Companions are a hallmark of BioWare's RPGs; the NPC followers who join your party in games like "Baldur's Gate" and "Dragon Age" were not a bunch of yes elves who just silently followed your decisions. They had your back, disagreed with you, and sometimes left to do their own thing. Each of those friends had a distinct personality and voice. That is why nothing triggers more discussion among BioWare players than the question of who is the best and the worst of BioWare's Companions. (Jacob's Defense Team, Rep.)

And when a group of veteran RPG designers gathered at a recent GDC roundtable hosted by PC Gamer, the question of how writers manage their casts came up; Obsidian's Josh Sawyer told Mike Laidlaw, " At BioWare, was there a standardized way to cast companions or develop individual companions?"

Laidlaw asked.

Laidlaw is the former creative director of the "Dragon Age" series, lead writer on "Jade Empire" and designer of the original "Mass Effect". However, since he was most familiar with "Dragon Age," he explained how the writer's room worked for the three "Dragon Age" games he worked on, and that he divided the companionship between each character and collaborated when those characters interacted with each other He responded.

"Our stance was, 'This character is yours and you are the voiceholder of this character.'

"I think that's pretty common, but at the end of the game we'd have someone pass the character and make sure it fit. Mary (Kirby) is the owner of Varick, and Lucas Christianson said, 'Hey, what would Varick say to what Sera said? ' She says, 'He would probably be annoyed. ' And then she says a line like that."

"The first time I saw the show, I thought, 'I'm not going to be able to do that.'

Each companion had an area of the stage in which they had to express and say something. In the case of Varric, the familiar dwarven narrator and rogue in Dragon Age 2 and The Inquisitions, "he is a merchant and represents the dwarves," Laidlaw explains. But the companion's resident writer would still have free reign over certain aspects of who they are. Mary says, 'I'm not a romantic! Because I don't do that.' I see. Mary hates writing romance. She's like, 'That's fine, it doesn't have to be all romance.'"

Securing a companion who would respond to each game's theme and central conflict was a goal from the beginning of Dragon Age. I fell in love with BioWare from Baldur's Gate 2 more than anything else. When I saw how Jaheira, Airy, and Viconia represented the elven experience, which is not perfect but definitely very disparate, I knew I wanted to do more of that." We talk about 'what questions are we asking players in the game? Whatever kind of things are being dealt with, whether it's mages versus Templars, whether it's freedom and security, whether it's the excesses of power, we were almost schematically saying, 'OK, we need characters that represent different points of view about these things.'"

Having peers with different opinions on all these issues gave us the freedom to write peers who did not stand for a particular philosophy. As Laidlaw says, these were people who didn't have to care: in Inquisition, Team Yellow was formed, with Serra, Bull, and others who were like, "Yeah, let's just kill the damn thing. That would work too, right?"

The RPG roundtable also included Strix Beltran, Josh Sawyer, Lis Moberly, and Paweł Sasko. You can read more about what they talked about here, or listen to the entire 80-minute conversation here.