Why are you starting with an NPC, literally everyone does that
There are like five thousands NPCs, and 99% of them are absolutely worthless and I'm super sure this one will be too. Why can't you start with anything else?
fake edit: of course there is a romance.
As a matter of fact, I think I do know the answer.
People often stick to their preferred combination of global enhancements and tweaks, spiced with some quest mods. Using exclusively vanilla characters grows boring after the Nth replay, and using mod-only NPCs has a drawback of lacking almost any crossmod banter interactions. As a result, the best way is to play one NPC mod at a time, and since their quality is usually exactly fanfic-level, it is easy to treat them as such, i.e. play once and forget. Of course, this means that for the next playthrough you need to find another NPC mod, and therefore 3-5 new ones per year is just the right quantity to select from - at least for those like me, who play BG once in a year.
Is a research really that necessary? I have no intention of offending anyone but we are talking a about a character of fictional race in a fantasy world where a source for his illness may be magical, demonical or something entirely new.
Stick to Wikipedia-level research, and you should be fine enough. Only the small fraction of people possess encyclopedic knowledge of any subject, and they will see through your fiction no matter how hard you try to make it realistic. The rest would read an article in Wikipedia and call it a day.
Worse yet, trying to be overly realistic kills the fun - none of Hollywood blockbusters are realistic, and none cares.
That's an advice I heard from professional writers.
Edited by GeN1e, 15 February 2013 - 02:58 PM.