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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1289 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 10, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Coming into it with barely any knowledge of the setting, dogmatic seemed lawful-stupid, or even pointlessly cruel. Look, I can get behind "for the Greater Good", or even "My Country Right or Wrong", but the choices were like:

  • [dogmatic] execute this poor commoner for having a reasonable complaint
  • [heretic] execute this poor commoner for the lulz, cackling maniacally
  • [iconoclast] don't execute the poor commoner

and like, it didn't do a great job of selling the appeal. I was interested in heretic initially because the evil artifact that will obviously obviously corrupt you seemed like a solid roleplay arc, but then the early heretic choices were chaotic-evil right off the bat. I was hoping they'd start off being written as neutral-evil power seeking and then by late game, you'd have frog boiled yourself into a servant of chaos.

Then, iconoclast was completely normal western liberal morality, and the game doesn't punish you for picking those options, so why not pick them?

Exception: idira - this was done well, and it's a rare thing in RPGs that the player gets the option to summarily execute a companion early on, and can reasonably decide it's the right choice.

Then, iconoclast was completely normal western liberal morality, and the game doesn't punish you for picking those options, so why not pick them?

The Void Shadows DLC takes advantage of the iconoclast naiveté very well. It absolutely punishes you for it, in very hilarious ways. The in-game lore optimal route is probably a mix of dogmatic and iconoclast. I agree that heretic is chaotic evil straight off of the bat, it would have been nicer to have different flavors of evil as well, or a slow build up. I don't think Owlcat's writing is particularly good, but I do appreciate that it doesn't morally railroad you in quite the same way as something like BG3.

I think with the DLCs increasing the number of alignment points that are available, you don't need to go hard down one path to be able to reach the end trees, allowing you to kinda set the pace in your own story a bit more.

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