Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks My Custom Honour Ruleset for Masochists

1. Start Honour Mode, and intentionally die (stand in the fire in the first room). This is the only way to keep the Honour ruleset with Custom settings as of Patch 5.

2. Set Camp Cost Multiplier to 3 (max)

3. Set Trader Price Modifier to 4 (max)

Rules:

1. Only 1 respec per character, 0 for Tav/Durge (or no respecs whatsoever, but I just can't with Shadowheart because her starting stats make my eyes bleed)

2. No Hill Giant Elixirs because they are too readily available early game and make certain builds (Tavern Brawler Monk, looking at you) way too OP early on

3. Only Long Rest when it is logical (i.e. not in the middle of fights/clearing an area)

4. If you have the Deluxe Edition, you must toss the extra camp supplies it gives you and cannot use the Shapeshifter helm (forget what it's called)

5. No consuming of Illithid Tadpoles (you can still use the Illithid persuasion ability)

6. No Multiclassing. This eliminates a lot of "optimized" builds like 1 Wizard dip for scribing spells and 2 Fighter dip for Action Surge and weapon/armor proficiencies. It also makes you consider taking feats you may not otherwise take.

More suggestions welcome.

Really sounds like masochism.

For me the Honour mode is an excuse to use all the debatable stuff the game offers which I mostly or entirely avoided to use in my normal playthroughs, like stealth abuse, shove, scrolls (never used one), potions except healing potions, minmaxing attributes, Illithid powers, magical uberitems etc.

One proposal for your suffering, restrict yourself to two or three magical items per character. You should also never cheese fights from meta knowledge, i.e. not avoiding dialogs that lead to dangerous fights by attacking immediately for example.

And, if you take honour literally, make it the rule to never run away. That is for the real heroes. Would have ended my run yesterday when I fought the Gith patrol from the dialog and all Gith went first, so at my turn I had one dead, one dying on the ground, my main with 10% hp and the fourth in Hold Person. I ran away with my main and came back later but is that honourable?

My hill giant monk says no deal.

I don't think you can "set" vendor prices and supplies multipliers for Honor mode, though?
That's just for custom mode. Honor mode has its own set values as far as I know.

Otherwise I missed where the options are supposed to be.


Anyway, seems fairly tame. Most of these "super masochistic rules" are pretty much how I played my first playthrough to begin with.
Except for the rule about Giant Hill elixirs (which I still used sparsely even if i didn't have a hard rule against them, since i was a cheap-ass and I didn't realize it was my CHA 8 barbarian that made everything look so expensive).

Not to mention that it's NOT EVEN CLOSE to be the most powerful elixir around, anyway. There are a bunch of these that run circles around it. The first Blood one outperforms it by a landslide, for instance.

You have to intentionally die once in Honour Mode in order to access the Custom options with the Honour ruleset. Hopefully they change this with the next patch.


My problem with it is not that it's the most powerful elixir, it's that it's so readily available at the start of the game and immediately enables builds like Tavern Brawler monk or an archer build using the Strength bow you can buy from the Zentarim guy. The better ones like Cloud Giant elixir are much harder to come by early game.

On one hand from a dev perspective I can see why you'd want to give players options like that, especially on Honour Mode. But I'd rather eliminate it as an option for myself to make it harder.

You could get way more hardcore than that. First implement 5E rules:

- Class spell casting, a character can only cast a scroll if the spell is on their list.
- Restricted pick pocketing, you can only steal one item from a vendor per day.
- No feats only ability score increases, which is default rule.
- Select spells at start of day only.
- Rotate party leader to imitate TT spotlight sharing. All characters would need to be developed with some party face ability.

Off the top of my head.

I have updated this ruleset based on some of the suggestions in this thread. I am using this ruleset for my current Custom Honour run.


1. Start Honour Mode, and intentionally die (stand in the fire in the first room). This is the only way to keep the Honour ruleset with Custom settings as of Patch 5.

2. Set Camp Cost Multiplier to 3 (max)

3. Set Trader Price Modifier to 4 (max)

Rules:

1. Only 1 respec per character, 0 for Tav/Durge

2. No Hill Giant Elixirs until Act 2

3. Maximum 5 Long Rests per act (you can spam more for story cutscenes as long as you take no other beneficial actions in between)

4. If you have the Deluxe Edition, you must toss the extra camp supplies it gives you and cannot use the Shapeshifter helm

5. No consuming of Illithid Tadpoles

6. No Multiclassing

7. No pickpocketing

8. No using scrolls in combat

9. No running from combat

10. If you TPK, retire with Honour and don't reload (excepting initial intentional death, obviously)

More suggestions welcome.