A lot of people talk about the nice indications of morality through whatever choices you make in Bloodlines, but by far my favorite has to be the Patty quest.
See, by all means her dialogue was written to get on you, the player’s nerves. I don’t know if this was different for anyone else, but for most of my playthroughs she calls me a bitch. When I tell her I know where Kent Alan Ryan is, she says “Goes to show you don’t have to be popular or care what you look like to be a cool girl!” Clearly, she was written to be Annoying Girl, The Character.
But when you think of the context, she’s a ghoul desperately trying to find her dormitor. Put yourself in those shoes for a second- you’re a ghoul, and you haven’t seen your dormitor in a LONG time. Obviously, you are blood bonded to him, so you feel a connection to him and feel you’re special to him. Surely, you think, he wouldn’t just go off and disappear without telling you, right? So a million different possibilities run through your head. What if he’s lost somewhere? What if he’s in trouble? What if he abandoned you on purpose- no, surely not. And so, you ask every single vampire you know for any sort of clue. But now, because of that, the vampires you know didn’t like how loud you were asking, and passed off the task of your execution to some fledgling. All because you wanted to find the dormitor you’re literally blood bonded to.
And sure, maybe the way Patty asked you about Kent could’ve been nicer- but obviously a ghoul going through withdrawal isn’t going to be a perfect angel. In fact, one piece of Patty’s dialogue stands out to me… she is scared she’s going to age. Now, you may laugh and think this is her being superficial, but we don’t know how long she’s been a ghoul. And who’s to say a Toreador ghoul is unfounded in her fears in looking too old for her dormitor to care about her anymore? A lot of the time, ghouls are treated like disposable tools in VTM. This IS the world of darkness, after all.
So, you have a few choices here. You can do the standard thing of luring Patty to the back of the club to kill her, and you still get your exp and rep from the Anarchs in LA. You can be particularly cruel, tell Patty you saw Kent in the Santa Monica blood bank, and leave her to get drained dry by Vandal to fill the blood bags there.
Or you can make what to me feels like the most interesting decision… you can be merciful and tell her you saw Kent in San Diego, and Patty will make her way there to get lost. And then, what happens to Patty from there? We don’t know. She will never see Kent Alan Ryan again; you later see his ashes in Grout’s mansion. Patty will never get her fix again, and now you have probably gotten her lost in a place she isn’t familiar with, STILL going through withdrawal. No matter what you do, the future doesn’t look good for Patty. Such is the fate of most ghouls!
Maybe, just maybe, she finally found a Toreador in San Diego that took pity on her and became her new dormitor. Who knows?
Patty’s future seems dismal here, and so this quest isn’t really about her. It’s about how YOU as the player react to someone down on their luck, even as they aren’t being the nicest person in the world to you. And that’s what I find so, so interesting about this quest.
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