up Aerie again, who'd be much higher-level
than anyone the Fate Spirit summoned but is still made out of tissue paper? Or add another of the fighters to replace
Minscy--Korgan, maybe, or Mazzy? I seem to remember getting some incredibly rude conversational options when I had Mazzy in my party last.

Further bulletins as events warrant!
L

 

It's a pity that the NPCs in ToB don't seem to notice that they're being insulted.

And I did get Mazzy to attack me when I summoned her in Hell, it's just a matter of how evil you are.

 

Curious, I checked it out with Infinity Explorer, and Namuras is quite right: when you first meet Mazzy (it doesn't work on subsequent encounters,) there are two insults available; if you pick one she says she "has her doubts about you" and will watch you carefully for evil, but if you pick the other one, about her attitude, she demands an apology, and you can tell her you'd rather kill her and she'll start a fight. Go, Mazzy, go!

I think Namuras has just settled Wally's debate for him; if she's the one NPC willing to give as good as she gets, she's in. At least till Wally annoys her again. (-:

 

You, my tale writing friend, are definitely a roleplaying riot. (((Sound of sanding up and applauding followed by chanting - Wally! Wally! Wally!)))

 

Maybe he should take Eddie and the Beave.

 

Those being Edwin and, uh, Viconia, right? *winces at self for even thinking of that one* Wally's wearing off on me, all right...

I don't know that I'd call Wally's quest a pinnacle of role-playing, exactly. I was doing a lot more role-playing with my first, basically hero-oriented party--I mean, my PC was making party decisions based on how he
felt about other characters in the game, not a formula like "always choose the rudest conversational option possible." I think a lot of the other character stories on the board are good old-fashioned roleplaying that
way, much more so than Wally's is. The cool thing about Wally, I think, is that he really revealed some of the depths of the SoA game design. Most CRPG designers can anticipate someone playing as a hero or
a loathsome villain--being prepared for a total smartass, both by providing snide comments with frequency and applying suitable penalties for constantly using them--is something that really impressed me. It's neat that you can go through the game insulting friends, strangers, allies and enemies; neat that there are special dialogues you can only get this way; neatest of all that there are unexpected negative effects of being so antisocial.

I'm still having a bad feeling that ToB isn't going to be as rewarding that way. So far the only "new" bits Wally has revealed to me have been due to his evil alignment, low reputation, and extremely high intelligence, not his bad attitude. Most people have actually given exactly the same responses whether he insults them or not. Still, we won't know for sure till the fat solar sings, will we? Blindly on!

Today I didn't get too much free time, so Wally's still off in the Marching Mountains hacking slowly through fire giants. As planned, we picked up Mazzy from Hell. (Since Wally had already spoken to her once, he was unable to goad her into attacking him, but he may get other chances to match wits with her later.) On the way into Gromnir's, Wally told the escaping Bhaalspawn woman she deserved to be kept in
line by Gromnir. She didn't seem to notice, giving him the same line she gave everyone else. Gromnir had nothing to say and you weren't allowed to insult Melissan. On to the undead temple, where we met the Gorion impersonator. Since it is high WIS, not INT, that enables you to deduce it's an illusion, Wally didn't, so he just got to insult his old mentor instead. How embarrassed he was to have fallen for such a transparent trick, but at least there was an insult in there. No opportunity to insult Nyalee. On to Marching Mountains, where Wally is currently doing a lot of hacking and slashing.

Somewhere in there, Wally had the first chit-chat with Imoen about her Bhaal powers. Told her to stop whining, she just said something miffed like "Thanks a lot."

Further bulletins as events warrant.
L

 

Lol "till that fat solar sings" - I like that. Keep it up Wally.

 

Okay, so Wally is still living off his previous reputation with me (sorta like the Green Bay Packers of the 1960s).. I am still gonna pull for him. I guess it does kinda suck that they didn't extend some of that "great scripting opportunity" into TOB (if that is true as you seem to suspect/have found).

But, Duharrel's ghost will remain here, looking over my shoulder and hoping for ... well, more Wally!