I am a dork.

Those of you who know me only by reputation (or from my blog) may see me as this hipster cool twentysomething living it up in Sin City, bypassing the mile-long lines at the ultralounges, calling in sick so I can go to Ditch Friday at the pool at the Hard Rock and chat it up with celebrities, but really, that's just the image I try to cultivate.

Because my secret identity as a sappy D&D dork must be protected at all costs.

Thanks to my friend-in-law, Kurt, I have been playing Neverwinter Nights for about five years now.  (I have a very long attention span for games I like a lot and tend to play them over and over again.  I'd like to say I take an analytical approach, playing them differently each time to get the most out of the game, but I don't.)  This is easily the best D&D RPG game ever, although it's also the only one I've played (not counting a half-hour of WoW, in which I only barely mastered the controls).  I've beaten it a bunch of times, created dozens of different characters, and probably spent more hours of my life devoted to hacking up bad guys than I would care to admit.  When I first started playing, I had to make myself a schedule where I was limited to skipping only one class a week so I would not have to explain to the advisors in the education department why, exactly, I failed my freshman-level composition class.

Anyway, in this one expansion pack, one of the optional members of your party you can add is this fighter/weapon master tiefling, Valen, and if you are a female character and not a complete twat, he eventually harbors a massive hard-on for you. 

I am not kidding.

This is a picture of Valen about to confess his passionate and undying love for me.  We just got duped by a powerful demon and sent to Cania, one of the Seven Hells (the frozen one, I guess).  Now we are on a quest to discover this demon's True Name so we can get out of here and go get all hitched or whatever.  (He does not normally glow green, I am just holding the mouse over him.  By far the best feature of the game is that, essentially, all you have to do to beat bad guys is click on them, and the badassery of your character does the rest.  My Whirlwind Attack can take down four drow warriors at a time with just one click of the mouse--way easier than enrolling at that Kung Fu studio was going to be.)  

The grown-up part of me understands that this is all just a video game, that neither Valen nor my patently made-up character who wields two +7 katanas with energy-draining, electrical-zapping powers and can run around all day with 533 pounds of stuff (thanks to my +24 strength!) and beat up all kinds of undead dragons and such are not actually real people, but I have to say I was looking forward to this chapter of the game since I started playing it again.  Something about making a broody, angsty, ass-kicking boy go all weak-kneed and sappy is just so yummy.

And I think it's not quite as pathetic as reading romance novels?

A moral quagmire

So I've been playing Neverwinter Nights 2 since Monday, and it appears I've gotten myself into a bit of a bind. It started Friday when I picked up a neutral-good wood elf druid and my tiefling rogue didn't really care for her namby-pamby tree-hugging help-the-animals quest to the Maiden's Grove. I'd been tossing influence points between the two all through the Highcliff quests--first one would be happy with me, then the other, but never both at the same time.
So by the time we finally get to Neverwinter, I'm ready to do something really nice for the tiefling: I choose to help the crime syndicate on the docks rather than the City Watch. We've got to get into the closed Blacklake district, and the only people who can get us there are cops or criminals. Neeshka's made her opinions about the Watch pretty plainly known, and I figure she's be happy to hang out with the thieves and thugs in the docks for awhile, seeing as how she used to be a thief in Neverwinter herself. So I see this thug Caleb and he puts me in touch with the head of the criminals, who tells me I have to kill or bribe the city watchmen at the four guardposts in the docks area. No biggie. We take down the guards at the first post before I remember I can bribe them instead, which I do, and feel better about it. Then we get the chance to wipe out some thugs from Luskan, which I am more than happy to do. Then when I go back to finish my quest, she tells me I have to burn the City Watch building to the ground and kill everyone in it!
The problem is that one of the watchmen, my contact if I'd decided to join up with them instead, is this guy Cormick who comes from the same small town in the swamp as I did. Actually, he's sort of a town legend: "the boy who got out" and so forth. AND I actually met him at Fort Locke and talked to him and everything.
I actually had to quit playing the game, I felt so bad about this! I can't believe I let one of my companions decide for me what to do. I even went back to one of my saved games with the intention of re-playing all the stuff in between there and Neverwinter, then choosing to drop the tiefling in the bar and take the druid to join the Watch, but it would mean two or three days of redoing stuff. I just keep telling myself that I will probably play the whole game again because I like being all kinds of different characters, so next time I can do it right. Tyson doesn't mind having a character that goes around killing everybody, but it really bothers me.

Besides this, I am wasing dishes and doing laundry and getting ready for family to come over tomorrow. The house is a mess and we still have no heat, so we've got a lot to do. And if I start feeling any worse about this whole City Watch mess, I may just switch back to Sims 2 for awhile instead for some good wholesome much-less-morally-sticky fun.