>>538237975
1. Karlach is slightly hypocritical - only insofar as you believe she has intimate knowledge that the souls in soul coins can be saved, even though she was just an unwilling soldier, and she would have no reason to know anything about that. The game never lingers on the lore-accurate ways to actually free the souls. Neither Shadowheart nor Gale chimes in. There is no passive Arcana check to remember a convenient method or spell to save the souls. Remove Curse does nothing. From the game's perspective, her reasoning that the souls are "already lost" is sound and doesn't make her an immoral or hypocritical person. Gale, on the other hand, is more than happy to discard trivial matters of morals - and potentially the lives of thousands - the second he sniffs that he could get his hands on the crown. That is beyond moral hypocrisy. It's moral recklessness, moral irresponsibility.

2. Wasting more time on the definition of a character. Karlach has agency and the capacity to make self-determined decisions - including sacrificing her own life for your sorry ass - so she is a character and a well-written one. Needing an elaborate quest or a lot of "content" in order to pass some character test is porcine drivel. Mol, the little tiefling brat who dreams big and is willing to deal with the devil, is more of a character than the non-character and she's just a minor NPC with fewer than ten relevant lines. "Content" does not dictate whether someone is a character or not - agency, and the capacity to move their story forward does.

2. The point about choosing "roleplaying over autistic min-maxing" is more about builds, not races, which is why I mention races in a separate point. I doubt picking a half-elf is going to budge your DPR that much. You get access to Booming Blade, big deal. If you choose to be a "cool" dragonfreak because you value "beauty" over mechanical advantage, you're ironically agreeing with my point, just with a different definition of "beauty."