Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Illithid Dialog Checks / The Party Size Limit

Illithid Dialog Checks


I don't like that you have to long rest to clear your "tadpoled" counts. I understand the intent was to make the long rest mechanic more rewarding and force camp interactions, but this design choice makes this part of your character's development tedious and consequently undesirable.

• Long resting appears to pass time because some encounters disappear if they're triggered from a distance and you long rest before engaging them (e.g., Edowin.) Maybe those are bugs?
• There's a sense of urgency in Act 1 involving a series of life-or-death consequences. I don't expect things to slow down in later acts. Long resting amid that urgency in order to regain the ability to use Illithid powers feels counterintuitive.
• You don't know when your Illithid powers are available for future conversations. When you unknowingly enter dialogue without your Illithid powers, the choice you're actually forced to make is this: don't embrace your Illithid powers and have fun, or embrace your Illithid powers and save scum to long rest. (Just to be clear, the problem is not the lack of a visual cue; if there was a visual cue indicating when your Illithid powers were available, you'd simply be motivated to long rest after every conversation where they were used. That's also not fun.)

What if Clerics had to pray at an altar at camp to pass Deity checks while adventuring in the world? This is what's happening with Illithid dialog options.

Eliminate the rest checks, penalize Illithid power use in some mechanically inconsequential way that makes narrative sense (e.g., max health reduction until long rest?), and rebalance the rest system so players don't have to game resting.


Party Size Limit

The campaign was designed for a party of four. D&D fans will point to most D&D campaigns having been designed for four and sometimes six characters. I've read all the threads about this.

However, when I play C/J/RPGs where there are companion stories and voice bark interactions, I hate feeling like I'm missing content that could make my current adventure more exciting.

Currently, we can edit saves to increase the party limit (later, we'll do this with mods), but changing the party limit has a few noticeable issues:

1. Combat is tuned for a party of four. When you have greater than four party members, combat becomes trivial.
2. Combat is turn-based. When you increase the party size, you increase the number of turns per combat encounter and thereby increase the amount of time you spend in combat encounters.
3. Cutscenes were designed specifically for a party of four. When you increase the size of the party, there are collision problems in cutscenes. For example, Shadowheart can appear inside Astarion - and not in a fun way.

Here are my suggestions for addressing these issues in both single player and co-op:

• Combat encounters don't need to be retuned for a higher maximum party size. Leave combat tuned for a party of four, but make combat progressively harder for each party member exceeding a party size of four. You can use something like (1 + ((CurrentPartySize > 4 ? CurrentPartySize - 4 : 0) / 2)) as a scaling difficulty multiplier.
• Players can travel with all companions and endure (or not endure) turn-based combat with a large party. Allow the player to travel with up to 8 members but limit the number of combatants by allowing the player to assign up to 8 members to combat roles. This means players can decide for themselves the size of the party they take into combat. (You might ask what noncombat party members would do during combat then. They probably should not be controllable at this time. They could idle, look bored, trash talk, call out enemy actions, fade out, or perform some other action that does not impact combat mechanically.)
• Cutscenes can show parties of any size with additional animations and engineering. First, I would assume that scenes along the critical path are handcrafted but that all other scenes are not; therefore, algorithmically place companions in scenes outside the critical path by their level of involvement in the foreground. Second, implement a behavior that would cause characters to move out of each other's way, assuming they would otherwise occupy the same position, based on the type of performance they will give in a scene (e.g., interjection > emote > idle.)

I think the cutscene issues are probably the most challenging, but if the game's ahead of schedule, they're solvable.

What if we could use the power as many times as we want, but suffer an accumulative penalty of -1 to all ability checks afterwards, like an exhaustion from an intense brain activity? Only the full long rest would then remove 1 level of this exhaustion. I think the penalty is just, considered the difficulty for an illithid check is 0. Maybe this could be solidified with a raise in a camp supplies count needed for a full rest - like from 40 to 100. That way we couldn't spam full long rests consistently.

Speaking of party size: all four in the party have Illithid powers. Can Gale or Shadowheart still use their Illithid persuasion even if Tav has used up theirs? They should. I haven't tried but I bet they can't.

Conversely, if only Tav "surrenders" to using the Illithid powers, why do the rest of the party get them as well even if they don't use them? Clearly this should work on an individual basis.

It's all a little bit too railroaded. I don't, and no sane person should, like using unknown powers from an alien parasite and letting that presence have more and more hold over you. Especially when you know from the True Souls they are trying to mind control you. The only sane conclusion would be to resist using the powers and try to get rid of the parasite as soon as possible. Unless your Wisdom is 8. It all stinks a little bit of "you will like these awesome cool powers for game purposes and screw role playing".

I for one fully expect to be rewarded for resisting using the tadpoles. That doesn't mean I wouldn't have someone in the party use them.

Just to add some technical info about the current implementation of tadpoling...

This is the Osiris procedure that runs when you long rest:


When the GLO_Tadpoled_UsedToday1 flag is set, corruption increases and the user is added to the DB_GLO_Tadpoled_UsedTracker table and the GLO_Tadpoled_PartyUsed flag is set. The setting of that flag triggers quest updates and is a requirement for dreams to occur.

When the GLO_Tadpoled_UsedToday2 flag is set, the user is just added to the DB_GLO_Tadpoled_UsedTracker table.

Both flags are set and checked in dialogs. In terms of implementation, there isn't much to the use and restriction of Illithid powers in dialog.

I've already written a script that - once we're able to recompile the story - would allow infinite tadpoling, but that's not an ideal solution.

They can. Each companion can use their illithid power once a day, just like Tav.

There even is one interesting dialogue choice that points out how broken "one illithid persuation per day" actualy is:

This seems intentional to me and in line with what you want: a sense of urgency & consequences to long resting..??

1.) I've mentioned this before, but imo split exp between *participating* party members is the best solution to the difficulty. It'd be a single equation that automatically makes a bigger party lower level and vice-versa, and doesn't deal with any complex situations of how to make BG3's handcrafted combats more/less difficult (Add enemies? Their turns are now too long. Increase monster HP? That just becomes boring. Overhaul each encounter individually? That's a lot of work.).
- Although, I admit, this would be somewhat incompatible with the below...

2.) Non-combat players in your traveling party should 100% fade out. Otherwise it would make absolutely no sense that they're not joining in. Fading out can be interpreted as "they're actually fighting other invisible enemies over there, which is just not being shown."
- Traveling with 8+ members whose inventories you can all access and who you have to worry about stepping in traps, etc, just sounds like a huge hassle. Especially with BG3's current inventory UI and chain mechanic. I would not want this without huge overhauls to those systems, and even then I still likely wouldn't play as more than 5.
- In general, your suggestion is a good way to avoid the arbitrary "your party is full" nonsense and the fact that some companions just stay at camp doing nothing, when they have a tadpole in your head. Just have the game (NOT the characters) say that you can only control 4 (or 5 or 6 or 8) party members at one time. The others will travel with you, but are not available for combat/dialogues. Although perhaps they would force themselves into view *only* for their quest-relevant cutscenes..?


That is a big IF and likely not true. Aside from the fact that there's not really a public "schedule" for BG3, I fee like Larian has said that BG3 is requiring much more work than they planned. Also, in general, assuming any game is behind schedule is a good guess.

I’m happy with the illithid powers being limited to once a day per person. The game indicates that each use takes something you can’t get back, and being able to use the powers whenever you fancied would undermine this. And you can’t just rest to reuse as much as you like unless you’re willing to turn into a True Soul. And though there don’t seem to be any consequences to that implemented in EA I’m sure there will be as the game progresses. Plus having multiple uses of the ability a day would mess up the link with the dream sequences, and the rate at which a player could turn into a True Soul. You’d need to make changes like having visions on use of the power rather than long rest and rework other elements like the illness dialogues.

I think it’s fair enough that the game encourages us to experience this over more time, and that there’s an implication that using the power has a cost to both us and the tadpole so we should pick and choose the times we make use of it. Sure, a player who doesn’t mind turning into a True Soul could just spam long rests and use the powers whenever, but I don’t think that’s a reason to change the experience for others, when the pacing as it currently stands seems reasonably good.

I agree it’s not perfect, though, with some bugs and particularly agree there are problems with the way in which some impacts are party-wide rather than individual. I don’t think it’s okay to hand-wave all of those as related to the tadpoles linking us. (PS Another issue with that, unless it’s been fixed in recent patches, is that if you use the powers to the point that the party agrees no more, then a party member other than the MC uses powers, then the rest of the party complain to the MC rather than the party member who broke the agreement.)

As far as I can tell from parsing dialog options, whenever you see this message...

  *You focus on the source of the power, but it is quiet and still. It needs to rest.*

...there's no other consequence to the Illithid dialog option that led there. Said another way, you will always fail the check. 😭 I'm more concerned with the Illithid dialog checks that you can pass or fail.

Does each different usage count toward getting the powers?
If so I'm pretty sure if done right one could get enough uses(was it 3 or 4) to activate the sickness scene & powers for all before they take their first long rest. I wonder if you have to do each dream step first or not.

Exactly my point ...
Why it even exist? O_o

Its like:
Here you can open this dialogue, if you spend this extra rare resource >> you can proceed in dialogue you opened with extra rare resource, if you spend extra rare resource you had to spend to even get here.
What? o_O

Seems like oversight to me, but its present for almost 2y by now.

Im quite honestly not sure there even is any ...
Illithid choices i remember are easy win no matter what. O_o

Can’t say for sure, but it feels like they might.

I think patch 8 revamped the ordering of camp scenes. I can’t remember their exact sequence for the tadpole users but I’m fairly sure you can’t skip any steps.

Maybe, hopefully, this is implemented to work with improved party dialogue, where you can switch freely between party members. One character would do the initial tadpole check, and then another character would step in to do the next one.

That would be awesome. :3

I’ve rolled 1 and failed illithid checks before! And I guess if you played a character with a wisdom penalty you might get more fails too. Though I do wonder at the point of making this a roll at all when it’s so unlikely to fail. Perhaps that might become clearer later.

(I confess I didn’t notice whether failed checks counted as a use of the power for True Soul progression or reuse of power that day. If not, then perhaps Larian are thinking of making the rolls harder in the full game.)

When you see this message...

  *The mark glows, but you feel nothing in response. Your illithid power is beyond reach until you rest.*

...that's because you failed the Illithid dialog check. The check is simple: have you used the tadpole power yet? You pass if you haven't and fail if you have.

I'm not aware of any Illithid dialog checks that require a dice roll.