I always think of the Arl of Redcliffe quest in DA:O. The "easy-out" option where you go to the Circle Tower to avoid any sacrifice.
Right now, it's the "no-cost" option, the "safe" option - what, in Mass Effect, would more likely than not be treated as an upper-left-blue "get out of jail free" card. However, we're told the round-trip from Redcliffe to the Circle Tower takes over a week. By the time the Warden got back, I wouldn't think it inappropriate to find Redcliffe Village once again came under attack from the demon's waves of undead, thanks to the Warden's compulsive need to save everyone overriding expediency in a time-sensitive situation.
Think about it. Factor in metagaming. On a second playthrough, you'd know ahead of time that the effort would be doomed to fail. Would you do it anyway, on principle, even knowing the universe won't twist itself out of shape to reward you for it? What does that say about your PC?
Robert Heinlein once delivered a graduation speech at Annapolis which seems relevant.
EDIT: Dead link, included the speech below. I'd be curious who agrees with the sentiment, why, or why not. What matters more, success, or the effort made trying?
"I said that 'Patriotism' is a way of saying 'Women and children first.' And that no one can force a man to feel this way. Instead he must embrace it freely. I want to tell about one such man. He wore no uniform and no one knows his name, or where he came from; all we know is what he did.
In my home town sixty years ago when I was a child, my mother and father used to take me and my brothers and sisters out to Swope Park on Sunday afternoons. It was a wonderful place for kids, with picnic grounds and lakes and a zoo. But a railroad line cut straight through it.
One Sunday afternoon a young married couple were crossing these tracks. She apparently did not watch her step, for she managed to catch her foot in the frog of a switch to a siding and could not pull it free. Her husband stopped to help her.
But try as they might they could not get her foot loose. While they were working at it, a tramp showed up, walking the ties. He joined the husband in trying to pull the young woman's foot loose. No luck —
Out of sight around the curve a train whistled. Perhaps there would have been time to run and flag it down, perhaps not. In any case both men went right ahead trying to pull her free... and the train hit them.
The wife was killed, the husband was mortally injured and died later, the tramp was killed — and testimony showed that neither man made the slightest effort to save himself.
The husband's behavior was heroic... but what we expect of a husband toward his wife: his right, and his proud privilege, to die for his woman. But what of this nameless stranger? Up to the very last second he could have jumped clear. He did not. He was still trying to save this woman he had never seen before in his life, right up to the very instant the train killed him. And that's all we'll ever know about him.
This is how a man dies.
This is how a man... lives!"
When you make a decision knowing you'll be validated for doing so before you even get to it - knowing that your efforts will succeed
because it's the "paragon" option - I personally think it cheapens the story and makes it too predictable. We shouldn't be able to consistently click the same spot on a dialogue wheel knowing it will make everything work out for the best no matter what.
Modifié par DeinonSlayer, 19 septembre 2013 - 11:35 .
Retour en haut
