Yonjuro

The penalty from boarding is really minor. You take a small amount of damage that you need to repair - the cost of repair supplies will have (approximately) no consequences.

It's better to have the discussion. Shutting it down makes it look like you don't have an argument and this one wasn't even difficult. I don't know if the OP is a troll or a misogynist or none of the above but we can let the arguments stand or fall based on the facts. I agree with you that ignoring this type of conversation lets it fester and just creates more hatred/frustration. That being said, the OP has little to no argument, so I don't see the point in engaging it with any semblance of dialogue. You don't negotiate with cancer, you treat it. Hating half the population because of its gender is a cancer. The OP answered my question and I responded to the answer. Anyone reading this thread can see the discussion and judge the merits of both arguments. If you believe that the OP has little to no argument, then you should want him to expose his weak argument to everyone. If you are going to label someone else's opinion as cancer and declare it off limits, it will sound, to a lot of people, like you think that opinion is too dangerous, i.e., that it is so solid that you don't have an argument against it. That is both a terrible strategy (for reasons I can elaborate on, if you wish) and an invitation to others to shut down your opinion when they have the power to do so.

And your steward is now just a nose and part of one cheek; how the hell did she even negotiate that deal?

It's better to have the discussion. Shutting it down makes it look like you don't have an argument and this one wasn't even difficult. I don't know if the OP is a troll or a misogynist or none of the above but we can let the arguments stand or fall based on the facts.

Seems like someone was triggered. Cry elsewhere. What are you talking about? Are you under the impression that word meanings are derived from something other than usage? If so, you (like the poster who initially attempted to redefine a word for all of us) don't understand how language works. If you have still missed the point, feel free to ask a clarifying question. Since you used the word 'triggered' in exactly the same way I did, I'm going to assume that you just misunderstood the thread.

Not if the choice isn't available. If you're playing a pure good (or evil) character and the game devs have decided to remove pure good or evil choices for the sake of "thinking" or reflecting "real world choices," then you've just been screwed over. The choice you made to play that character is no longer a vaild one in that game. Either you have to change your concept or quit. I'm on the side of more choices for roleplaying in roleplaying games, not less. Fair enough. What I mean to say is that you make the (difficult) choice that is as close as you can get to the preferences of the character you are playing. Again, I didn't explain my point well. I meant it effectively isn't a choice because in a good playthrough you wouldn't consider doing anything else. As PatrioticChief pointed out, any other choice would be suboptimal in that case - that is what meant to say when I said that it wasn't a choice. There is certainly an argument to be made that choices in the real world are hard enough and that in game choices should be easy. That would be games as escapism. There is nothing wrong with that but it clearly isn't what Obsidian was going for. Not everyone will like it. I like it because these are difficult choices that we can all agonize over and argue about in the forums. YMMV

Umm, "nobody is perfect so all of them must die" is pretty close to pure evil. That exact attitude is what has motivated many real world atrocities; someone has looked at the world as it is, found it wanting, and self-appointed as judge, jury and executioner - always with the purest of intentions.

And the only correct solution of this problem can and must come from inside of the Huana nation itself, regardless of how long it takes. Nobody can -- and should -- "fix" it for them, because it would only make things worse. RDC's, Vailia's, Principi's hearts do not bleed for the Roparu -- the Roparu is just an excuse for imperialistic greed; the three powers do not give a sh†t about them, as they're not there to fix the social injustice; they're just here for that sweet, sweet Adra/ land/ looting and pillaging. Why do you think outside influence will necessarily make things worse? In the real world, modern economies, scientific rationalism, rule of law and free(-ish) trade have had a net positive effect on poverty, disease, human rights and life in general even when they have been motivated by less than altruistic reasons. Why would the Deadfire be different? What would prompt the Huana fix their toxic culture unless they saw another culture working better (ie outside influence)?

I don't understand why so many people think this is a bad thing. Isn't this a roleplaying game? Aren't we supposed to be making choices that match our character sheets? Why take the ability to make that choice away? Yes, but the roles aren't pure saint and pure psychopath and the factions aren't either. Real world choices are nuanced and and most of us aren't saints or psychopaths; the game is trying to reflect that. You still make the choice that you find consistent with the character you are playing. Having a pure good outcome and pure evil outcome isn't a choice; if you're playing good you pick good and if you're playing evil you pick evil (or you can mix things up and play a character who will fall to evil/redeem yourself) - not much thinking involved. That isn't necessarily a bad thing but the angst people have been posting about this indicates that they really are taking the decisions seriously and thinking about them.

You are free to dislike the game, but Obsidian is not responsible for whatever craziness exists in the world, both real and imagined. They are certainly not responsible for how you imagine a hypothetical group of people would have reacted had the game been different. To your specific criticism, in this world there are 5 male deities, 4 female deities, 1 deity with no identifiable gender and 1 twinned deity with a male aspect and female aspect. This mirrors many real world religions but you are, of course, free to be offended by any of it. What do you think is the is the problem with the above setup and how would you fix it? Most gods that you see and talk to in the game are female and berath almost exclusively uses Pallid knight form, ugliest or most hideous god is male, You mentioned Skaen earlier. You also meet Abydon, Galawain, Rymrgand and, of course, Eothas. In addition, Ondra would give Skaen a run for for his money in the ugliest god competition. You are seeing what you expect to see not what is there. The head of Port Maje is male, the jailor is female. The heads of two of the four factions are male and have a female second in command, the other two heads are female with a male second in command. Some ship captains are male and some are female. Etc. Male characters are unlikable? Eder, Serafen? YMMV but I don't find them unlikable. Aloth is grumpy but so is Pallegina. Again, I think you made up your mind before you saw the data and have not noticed the aspects that contradict what you expected to see (an all too common tendency these days). The objective truth is there are likable and unlikable characters of both genders and powerful and weak characters of both genders. If you go through the game and count them, you can verify this for yourself (though reasonable people can disagree on what they find likeable). I don't know if it has influenced them. I also don't know if fear from backlash by anti-sjws has influenced them. They should really ignore all of the noise and write what they want to write.

At any point in the game you can ask what you should do next - it would prevent a confused player from getting lost (of course, since the option is grayed out, the confused player may never ask), but, yes, it isn't a well fleshed out stone statue, err, so to speak.

Yes, but the Huana have a permanent underclass who are required to give everything they produce to their leaders and are lucky if they get any crumbs leftover and are treated badly in other ways. The Roparu seem to do better under the Rauatai than under their own rulers so it isn't a clear moral good to side with the Huana. It's a little bit like Alexander the Great. Part of the reason he was able to hold on to so much territory is that he often was an improvement over the previous regime who tended to chop off body parts etc. As to the point of the OP, I think that issue is the good part. If you take the story seriously, you have a difficult choice to make. If there was a clear obvious good choice and a clear obvious bad choice you would just take whichever one matches your character sheet.

You are free to dislike the game, but Obsidian is not responsible for whatever craziness exists in the world, both real and imagined. They are certainly not responsible for how you imagine a hypothetical group of people would have reacted had the game been different. To your specific criticism, in this world there are 5 male deities, 4 female deities, 1 deity with no identifiable gender and 1 twinned deity with a male aspect and female aspect. This mirrors many real world religions but you are, of course, free to be offended by any of it. What do you think is the is the problem with the above setup and how would you fix it?

That sentence is a good summary of what I think too. I really like the game but would like to hear more from the companions - they seemed to run out of things to say very early.

All things considered, it's probably for the best that it's undroppable, if you catch my drift.

Ok, so Obsidian employees with blue orlan fantasies confirmed. Thanks for the explanation Dimitri, there was a lot of curiosity for whatever reason. (Obsidian fans with blue orlan fantasies confirmed.)

Ah, I mistook the Nuremberg thing then . Sorry for that, since the moral side of "following orders" is definitely at play here, lawful or not. I definitely agree that Maia's assignment is less gray than the bounties, especially since no-one was supposed to know it even happened and the target's a civilian. But i think Maia handled it well: while she did carry out the assignment, she's not going to hide the fact that it shook her and she doesn't agree with using those methods at all. One key element is also her mentioning how the next leader takes up the last one's cause: Her worry isn't simply that she killed an innocent, it's that she killed an innocent without a good reason. Whether there's ever a good reason to kill an innocent is up for debate, of course, and it's never going to be the moral thing to do, but it's something I liked about her reasoning. P.S. I have to say, I'm kind of surprised by how civilized these discussions are over here. Most fora I know would've stoked up a flame war already. I agree with your assessment of Maia and also of this board. There are good discussions and fewer flame wars. I suspect that a wide age range and that the content of Obsidian's games attracting people who like to talk about them may be some of the reasons for that.

Yeah, but that menagerie was pretty sweet. Or, to like her as a character because she at least has second thoughts about an order that she followed but didn't agree with. And, the Huana have a permanent slave class as part of their culture - do we want them to have strong leaders to carry that forward? It is the gray areas that make this an interesting discussion. I'm not sure that I'd call the Roparu a "slave class". Nobody *owns* a Roparu; you can't buy them, sell them, trade them, etc. And the Roparu appear to have rights; nobody forces them out of bed with whips and clubs and beats them if they don't show up for work. They're treated very badly, but they're more like Untouchables than slaves. True. They also give everything they produce to the upper classes who divide things up with the two upper classes taking the majority - so I guess they are worse off than untouchables but not fully slaves.

I wasn't able able to start the download from their Galaxy app, but I could download the installer from gog.com from a web browser.

Yeah, but that menagerie was pretty sweet. Or, to like her as a character because she at least has second thoughts about an order that she followed but didn't agree with. And, the Huana have a permanent slave class as part of their culture - do we want them to have strong leaders to carry that forward? It is the gray areas that make this an interesting discussion.

Maia's mission was an assassination of an effective leader who was politically inconvenient. He was innocent of any wrongdoing. That isn't exactly the same as killing someone for criminal behavior. You can certainly argue that killing is not the right penalty for a criminal, but one of those seems worse than the other. No? If we start talking viewpoints, how about this one: Maia's simply carrying out her orders to build a better Rauatai, while the bounty hunter chooses to murder people so long as he gets paid for it. "I was just following orders" didn't work as a defense at Nuremberg. Should it have? There are, of course, multiple ways to look at every situation. Not all of them are equivalent and you have to make choices about how to act in the world. You stated several viewpoints in your post. Do you have an opinion about any of them? Personally, I'd say that Maia was a soldier carrying out orders, exemplified by the fact that she carried out her orders without a problem, despite her doubt concerning the target and belief that assassinations shouldn't be the way her country deals with potential problems. I'd also say that a nazi comparison is as tasteless here as anywhere else. She performed a single assignment to secretly eliminate, in her view, a potential enemy leader, and it shakes her enough to turn to the watcher with her doubts about a mission that was clearly supposed to be off the record. Equating that with the Nuremberg trials, involving several years continuously exterminating millions for which no good reason could ever be given, is just bad taste, though it is an excellent example of Godwin's law . No no. It's only Godwin's Law if I direct it at you as an epithet - which, for the record, I am absolutely not doing. (Everybody: Yonjuro doesn't think that Taevyr is one of those guys.) It is the case, in the modern world, that carrying out an order you know to be illegal doesn't absolve you from the crime - that was my point. Your point about not judging an premodern culture by modern rules is a good one (and something that lot of people forget when they look at history). Anyway, in Eora, they probably haven't made that law about following illegal orders (and maybe assassination is just fine and dandy in this culture), but the moral issue is similar and it was the morality of the choice that we were discussing. Maia's assignment seems to be a lot less of a gray area than the bounties and, Maia, as a character, seems to know that (meaning that she knows that she has done something wrong, not she has an opinion about the bounties).

If you go with Hylea,

That doesn't make her a bad person.

Not even. It's a zeroth world problem.

I was really making a general comment about recreational offense taking that seems to be all the rage these days, not really aimed at the poster in question.