KOTOR - diplomatic character

[Zewp]

Not having played KOTOR since its release, I can't remember much about it. I want to play it again now, but I'd prefer to play a more diplomatic character that talks his way out of situations instead of fighting the whole time. How feasible is such a character or should I rather just focus on getting Persuasion as high as possible while spending lots of points on other combat attributes and skills?

 

[Roguey]

You can pass all dialogue checks with a charisma of 10 (probably even 8) while regularly putting points into persuade. If you fail a check, just keep trying since in most cases you can.

Talking your way out of things is just a side-thing you can do; like all Bioware games, kotor is largely combat-based. You can also skip quite a few encounters by hacking computers and spending spikes to blow people up and such, which I thought was neat at least the first time.

 

[Catfish]

Go for Jedi Consular, since his class works best with high wisdom and charisma. That way if you can't talk your way out of a battle, you can still zap your way out of it with force lightning (with a high enough wisdom you can use dark side powers more or less effectively even with a light side char)

 

[Snufkin]

I toyed a bit with ranged chars a bit, while ago. I finished game with two gunslingers. First was sneak attacking dual pistol scoundrel/consular. Second was soldier/guardian with Baragwin Heavy Repeating Blaster (upgraded). With rapid shot and haste you will do 4x 9-48 dmg. You might think the first one was better but it is not true. Yo my surprise soldier/guardian is best gunslinger you can build. One important thing if you want to finish game as gunslinger is vs Malak to use force breach > plague > force whirlwind. My first char didnt had this and had to kill him with granades running like idiot.

 

[stray]

Don't be annoyed with Carth and don't let Wookies kill little girls.

That''s the extent of "diplomatic" I think.

 

[Morality Games]

Got to make a distinction between games made by writers and games made by programmers.

A reactive game environment as we understand it today was mostly an invention of Fallout and it was because Tim Cain created his game engine so he could program stuff the way he wanted to. The entire post-apocalyptic environment was just a pretext to program stuff cool Mad Max effects and other crazy physics stuff. As part of that he tasked some writers to create a world and narrative that would entail programming a large range of effects and world states. The more stuff that can "happen", the more buttons the player can press, the better it is.

As games have become less driven by programming and more driven by writing, highly reactive environments have gone under. Game play is some annoying detail or chore you have to go through to turn the page and see what happens next in the story.