Nice to meet ya!

[solitae]

Just wanted to say hello. It seems like there's a great deal of fun around here, so I thought I would join when a few interesting stories on FanFic pointed me this direction.


I have a few DAO and DA2 stories that I'm working on, but I never seem to get them quite finished. Hopefully hanging out here will inspire me to do so, and I'll work past my shyness and actually POST them.

And to give this some relevance to the topic, some thoughts

Does anyone else find it much easier to play DA2 if you've 'broken' your character early in the game?

My first playthrough was with a generally good and idealistic warrior. I swear, I spent most of Mina's game feeling sick. The downward spiral was soul-wrenching, especially since she viewed most of it as personal failure: failing to protect Bethany and forcing her to become a Grey Warden, failing to protect her mother, failing to realize what Isabela was up to and getting betrayed, failing to keep her beloved Anders sane when he was all she had left.

On my second playthrough, I created a mage who basically snapped when Bethany died. Flemeth became her hero, and she rushed headlong into chaos. The only thing she wanted was to be free and had no illusions that she was 'fighting the good fight'.

I realized I'm doing something similar with the creation of my third character, destroying all his idealism at Ostagar and leaving him with anger issues ;)

Thank you, Bioware, for devouring any goodness left in our souls! (In truth, I'm enjoying the game, but...ouch, just ouch.)

Also, I'm new to Dreamwidth, so if I've screwed anything up, please let me know!

Comments

[miri1984]

MORE SPOILERS IN MY COMMENT:







WELCOME. And no, I don't believe that is an uncommon way to play. My first Hawke was trying to be a funny girl the whole way, she was a mage and she romanced Anders and she got a tiny bit upset about things, but was mostly fine until ACT TWO RIPPED OUT HER HEART AND ATE IT. Then she was a bit grumpier. But I didn't think I RP'd her well enough, at the end when she spared Anders I actually didn't think she would have, so I felt a bit cheap and wrong for doing it.

My second Hawke I played as a goody goody rogue, intending to romance Anders, but THAT didn't work (I'm going to go back and have her romance Merrill instead!).

My third Hawke is a mage, and I'm RPing that she's a funny, slightly unhinged girl. I'm actually playing her sarcastic through ACT I and most of ACT II, and then she's going to turn violent, committed to Anders' cause more than he is almost. I have no problems about sparing him at the end, she wishes she had planted the bomb herself.

I totally agree that Bioware is bending our moral compasses here. I love it though.

[scarylady]

Welcome!

I often found this in Origins, too. My characters would get angrier and angrier until they were steamrollering over everything in their path. This is probably why most of my memories of the Deep Roads are of stomping around in a grump.

Thinking about it, I don't think I ever did the Circle or Redcliffe last. God help them if I had :D

[lenna_nightrunner]

I can't read the post or the other comments but I had to stop in and say welcome! I need some kind of DA2 spoiler blinders XD Point is, I/we am/are very glad you're here, and hope you like it! :D

[christmasinjuly]

What an interesting thought. In my DAO game, I had a rather steely elf mage who was so accustomed to the entire world shitting on her for one thing or the other that very few things caused her to flinch; Alistair helped unlock a little of the flower instead of the sword within a very cynical, practical, money-minded girl, but then he got all snippy and I accidentally broke up with him for Zevran and saved over it XD which I think was best in the end anyway.

However, my Dalish elf went mad with fury and heartbreak from the very start and stormed about the whole world leaving rage and fire in his wake. THEY KILLED HIS BOO, HIS BELOVED TAMLEN. It made it a lot easier to play him considering how unhinged he was and how little he gave a damn for the shemlen world he'd been forced into all unwilling. My mage was motivated by "but what can YOU do for ME?" and my Dalish was motivated by "but how can I fuck up YOUR world the way MINE was fucked up?"

As for my Hawke, I think irritation was my Hawke's primary motivation, not so much being broken. Everything in her path peeved her marvelously, provoking truly sublime sarcasm. If she could have washed her hands of everyone who was doing things WRONG, she would have. The increasing insanity around her shortened her temper and patience correspondingly. But she got on quite well with the Arishok, all things considered, even if she was too much of a free spirit to get on with the Qun much.

Might contain traces of spoiler.

[sleepyowlet]

Hi there! *waves*

I don't think my Hawke had a motivation. I disconnected from her progressively, and Act 3 just felt like an endless grind that was linear to boot. Would it have really killed the devs to make two possible endings? I didn't want to kill all those mages, because it just didn't make sense. And after Orsino pulled the stunt he does, I was like, lol, whatever. Too much of that game made no sense (e.g. the lemming-bandits)...

In Origins each and every one of my characters had a different motivation. My mage was a bleeding heart who was so sick of killing posessed mages, that she felt like she had to save this one innocent child at least (though she still wanted to punch Isolde).

My Tabris, Chaeli, ran through that game feeling extremely vulnerable without the tightly knit community that she grew up in. She had no idea how a person is supposed to function on their own, so she connected very strongly to Alistair and Wynne, but that bond ended tearing her apart in the end when she decided to spare Loghain, refusing to be judge, jury and executioner *again*.

And so on. They are all their own persons, and no Warden is quite like the other - it gets even more diverse when you add other people's Wardens to the picture.
Hawke is either nice!Hawke, troll!Hawke (sorry, I think that asking a Templar who is investigating a series of murders "I hear you're still in the lost and found business?" or something similar to that is trolling) or jerk!Hawke. And that is sad.

[twist_shimmy]

Hiiiii! :D

Playing a nice Hawke broke ME. Granted, some of it was the storyline resonating personally with me (losing one's entire family, not necessarily DARKSPAWN DISEASE AND ZOMBIES, but by the end I had broken down in actual tears twice.) I'm not normally one to cry, but like you mentioned, I got in my Hawke's headspace.

This time around, I am playing a sarcastic but nice Hawke, and it's a lot less painful. Well, except when I choose "I'm not ready for this kind of commitment" and she tells Anders he wasn't good enough in bed to keep. But the pain is totally different.

My canon nice DAO character died at the end because she was too emotionally exhausted to outlive Alistair. My selfish Warden went off and happily saved Amaranthine (and according to sidequest events in DA2, destroyed most of Ferelden. Holy crap. Nothing she touched was left unscathed.)