I've decided to play Arcanum again. The point will be to assemble an unusual mixture of companions, with preference given to those lucky few who have audible voices, and those who I usually tend to ignore. Mostly I want to hear new conversations and comments I may have missed in the past. I'm primarily considering:

Geoffrey Tarrelond-Ashe
Raven
Torian Kel
Franklin Payne

I'm also willing to consider Gar, Loghaire, Magnus, and Virgil, but only if they have some good banter with one of the first four. I'm also willing to consider taking a non-voiced companion if there is some good dialogue, but I'm not holding my breath for that. There are even a few NPCs I've never recruited, so I don't know if they have recorded voices, but they're also in the mix, of course.

I will be making sure I have 20 CH so no one will leave my party, and I will eventually be getting Persuasion Mastery so I can convince anyone to join, but I'm also willing to cheat with alignment to make sure I get who I want.

If anyone has a good NPC pairing or a party composition to suggest, I'd be glad to hear it! Thanks.

So, we're talking specifically about followers interacting with each other or other NPCs?

- Gar doesn't interact with anyone, sadly, so I'd free him right away.

- Loghaire only interacts with Raven a little, his dialogue is mainly with Magnus (and Bates).

- Z'an Al'urin has a cool conversation with Loghaire before he joins, and she is voiced as well. (IMO, she is more interesting in terms of banter than Raven.)

- Magnus only really talks to Virgil (during the P. Schuyler & Sons investigation) and Loghaire, not counting his random comments with other dwarves.

Other followers aren't voiced, and, IIRC, only Vollinger and Smythe have any interaction with people at all.

Thanks for your comments. I don't see this topic discussed much, so it's all helpful. Geoffrey is voiced. I've got him right now, and he's had some pretty good lines already. If he's in the party when you visit the Ancient Temple (the place where you find Torian Kel) he tells you about the Derian-Ka. And he has a funny exchange with Torian Kel when you first meet him. Torian Kel is voiced too, of course.

I didn't remember that Z'an was voiced. I'll add her to the list of potential candidates.

Right now I've got Geoffrey, Torian Kel, Virgil, and Gar. I've had Sogg, Magnus, and Dog in the party, but I've left them all standing in the courtyard of Simon Plough's facrory in Tarant. I'm very happy to be rid of Magnus. So sick of him.

The interesting thing about Gar is, even though he doesn't interact with the companions, he has a lot of things to say about other things. If he's in the party when you go to P.Schuyler and Sons, he can tell you about them. He talks a lot about Gilbert Bates and Cedric Appleby. He has good dialogue when you ask him about Stillwater.

So far, so good, I guess.

You left Dog there? Why? Right, the quest/location commentary... I guess I rarely ask them stuff like that. (Though I know Vollinger and Smythe do that as well, to an extent.)

It seemed as good a place as any.

I usually take over the factory and make it my unofficial headquarters, so I often leave NPCs I don't want parked in the courtyard so I can find them again later if I want. They're off the street and they look like guards. I figure Magnus and Sogg can feed Dog while I'm away.

Pretty sure unattended followers disband after a certain period of time. Sogg heads for the nearest bar, while everyone else heads back to wherever you first found them.

But I'm pretty sure what YnK meant was, why leave Dog behind at all? He's a free follower, and a damned good one as he starts leveling up.

You know, I've never actually seen that happen. It wouldn't bother me if it did happen, but it doesn't seem to.

So far I've left Sogg, Magnus, Dog, Gar, Smythe, and Jormund standing in the factory courtyard. None of them have moved from the spot where I told them to wait. They're like my Tarant gang: the Southside Facepunchers. Short answer: he doesn't talk.

The purpose of this playthrough is to test out NPC combinations I've never tried before in order to see interactions and dialogue I've never seen before. I don't care how good the NPCs are at fighting.

With Teleportation and metagaming you can do the main quest really fast if you want to. Right now my party is Virgil, Raven, Z'an, Geoffrey, and Torian Kel. I'll be dropping Virgil soon. Ultimately I'm going to replace him with Franklin Payne, I think, but I might dump him before that.

Torian Kel has an interesting speech if you ask him about Quintarra. Z'an has interesting things to say about almost every location.

IIRC, if you have 20 Charisma, they just wait indefinitely. (I think it's Charisma, although Persuasion Apprentice is supposed to make them wait longer.)

Ahh...yes, that might be the reason. My character has had 20 CH since the crash site.

I must say, having Persuasion Mastery is very useful as well. You no longer have to worry about alignment when adding or removing party members. I'm now at the point where I can add and remove companions as I please, and they'll never refuse me or leave if I don't want them to. It's like I'm a cult-leader!

UPDATE:

I've got my "final" party in place now: Raven, Z'an, Geoffrey, Torian Kel, and Franklin Payne. The interesting thing is that I wanted to assemble this odd group as quickly as possible, so I rushed the main quest as much as I could. As a result, I still have almost all the side quests left to complete. I hadn't even finished stolen relic quest from the crash site until after I got Payne in my party. Now I'm going to take the group through many adventures before I head out to Thanatos.

UPDATE 2:

This playthrough has given me the idea to do another one, but using only NPCs who don't have voice recordings. I'm thinking of Sebastian, Vollinger, Smythe, Jayna, and maybe the priest guy from the bar in Black Root. That would be an odd combination.

Does anyone know anything about Tolo Underhill, or whatever his name is? It's funny, but I've never even met him before. I guess he's in the prison in Dernholm, and I've never been inside it.

UPDATE 3:

I finished my playthrough. First, Arcanum is still a great game, even though I've played the heck out of it.

Z'an has some great dialogue with Loghaire when they meet. In fact, I think Z'an is one of the best companions in terms of dialogue.

Overalll, I'd say my experiment was a little disappointing. The NPC companions and their interactions are really quite sparse for the most part. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing however, because it reminds me that Arcanum is not a Bioware-esque, NPC relationship simulator game. I don't think it really matters all that much which companions you choose. It's fun when you get to see something new, but there just isn't that much. Companions are one of the things that got caught in the storm when the game was pushed out too early by the publisher.

I still plan on doing another runthrough of this sort some day. I'll take Vollinger, Tolo, Sebastian, Dante, Jayna, and Sogg, I think.

oh wow. you beat it in 3 days?! my bimbo and ogre are still "stuck" in tarant city. or rather i got distracted by other games when the summer sale came along.

No, it was longer than three days. Some of those updates were days after the original post.

I probably did it in...ten days maybe? That was with a lot of metagaming, and it still felt like I was spending a lot of time playing. It was fun, but I'm glad it's over because I was spending so much time on it.

I'm not sure how fast you could do a speed run. I started doing side quests after I had assembled the party I wanted, so it took longer than it could have.

Speedruns exist on the order of 20-30 minutes; perhaps faster. I remember watching one on Youtube, and it involved a fair bit of metagaming as well as some luck (to successfully pick pockets, and not have any random encounters during overland travel, for instance).

Hilarious.

I know I managed to complete all the main quest missions at what seemed like lightning speed. If you make a point of getting Teleportation ASAP you can do it really fast. Still, it was nothing close to 20-30 minutes.

There are some really good side quests in Arcanum. Really good. And in a lot of cases you're just left to discover them on your own. I'm very supportive of all the new crowdfunded cRPGs coming out these days, but so far none of them have managed to pull off the kind of vast world Arcanum has. They're not even really trying, and for justifiable reasons, but it's still too bad.