How do I force party banter?

[Dwarven Crusader]

I've tried everything. All I want is to do the companion quests for Neera and Dorn (for now). Problem is, they're initiated by Banter. Banter is....so ill-defined that there's no actual guide to activating it. I ran laps around Beregost, nothing happens. Tried traveling from Beregost to Temple and back, waiting about a minute between trips, nothing happens. Tried running around with one character, nothing happens. I've had banters trigger on occasion after traveling but only directly after arriving.

I tried installing the Banter Accelerator mod, didn't work. Tried a few presets, tried user-defined checks every 5 seconds with 99% chance to activate banter, didn't work. Is there some secret limit on banter stopping me from getting this quest or am I literally just supposed to leave the game on forever?

EDIT: Forgot to mention, I enabled cheats and have been attempting to use Ctrl+I to select an animation and Ctrl+L to play it, I had read in multiple places this can force party banter but if I'm gonna be honest I have no clue how that would even work, since all it does is play spell animations. I tried each spell animation with a 30 second interval in-between to let the ticks update but nothing came of this.

[Leeux]

For Dorn you can directly go to the quest NPC to trigger the next phase, she's standing outside the Inn at Nashkel, you'll miss the banter but you can move the quest to the next phase that way.

For Neera, first conversation triggers after 1 day in-game time after she joined the party, and from there on, for the next trigger depends on player's level... first stage for the actual plot triggers after you're L3 or greater and seven days have passed from your first banter, as long as you didn't use the reply option "I don't have time" on the first conversation.

[Dwarven Crusader]

Seven days? Does she need to be in the party for that? Cuz if not I'm dumping her in the Friendly Arm Inn so I can go get some other companions to move there (I'm collecting people which sounded better in my head).

[red255]

I believe the timer starts when they first join.

I believe I grabbed them, ditched them did other things grabbed them again some time later and the banter started.

I normally do the evil people stuff first before I get REP.

Dorn only takes a week, Hexxat is like 3 weeks. (one week between each crypt walk)

Neera I didn't think required banter, you go to the bridge district, you get a cutscene, you go walk somewhere else she teleports in, tells you to meet her in the forest, and you meet her in the forest as the quest starts.

[Dwarven Crusader]

I was thinking the same thing, do evil companion quests first, but I think you're mistaking Neera for someone else. According to the wiki she just banters about some other Wild Mage and you go to meet him.

[Leeux]

I don't think she has to remain on your party for the timer to keep ticking... probably you can leave her at the Friendly Arm inn and pick her later and the banter will trigger.

For Dorn, you can advance the first stage up to Kryll without any waiting after you recruit him, but since the end of his quest require access to Baldur's gate city, you'll have to drop him too and pick him back when the bridge to the city opens after you've dealt with the Cloakwood mines.

[Godsarm]

Here's the deal though, if you join them to the party, kick them out before their quests and then rejoin them...they are the same level as when you first joined them. Which means that you may have to work to keep a 1st Level Neera alive just traveling to do her quest.

I've done both Neera's and Rasaad's quests in BG1, SoA and ToB, the first part of Hexxat's in So A and her whole quest in ToB and never done Dorn's (I'm a Paladin, it's hard enough to do Hexxat's without getting in trouble). Neera's quests are worth it in SoA and ToB because of the loot and the extra Merchants

[Dwarven Crusader]

I'm not worried about that, more looking to get evil dudes out of the way due to party conflicts but I wanna get all the rewards and journal entries for their quests. I have no intention of using Montaron and Xzar ever again, so I'm not worried about them being low-level. Besides, if I roll hundreds of 20s in a row I can solo the whole game so I can carry the team.

[red255]

Originally posted by Dwarven Crusader:

I was thinking the same thing, do evil companion quests first, but I think you're mistaking Neera for someone else. According to the wiki she just banters about some other Wild Mage and you go to meet him.

I was thinking about BG2.

in BG1 you go meet adoy, and he gives you a belt with +5 saves vs polymorph.

in siege of dragonspear, you get her a potion which requires some whacky ingredients and then go meet adoy again and foreshadow BG2 Neera. Not really something that memorable.

Rasaad at least gets you a belt of strength to 19.

what neera has going for her is she is a wild mage, which gets her an extra spell slot per level like a specialist mage, except she doesn't lose a spell school instead getting a chance of failure.

and also rolls a +/- 5 spell levels on each spell casting

[Dwarven Crusader]

Not that I dislike her but I would like to tell you my first experience with Neera was her polymorphing herself into a squirrel during her introductory battle. When I won she couldn't move. I thought the effect would wear off or something but I had to look it up to realize she actually screwed up. So I'm guessing 60% of the time Wild Magic works 100% of the time.

[Leeux]

Yeah, Neera is not for the faint of heart... or for those that don't like reloading.

I did a full playthrough with her once and I was lucky nothing bad happened most of the time, except a couple of bad rolls... she summoned a pit fiend on me once, had to reload... and also she had the surge where you lose all your gold... also had to reload. And also had one more that I don't recall that I had to reload... all of this was while on BG1... it was years ago, IIRC patch v1.3 it wasn't even out yet.

Other than that all the others were minor annoyances, like being slowed or confused etc. As a rule of thumb you should never use a buff spell on your team mates with Neera, unless you want to live dangerously :P

In BG2 after she got access to improved chaos shield, things went much more smoother, to be honest...

Still, once that playthrough was done, I swore to me that I won't ever do it again.

[arsenicBumpnip]

TLDR: Banters are disabled in multiplayer, you can re-enable them by editing the game's config file.
If you're reading my copy-paste of this reply for a BG1 thread rather than a BG2 or Dragonspear thread, be aware that the BG1 base game has -very few- banters unless you recruit EE NPCs or install the NPC Project mod.


Longer Version:
Hi, sorry to give you a potential solution 5 years too late, but I just solved this issue in my own game and figured it'd be worth posting the potential cause/solution for anyone else who ends up Google searching "Baldur's Gate 2 Banters Not Working" and finds this post.

At least in my case, the problem was caused due to playing in Multiplayer, which by default disables almost all non-romance banters.

If you're playing in multiplayer, you can re-enable NPC banters by editing your Baldur.lua file before launching the game (default file path is C:\Users\[YOUR PC'S USERNAME\Documents\Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition).
If you're playing with a friend, they'll also need to edit their own lua file.

Find the following line:
SetPrivateProfileString('Multiplayer','Disable Banters','1')
and change the 1 to a 0.

You can also make this same edit for Baldur's Gate 1, though bear in mind that base game BG1 only has a small handful of banters unless you keep the EE NPCs in-party, so this is mostly just for re-enabling banter in Dragonspear. Also, banters from the BG1 NPC Project mod work in multiplayer just fine even without the lua edit.


Our game went from having zero non-romance banters even with CTRL-i, to my being able to -immediately- trigger one with CTRL-i once we made this change.
Just be aware that apparently one of the reasons it's disabled by default is due to bugs that might happen if the bantering NPCs are controlled by different players. Stuff like "multi-episode" banters not setting their flags correctly, so the later parts never trigger, etc.