Divine Divinity: About Attitude

Myrthos, 2002-09-11

Attitude
The attitude of an NPC towards your character varies per NPC and will change depending on the actions your character takes. The range of attitudes is from -100 (I hate everything about you) up to +100 (you are my best friend).
A positive attitude towards you will get you better prices when selling items and will lower the prices when you want to buy something. A negative attitude will result in the opposite. When the attitude decreases beyond a certain point, NPCs will refuse to talk to you any further. Any further reduction might result in them calling the guards or even start attacking you.

Otho
So NPC's will change their attitude towards you, but two NPC's will not do that in the same way. Some NPC's have a very low tolerance and will decrease their attitude towards you faster than others. As an example take Otho, the dwarf we all learned to love so much in the demo ;-).

When we start out, his attitude is 0 (neutral). When we want to buy some minor healing potion from him the price is 100. Now we are going to make him upset by fooling around with his skeleton. As a result his attitude decreases to -10. When we then check the price of the potion again, it has increased to 110.

I'm just being neutral here	The price is 100	The price is going up

When we now steal something from him, his attitude decreases to -34. This will result in him not wanting to sell you anything anymore.

I'll just ignore you from now on

As you might know there are two patients in the village that need to be healed. One of them is in the caring hands of Otho. If you manage to heal both patients then Otho will like you a lot more. However as you will notice when you approach him again, his attitude is already slightly better than before, -33 in this example. This is the result of time. When time passes people will start to loose their negative attitude towards you. The healing of the patients will change Otho's attitude to +2 and you can buy things from him again at the same price as before. If you manage to increase his attitude towards you (which in Otho's case is rather difficult) then things will get even cheaper.

Maybe you're not so bad as I thought you were	Here's some discount

Giving things away
Besides helping out the NPC, there is another way to improve the attitude towards you. Let's say you want to get ready for some heavy fighting and decide to buy some real healing potion. Naturally you go to a shopkeeper. In this example the shopkeeper's attitude is 8 and when you want to buy the potion the price is 277.

A good day customer	Here it is, a fair price

Suppose now that we give him something first for free. This will make him so happy that in this example his attitude rises to 23, although the actual result will depend on what you give him. If we now buy the same potion again, we suddenly only have to pay 262.

A trusted customer	For you a special price

Giving something really expensive will change his attitude even more. Of course giving things away never made anyone rich, but you can experiment with it and maybe sell it for less than it's worth, which will also increase the attitude of the shopkeeper.

Welcome my friend!	Only for you I give such a discount

In this example the difference in price isn't worth the free articles, but this discount is over all the articles of the shopkeeper. So it might be worth the effort to establish a long lasting relationship with a shopkeeper of your liking.

Some other issues
Many of your actions can influence the attitude of NPC's. Suppose you feel like killing some guards. This will result in the guards that survived not really liking you of course. They will become hostile and attack you on sight. If you go away however to a different town, the guards there will not attack you. After all, they know nothing of your previous actions. If you stay away long enough then it might even happen that on your return the guards are no longer hostile towards you.

If there is an NPC that would normally give you a quest and you get him (or her) mad enough, then you can forget about getting the quest. He will no longer speak to you and the quest and the rewards of solving it are gone. Of course the quests required for the main plot line will always be available.

The above is not a complete overview of all the issues related to NPC attitude, but it should give you some more information on how it reflects on the game. It sure makes interacting with the NPC's a lot more interesting.