How do you play evil in Baldur's Gate 2?

[Zeckul]

It's a well-known fact that Baldur's Gate 2 heavily favors good actions over evil ones; evil alternatives to quests, when they exist, often mean tons of lost experience if not good items. For instance, in the Copper Coronet, if you kill Hendak for Lethinan, the Beastmaster won't appear afterwards, robbing you of the Tuigan Bow (3 shots per round), plus you lose the chance the complete the Slavers quest, about 36K XP per character, although you can still go there kill everyone if you're so inclined.

 

So how do you play evil in Baldur's Gate 2? Do you take the evil alternatives even when they're clearly inferior? How do you handle romances? What arbitrary acts of evil (murdering, thieving etc) do you commit while staying in the bounds of acceptable reputation? What does it mean to be evil to you and how do you rationalize your actions?

 

I'm curious to get everyone's opinions as I'm in the early stages of an evil LP of BG2, and I usually play this game with good characters.

 

By the way, I asked the same question at the BG:EE forums, but I also wanted to get input from this community.

Edited October 15, 2012 by Zeckul

[greylord]

Export/Import/Export/Import...suddenly I OWN the game in my XP Level...at least until towards the end

[Majek]

There's enough XP to be gained in BG2 to play anyway you want. Why would you have to rationalize anything? And evil romance is easy, Viconia doesn't complain at all.

[Humanoid]

I remember there was an exploit where you could confront the skinner guy over and over for infinite XP. Horribly inefficient of course since it was probably something like 1k XP per dialogue.

[HoonDing]

I like to cast Gate in the middle of Waukeen's promenade.

[Gorth]

Poisoning the druid grove was fun

 

I never did the xp math, just played it for the sake of variety, siding with Bodhi, leading Anomen down the path of damnation etc.

[ion.sh]

I never persistently tried for an evil character, for some reason it never really appealed to me.

 

Random massacre due to miscasting dangerous spells, on the other hand....

 

My BG2 character was probably the most bipolar one ever.

[AGX-17]

RPing isn't about reward economy, it's about doing what the character would. If you know ahead of time that the vile path you're making your character take will result in an invincible goddess of judgement appearing at the end to send you to 100 hells of eternal torment, RPing is staying on that path of evil, because that's who the character is.

[Orchomene]

The evil path is mostly meant to be played with a five member party instead of a six : PC, Edwin, Korgan, Viconia, Yoshimo/Imoen (if yoour PC is not a thief). Then in ToB you can add Sarevok.

[Superbeast]

Do what I do. Play the game as a good guy until right before you fight irenicus. Then go to every city and kill EVERYBODY. Careful though. Amnish soldiers will spawn endlessly until the game crashes. Then in throne of bhaal, do the same. Be a good guy, then at the last minute kill everyone. As i say " Bhaal thinks he's the lord of murder? Screw Bhaal, I'm the lord of murder."

[Bartimaeus]

There's a component in the mod aTweaks called "Unbiased Rewards" that levels the playing field somewhat for a few particular quests for evil paths. I've always felt the game was too lenient in giving out huge XP rewards - if you do the majority of the game's content - so I currently play with a to-75% creature and quest XP reduction in a very vanilla mod install.

Edited November 28, 2014 by Bartimaeus