timppu: Why did they add him to the game, just to troll the players?
morolf: Pretty much, but if you beat him hard and long enough, you'll get a funny dialogue and he'll stop pestering you.
To me that sounds like some kind of moral test, can you endure an idiot (who was convicted for abusing animals?) or will you beat him up like the rest of the village? It would be nice if they gave you some reward for allowing him follow you around, but apparently not. Not sure if I can endure him until Chapter IV (where he is supposed to die anyway?), or if I will just run him into some accident (a fight etc.) to get rid of him.
He is truly as irritating as that one character who follows you around in one of the Baldur's Gate games, but that BG creepie was doing it only in one town, I think. I don't recally for sure how one could get rid of that guy in BG, was it just that eventually he got tired of pestering you.
morolf: Regarding the protection money, iirc some of the guards will beat you up and take your money if you don't pay them, iirc it's best to avoid passing by them if you can.
I decided to give 10 ore to one guard... and he said that I am supposed to give the same amount every day. How about no? So I reloaded an earlier save game and decided to decline such "protection money" offers, unless I find out they really are beneficial to me.
Apparently because of that, one guy offered me a quest to fetch some amulet outside the village, but it was an ambush where they wanted to kill me because I hadn't paid that protection money, it was kind of a revenge I guess. I really much wanted to kick those three ambusher's asses, but for now I am too weak to fight them, so I guess I need to "accept" that amulet quest later in order to beat those three guys up, when I am a more proficient fighter.
At this point, I like how diverse the social structures etc. in Gothic are, having all those different factions and you are supposed to grow your social network to get up in the hierarchy. knowing the right persons and doing favors to them etc It really does feel like you're thrown into a prison trying to figure out how to cope with the rest of the people.
I guess I was expecting Gothic to be simpler, like you just fight monsters and occasionally perform tasks (subquests) to people in some villages. It seems it is more than that.
I also liked how "realistic" some conversations or subquests are, testing you how far you'd go. Like that quest to go buy the ornamental sword to one guy (he can't buy it because he is disliked by the shopkeeper). You find out he is asking 110 ore for the sword (instead of the 100 that the person gave you), so instead of taking the hit and paying 10 ore from my pocket, I did what I'd probably do in real life: I went back to the person and told him it costs 110 ore, not 100 ore. And indeed, he agreed to give me the missing 10 ore.
Also I don't recall if it was some other quest where you get the best reward by pushing it to the limit, up to saying that fine if he doesn't agree with your demands, he can forget about you doing the quest (even though he had suggested he can certainly find someone else to do it). If you go all the way, he finally agrees because he knows it is not easy to get some new guy to do the task. I think it was the task where Thorus wanted me to make sure some thief will not revisit the old town anymore (he left it open for me to decide how to achieve that, be it killing the thief, or talking to him...).