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What if it were not taken as a given that our protagonist was master of all he surveys, what if he had to work to persuade the party to follow his course, and pursue his personal objectives. Currently doing a playthrough of Origins, and the character of Alistair has gotten me wondering what would happen if the man had possessed a functioning spinal column, if he had taken control of the party and decided its actions and strategy after the battle of Ostagar. Say for instance he had chosen which quests to pursue and we had merely a chance at persuading him otherwise within dialogue and asking additional questions, so that originally it seems we are more a junior partner in his struggle against the blight. If we kept persuading him to follow our path or challenging his decisions eventually we'd have to resolve our roles within the party, through persuasion, threats, violence or even blackmail we might try to seize control. Obviously other party members would have something to say on these matters, and an unpopular player character might be challenged by all and sundry if he tries to seize control without the proper legwork. Then again the opposite might be true, and a protagonist who has pleased all the companions and advised the party leader well might be approached to lead the party as everybody sees the benefit of his leadership. Would this be feasible I wonder, would it create too much of a dissonance when we are controllling the party but our character is not the primary decision maker. Would it take away too much of our sense of agency, when we are not driving the plot but rather steering from the sidelines. We could still be fairly free in the short term, free to wander where we choose within areas, begin converstaions with who we please and conduct business with merchants and craftsmen, but in the long term we'd be bound to follow the party leaders mandate and path. Or perhaps work against it, so as to harm his reputation? I'm not sure what to think of my own idea honestly as I can think of as many bad points as good, and it might be a nightmare to implement.

Do you want to romance one or two of your companions? I do because the romanceable characters become more deep and intresting persons. It also helps me made my role-play in game diffrent and intresting every time. Developers please give us opportunity.

I only plan on playing through the game once as one race and class combination, so I want you, Obsidian, to focus all your time and money on making that race/class combination the best gaming experience you possibly can. Please remove all other classes and races, since I don't plan to use them. I don't care which you include. Maybe you should have a poll and only include the most popular race and class. Also, I don't like doing sidequests, so none of those, please, and no extra regions. I find a world-map that's too large to be confusing. Please make the main quest the best you absolutely can. Maybe you can release sidequests for those who want them as DLC later. There should be exactly 5 characters that will (not may) join your party. I want every moment of gameplay specifically crafted for my exact party, with each character chiming in with the perfect dialog at exactly the right time. Obviously, once you start multiplying party makeups, there's no way you can make so many different cohesive narratives on such a small budget. Please, please, please no multiplayer. I'll never use it. I would prefer that you focus on making the game the best that it can be when experienced by exactly one person. You basically have to make the whole game over again for each additional player you allow. I don't know what other features you're planning to add, but I would really prefer that you focus on crafting the best versions of the features I am going to use and leave the others out. Oh, I almost forgot. I am a male that is almost overflowing with testosterone and manliness. If I am not looking at a humanoid female's sexy body I have to immediately leave the computer and go do adult-things with my girlfriend. I will not be able to spend the 15 hours I expect the main quest to take looking at a tiny digital man-butt. For this reason I expect to play as a female. Please remove all other sexes. Her name will be Alwethia. Now you won't have to waste your tiny budget programming a field to enter the PC's name. Thanks. EDIT: I plan to have my character look like the babe in my avatar picture. I don't know what she's from, but if it's not a copyright issue, please use that image for the PC. Otherwise, something as close as possible.

Well, I saw the kickstarter update, and I figured, lets start a discussion on character and companion archetypes! So which archetypes interest you the most? We've probably seen a few of these in past games, and maybe we'd like to see some of them return in some spirit or another! If you have one in mind and it's not in the list, post it here and add it to the discussion!

Given that souls play a major role in this game, your dead companions could come back in some kind of soul-bound way to an object, animal, spirit, undead, or even mind. I want my goblin-like herb-mixer remain in a talking voodo skull for example. Or your healer comes back as a ghost, the thief accompanies you as your shadow, the figther's soul in a weapon, the druid in an owl, the monk as a ghoul and so forth. In what form would you like to see a companion return to the world of the living?

Like many people, I'm a bit concerned about the small pool of potential companions, and the implications that this has for player choice & party size. After some thinking, though, I realized that there may be a still be a way to achive a high level of player choise and a large party size (6) with the small pool of potential companions: Provide all (or most) of the companions with corrupted / redemption / similar plot-lines, and allow these quests to be triggered and completed early in the game (first third of the game). Such quest lines are common in other games, of course, but inevitable either resolve very late in the game or have pratically no impact on the character's actual personality (expressed in dialog). This is due to the branching problem -- if a character's alignment / worldview changes dramatically in the course of the game (and you don't ignore it), then you effectively end up with "1 and half companions" -- same graphics / character, but all the dialog that occurs after the redemption / corruption plot resolves has to be written twice (once for the "good" version, and once for the "evil" version). But given the small number of potential companions such a model might work in this case, and doing so effectively doubles the number of companions available. it also provides lots of opportunity for the player to develop HIS character along the way. Just a thought... Note: I use "corruption / redemption" above, as that's typically how such character changes are described. However, changing a character's class (at the prompting of the PC) might well be modeled in a similar way -- for example, consider a character who starts out hating mages, but the player convinces him that the best way to defeat mages is to become a mage him/herself (fight fire with fire, basically), or convincing a straight "tank" type character that stealth is a much more effective way to achive his/her goals.