Wow... walls o' text arguments about technical game mechanics and details. How classic D&D is that? I actually just dropped in to say, I quite love the game- except to be fair, I did so by cheating. Before even beginning, I installed mods that allowed me to bypass things like artificial time limits, and to level up at my own pace. Essentially, I leveled the playing field to compensate for an artificial and notoriously arbitrary GM who could not react to creative approaches or decisions. The one thing I cannot seem to find a way to compensate for is the bad railroading and alignment issues. The game advises you frequently to choose advisors with views that closely align with your own, then provides almost exclusively extreme alignments that swing toward either evil or extremist. I'm here primarily because I've stalled at the point in the game where Nok-nok is standing in front of me, and I'm told, I can cheerfully take him with me, leave him behind unharmed, (though I'm assured by all reviews he will join me ANYWAYS,) OR... (the logical choice,) KILL him- but it points out that the game thinks killing this ONE goblin, who has just admittedly been trafficking with an evil Goddess (called Mother of Monsters, for cripes sake,) is a chaotic evil act, even though I've just been pretty much forced to slaughter his entire village. Why on earth WOULDN'T any SANE character kill him? He doesn't offer any good justification for sparing his life, he's not contrite, he's not sorry, he's PROUD of what he's just been doing, and gives you no reason to think he's not going to keep on doing it. NOT killing him is Chaotic Stupid. No rational reasonable GM would claim that doing so under the given circumstances was an act of evil. Meanwhile, you have Jubilost, supposedly CN, who is a numbers nerd, and ridiculously orderly about everything (except the whole bombs thing, but even that he approaches in a meticulously logical fashion.) These are just a couple of examples of the nonsense railroad approach the game takes to dealing with alignments.
Another is that certain dialogues and reactions are only even visible to the player if they meet certain alignment criteria, implying that alignment is not, in the devs' view, ever a direct result or reflection of your choices and actions, but rather, a fixed state you cannot alter through choices and behaviors. Happily, the mods I use allow me to force all alignment options to be available in game, regardless of current alignment. Unfortunately, the Nok-nok thing has me completely hamstrung. It doesn't SEEM like single actions sway my alignment that much, I'm CG, and have been repeatedly forced to choose LG, NG, and LN options, because the only alternatives were blatantly evil. Much as I AM overall enjoying the game, I very much agree with those who have said, if this were my GM, I'd quit his table.
