I am playing PS:T for the first time, since it had been an my "missed gems" list of games for a while now.

Just yesterday I was talking to a friend, telling him how much I like the quests in the Clerk's Ward. He then asked how I liked Annah... "Annah?", I asked, remembering that Pharod told me about how his daughter found TNO's body. It seems that I killed her just after leaving the mortuary...

Wait, WHAT?

At first I was angry about missing out on a character and her story.. but then I realized that I now have an even deeper fascination with PS:T, since my decisions really *do* have an impact on the story and the world. Just wow!

You killed Annah?! How could you?!

This now means you'll need to replay PST once you're done with your current game, since Annah is a great character and you need to play through the game at least one with her in your party.

You can actually kill Annah? I'll admit I never tried it since randomly killing innocent NPCs, even the annoying ones, isn't my thing.

OTOH, I'd say it's a pretty bad idea, since not only is Annah an awesome NPC as DarrkPhoenix said, she's also your only thief unless you make TNO one.
Now, there aren't nearly as many traps and locks in PS: T as in BG, but having a rogue to take care of those is still pretty useful.

Not to mention that she's supposed to show you where to go next after the Pharod thing.

One character less in the party to share the XP. Don't worry, you might have missed 0,01% of the game content because of this but the extra XP might open new options for you.

You can kill just about any of the recruitable NPCs in the game. There's actually a book that offers you power in exchange for evil acts, including selling one of your companions into slavery and murdering one of your companions, then there's the option to offer up one or more of your companions to the pillar of skulls. TNO has been a real bastard in his past incarnations, and you have the option to make his current incarnation a real bastard as well if you so chose.

It seems to be a thing the developers had in mind, since Pharod just told me where to go (my friend said normally Annah has to take you there).

As I am absolutely in love with PS:T right now, I think I'll start a second playthrough after I finished this one, and take care not to kill Annah this time. But I kinda enjoy the fact that my moral decisions do have an impact on the story. I missed consequences like this when playing modern RPGs tbh. Thanks for the reassurement, I'll finish this playthrough no matter what happens! ;)

Well, I guess I'll have to do another playthrough of PS:T as an evil TNO then.

I usually don't play evil because games tend to provide "evil" options that make your character either a complete psycho or a rude, petty asshole.
Neither of those appeals to me, the only time I have fun playing evil is when I can be some kind of manipulative bastard.

Same here. Killing people just for the sake of it is evil, yes, but when it's contrasted against three or four good options, none of which is equally spontaneous and stupid, it comes across as cartoonish stepping-on-puppies kind of dickiness. I think Neverwinter Nights 2 was a particularly good example of evil done badly, although this might have something to do with the developers designing the game to be played as a good character, and then slapping on the evil options as an afterthought. I even went from evil to good around eight hours into the campaign because I couldn't watch my character embarrass himself.

That said, I've heard that Torment lets you do a more subtle kind of evil. The ruthlessly practical, egocentric sort, which is fair enough considering the predicament TNO finds himself in. Never done an evil playthrough myself, though.

The evil options in PS:T are really nicely done imo. I started the game as evil and it didn't feel cartoony or random at all. I switched to good halfway through though, because I really care for the characters, and TNO seems to have been a real SOB anyways. Time to change that!

Don't forget the "axe-crazy paranoid psychopath" incarnation to go along with the "conniving manipulative sociopath" incarnation. And those are just two of the ones that are most influential on this particular story. Likely TNO has had a whole host of diabolical incarnations we just haven't seen. Heck, ingame whenever a story about horrible douchebaggery is presented, I assume a 90% likelihood it was me in a past life.

Neverwinter Nights 2 was made by Obsidian too, you know. It's just that they really stepped up their writing for some reason for MotB.
In the case of both KotOR and NWN, both of the original games (and their expansions) were made by Bioware, both of the sequels (and expansions) were made by Obsidian.
I don't know why people always get that wrong...

People always praise Obsidian's writing, but imo it's really inconsistent in terms of quality. Sure, they've made some very well-written games (MotB, most of Alpha Protocol), but they've also made some where the writing was much worse than anything Bioware made (NWN 2, some of KotOR 2).

It seems you're absolutely right. The writing in NWN2 just seemed so Bioware-esque that I just assumed they were the devs for it. I guess Obsidian just decided to bring their A game when they did MotB.

Wasn't the main campaign of Neverwinter Nights 2 done by Obsidian as well?

Yeah, mystral just corrected me on that.