Hell trials for an evil character

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I've recently finished SoA again and so I had to go through the Hell trials with my evil character. It had me thinking how the supposedly evil path in these tests is usually not really evil but just dumb. Let's go over each:

Pride: a demon appears, telling me that a powerful creature holds the Tear of Bhaal I need, and that only I can defeat it. Asking any questions about this creature immediately reveals the demon's ruse, as he completely deflects the question and simply reiterates that I can defeat it.

The only person who'd fall for this demon's ruse would have incredible pride, indeed, but to the point of madness. Obviously, it is way easier (and thus more profitable) to ask for the tear rather than risk one's life fighting a powerful creature. Besides, who would trust a demon? It's not because I'm evil that I blindly trust other evil creatures, much the opposite in fact. Not bothering to ask any question regarding the creature shows a total lack of common sense.

The game also reflects this by rewarding the clever choice with something much more desirable (+20% to all elemental resistances), than the "dumb" "evil path" (200K xp).

So in this case, there is not really a good and evil path; there's a sensible and a mad path.

Fear: I really don't get this one. You're supposed to accept to wear a shady cloak handed to you by a demon, on that demon's claim that it will shield you from fear. What? I've had Remove Fear since BG1! What do I need this for? Once again, simply questioning the demon quickly reveals you could probably do without.

Remove Fear aside, one could at least try and see what the challenge is about before accepting the demon's offer, and it turns out it's just a couple of Beholders. So here, again, only a totally pathological case of fear would give in to the demon's offer; any semi-rational being would act otherwise. Again, the rewards are unequal: immunity to +1 weapons is much better than +2 CON.

Selfishness: this is the only one that makes sense. It had me thinking a lot about my course of action. Being evil, to me, is selfishness, and I would never hesitate to sacrifice anyone for my own advancement.

The way I solved this was to consider my companions as vital tools to my advancement, especially given my precarious situation (in Hell). I cannot afford to lose any of my allies now. While the natural choice for an evil character is indeed the sacrifice of a companion, he still has to weigh it against his own chances of survival in this situation. Reasoning in this way I decided to go for the sacrifice of my own abilities.

I wouldn't say I'd always do this. The fact that Korgan was selected weighed heavily in the balance; had it been, say, Jaheira or Jan, I might have sacrificed them. Korgan was too useful to lose.

Also, in this case, the rewards are fairly equal: +10%MR vs +2AC. So, a well-designed trial (the only one).

Greed: debatable. The sword is decent but not great. Most characters will not need it whatsoever, so giving it away will seem the more sensible choice even to many greedy PCs (vs fighting the creature which is always a risk). To those who desire the sword, unfortunately BG2 slaps them in the face with a meager +15HP rather than the +2 to all saves you get for giving the sword away.

I feel like this test is unfair. Keeping the sword might be the sensible thing to do, depending on whether you need it or not. For most characters (me included) this will not be an issue, but for some maybe.

Anyway, I'm sort of undecided on this one, but I don't like it.

Wrath: similar to Pride. To not realize that this is a ruse, one must have insane bloodlust. Any being still capable of rational thought should understand that this isn't really Sarevok, and that he's just attempting to goad you into attacking him.

This time the rewards are similar (+1WIS/CHA vs +2STR) though.

So, to conclude (wow I didn't think this post would end up this long-winded), the "evil" paths of the hell trials are not so much "evil" as "mad" generally, except in the case of Selfishness (and perhaps Greed). The fact that choosing the "good" path leads to greater personal rewards shows that these trials don't really test good vs evil in a moral sense, but more simply, the ability to see through demons' schemes and think outside the box.

Ok I'm done. Thoughts?

 

Nice analysis, here my thoughts:

About Pride: If you choose the evil path you also get the valuable treasure the dragon owns including arrows of dispelling and a time stop scroll.
If you play a party of 5-6 including ToB and don't waste your time grinding up to the XP cap the 200,000 XP are more than half a level a which means extra hitpoints and a HLA.


About Fear: This test could also be named pride with good and evil swapped. Do you accept a gift to help you (no harm done to anyone by accepting it) or are you too proud for it ?


Selfishness is in fact the only test which makes sense. Since you also loose 2 hitpoints, 75,000 XP and 1 dexterity if you take the good path and 2 AC are at least as valuable as 10 MR you really sacrifice something as good character.


About Greed: The evil reward (+15 hitpoints) is far more valuable than the good one (+2 to all saves) considering how good the saves of high level characters are and you even get bonuses from equipment and spells. It doesn't matter whether you have to roll better than -4 or -6 to make your save if you roll 1-20.


About Wrath: Can be renamed courage with good and evil swapped. Do you dare to face your inner demons or do you try to avoid confrontation ?
The evil reward is far better. You also get +1 STR when you start the battle and +2 STR on top of equipment does make a difference while WIS and CHA are useless.

My conclusion: The whole hell chapter is nonsense made to fake roleplaying depth for better marketing.

 

kmonster already stated a lot of what I was going point out, but whatever:

I think the only way you can really know which way you should go would be to do each trial both ways, and meta-game based on the results. That said, I agree that it doesn't take much in terms of mental capacity to see that the demons are (mostly) trying to trick you, especially in terms of Pride and Fear. As for the rewards:

The good reward of Pride is a tough one to pass up. No matter what your equipment selections, it's impossible to get most of your characters anywhere near maxed out on elemental resistances, but the evil reward is not to be sneezed at. IIRC, in addition to the 200K XP reward, you get the XPs for killing the dragon, and you get a few high level spell scrolls that could be scribed into spell books for even more XPs (although they would be party XPs, so not as much for your PC unless you're soloing). The items aren't bad either - arrows of dispelling are useful, and difficult to acquire through other means, a Robe of the Evil Archmagi (potentially useful playing an evil party) and you also get a +2 RoP, and those definitely don't grow on trees.

(Full disclosure: I do have part of Ease of Use installed in BG2, and one of the components I accepted was the ability to wear a ring/cloak/amulet of protection in conjunction with magical armor, so I do covet +2 RoPs more than people without this mod. Since I play typically with full parties - or at least 5 anyway - and there aren't 6 +2 somethings of protection in the game, getting an extra one is valuable to me.)

For the Fear test rewards, as I've said before, I think it depends on what that +2 CON is going to do for you. If you aren't playing a fighter, and you already have a 16 in CON, then the reward is worthless to you, so obviously anything is going to be better. OTOH, if you imported a character from BG1, you might already have a 19 CON - 20 if you played a dwarf - and that +2 CON is therefore worth enhanced regeneration abilities, which is not worthless. Furthermore, it's not like the immunity to +1 weapons in ToB is all that anyway. Most of the encounters in ToB are against enemies that have weapons better than +1. Hell even many of the routine encounters have enemies with +3 weapons, so it can be argued that the good reward is also of marginal benefit.

For selfishness, I think the rewards themselves are unequal - 10% MR to me is more valuable than a 2 AC boost, because it seems like a lot of enemies in ToB have such low THAC0s that you can be walking around with -15 AC and still get hit regularly. If you happen to be playing a mage and don't have a super low AC to begin with, that 2 AC is next to worthless. That said, if you take the good path, you have to factor in that to get that 10% MR, you're losing XPs, hitpoints, and a dexterity point (which may cost you 1 AC).

With Greed, I completely agree that I'd rather have 15 more hps than a bonus of 2 to my saving throws. Like kmonster, my saves at that point in the game are typically low already - sometimes even negative values, although I don't think I've ever had them at -6 like kmonster - so there's no benefit at all in going with the good path in that situation, and makes the value/usefulness of the sword immaterial as well.

For the Wrath rewards, I think that depends on what class you decided to play, in conjunction with your current stats. If you are playing a fighter (single, dual, or multi) with a 19 in strength already, that boost to strength is very useful. If you have a 21 in strength, it frees you from having to make equipment choices that include a strength enhancing item. However, if you don't already have a high strength score, the boost isn't going to do much beyond raising you carrying capacity. The boost to wisdom and charisma would benefit a much smaller group of characters. I suppose a boost to charisma would yield a marginal increase in reactions by NPCs, and clerics and druids would get a couple of more spells from the wisdom increase. If your PC is also the main identifier in your group, upping your wisdom would give a small boost to your lore. However, I think a sizable chunk of PCs will fall into none of the categories I outlined, in which case neither reward offers any significant benefit.

 

I always kill the dragon.
But I don't fall to the demon's ruse. It's fun because the game considers me good for doing so, so I have the fun of killing a dragon and the better bonus.

He offers you a magical cloak and you don't take it? You must be a fool (*). It doesn't matter that you don't need it, it's always better to have too much and not need it than to miss it later.
Knowing rewards changes the calculation though.

I totally disagree with you here. Fighting is fun, giving stuff away is not. And I'm with kmonster saying that +2 to saving throws is useless.

Ad (*): It's not personal, it's just what my average PC at this points would say about sb. taking a good choice w/out knowing rewards other than the cloak.

 

Hmmm.... Tricksy, tricksy! Never thought of that... Best of both worlds!

 

In ToB charisma is useless and high level priests don't really benefit from level 4 spell number 11 they get from the wis bonus.
The +2 strength reward on the other hand stacks with equipment, so if you have your 8 STR mage wear a girdle of hill giant strength he'll have 19+2=21 STR. Almost every protagonist without high natural strength will wear one of the many items which set strength to a high value, only a character permanently using Crom Faeyr won't benefit from the strength boost.

 

Well, you could well be raising your wisdom from 21 to 22 with that quest, which has to be worth more than a 4th, right?

I didn't know that the strength bonus stacked with items. I assumed that when an item says, "sets strength to 19" (or whatever) that it sets it 19. Not 19 in addition to whatever bonus you might have. In fact, if it works that way, it doesn't really makes sense at all. I would think that +2 strength would affect your base ability score, not add to whatever item you had equipped at the time you completed the quest.

What happens if you later remove the item, and then put it back on? It's almost inconceivable that it would alter the property of the item you had equipped.

 

It's a bug, but it works this way. There are fixes for this though.

No, it doesn't change properties of a weapon. It's just that it's added after all other effects, including ones that set your STR to a particular value.

 

Wow, nice to see different opinions! Looks like I was wrong on some counts.

But sometimes you save with penalties. If you have Greater Malison on your party (-4) and someone casts Chaos (save at -2), suddenly -4 vs -6 saves makes a real difference.

I don't see how hitpoints are that valuable when basically everything hits you for way more than 15hp in ToB. If you're taking damage in ToB you're dying very quickly regardless, it's more about avoiding damage than being able to tank more.

I see it this way: against a 10D10 fireball, would you rather cut the damage in half (save) or have a few more hitpoints? The saves seem way more valuable.

I must say that when you put it this way, the WIS isn't that desirable even for a cleric. That said, I plan on always wielding Crow Faeyr, so to me the STR bonus was pointless, but I agree that for most characters this will not be the case.

 

First, how often does it happen?
Second, even if it does happen, you still have usually like 80-95% to save, so improving this to 90-100% isn't much.
I certainly prefer a solid 15 HP to a 0.5% chance to save 5D10.

 

You're writing about hypothetical situations which don't occur that late in the game. +2 to the saves of a low level character would reduce the average damage taken by a 10d10 fireball by 2.75 hitpoints but for high level ToB characters it wouldn't matter at all, with equipment and protection spells they'd have save versus spells at negative values.
Try finding concrete situations in ToB where the bonus would improve your chance to save by 5-10 percent, I don't know if there's even one.


15 extra hitpoints (which are as much as the difference between 7 and 15-16 con) on the other hand can make a difference in many ToB battles, especially the hardest ones. Most battles are lost because you run out of hitpoints, being able to survive another blow will grant your character and the rest of the party the time to add in extra moves for killing the enemies.

 

Exactly. You don't lose until your PC runs out of hitpoints. Having more hitpoints means you have a greater chance of survival. This is especially true for character classes that don't have a lot of hitpoints. Say you're playing someting like a M/T multi or dual class. In such a scenario, 15 additional hitpoints is a significant percentage of your total. Say at the end of SoA that a typical mage has somewhere around 75 hitpoints. (I'll assume that you have a fairly high CON score - if you don't, it won't be anywhere near this, but let's take best case scenario.) Getting another 15 to take you to 90 represents a 20% increase in hitpoints. Or, to put it another way, it would take you 15 more levels - more than you are likely to earn in the entirety of ToB to get that many hitpoints.

One thing that I'm unsure of on saving throws is whether or not a roll of 1 is an automatic failed saved - kind of like a critical miss. I guess I'm asking if you have a saving throw of 1 or less, are you guaranteed to make the save, or will you still fail 5% of the time?