Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion There are an awful lot of giants running around without fingers

Is this some kind of sick catch and release? Minus the fingers? I have a hard time they'd put up with this kind of thing, and worse, that their lands have somehow been subjugated.

And now, cloud giants? They live in the clouds! Almost nobody can even visit, much less invade. Are level 20s or 40s on a warpath to take out near-gods? Hill giants are bad enough, having the high ground and all, twice over!

Cloud giant fingers suddenly appear? What's going on elsewhere in the world?!??!! What army is rampaging across the planet that makes Kethric's look like a childish sideshow?

I've never understood the Craftig system with the fingers of giants. Fingers that are not huge and heavy, but seem to be an inflationary ingredient to find...

Speaking from 2e (~120 years before BG3), giants mostly lived together in small groups of a few families at most, so they didn't have much of a lobby beyond their size and strength. Hill giants are/were evil savage brutes would have probably accepted the violence they can enact as payment to join the Absolute. Two or three hill giants would have been a great addition for the goblins in Act I and I would be surprised if the Absolute Army didn't contain at least a few hill and/or mountain giants. Since cloud giants were good-aligned, the presence of evil giants in the Army of the Absolute could serve as an IG explanation for the sudden appearance of cloud giant fingers.

"Two or three" and "A few" is the crux of the issue though.

The existence of giants isn't in question. But rather the abundance of them (Or rather, their fingers). Where there's dozens upon dozens of fingers lying about in random crates and being regularly stocked at vendors (In addition to elixirs that are brewed from the essence of 3 fingers)

So unless there's some missing information about how Giants routinely shed and regrow their fingers like how deer do their antlers, there can seem to be an overabundance of giant fingers on the Sword Coast.

I like how details like these are left for us to interpret how we wish even if it sounds silly on paper, you can make it make sense with your own take on it, I always found that perhaps these fingers are delicacies just scattered all about and explains their abundance for same reason like other food and maybe its just the name of it that looks like fingers from giants.

In our case we drink it in the form of a potion.

Isnt the whole BG3 alchemy Larian homebrewn ?!?

The D&D way of making potitions is to my knowledge having appropiate ingredients and the correct spell.

Larian did something completely else, and what it actually is is open to interpretation.

Maybe these "Cloud Giant Fingers" are actually just the name of a specific herbal mixture that is only known to Cloud Giants and nobody else has figured out how to create it. So Cloud Giants produce it and sell it to make a living.

No.

The only real "Homebrew" is Larian's lack of "This is done during a Long Rest over many hours" schtick, which is most notable with "Spell preparation" being done whenever you want.

Prior editions of D&D featured Alchemy, allowing you to brew potions over several hours of long rest by having the ingredients and passing relevant Alchemy checks (With Alchemy being an Intellect based skill)

Herbalism Kits were used to make healing items and could be used without a Long Rest to make Healing Potions, Salves and Soaps.

Alchemist Kits were used during a Long Rest to make Potions, Elixirs and Bombs.

Poisoner Kits were used during a Long Rest to make Poisons, Coatings and Acids.

This is along with other crafting things like Spell Scribing to make Scrolls (Using various checks depending on the spell being scribed - Knowledge, Arcane, Lore or Religion)

Of course, these are not to be confused with the Alchemist, Artillerist, Arcane Bomber or Scroll Savant subclasses (For Artificer and Wizard respectively) wherein they condense magic into potions and bombs (With Scroll Savant simply being better at using Scrolls and magical artifacts rather than being a requirement for spell scribing) which is their version of casting spells.

Digging way back into my memories of PnP in the mid 70s as a kid, it seemed like they flat out didn't want things like healing potions to be common. The game was encounter-based, if not full module-based, with few or any rests to heal up. This is why resting in the dungeon gave you the famed "wandering monster" roll to see if something came along that not only interrupted your rest, but left you worse off than if you had not even bothered to try.

They didn't want you to try. Strategy, think, plan!

Hence heal potions were expensive, and there was no crafting or no farming. Then there was the mentioned crafting, but your wizard had to go sit in his rental suite for a month just to produce low level stuff. I mean, someone had to make this stuff somehow, right? Nope, not you, not the players, no farming of this stuff, no manufacturing assembly lines.

It's the economy encounter, stupid!

Maybe giants also have a Yakuza organization.

Wait, this is an original D&D rule ???

Then I would have to argue that a potion recipe actually demanding fingers of a sentient race is a bloody obviously outrageously stupid idea.

But as anyone familiar with the subject knows, D&D is certainly not above having outrageoulsy stupid ideas at all.

I guess the giants could just rid themselves of their ten fingers and afterwards just cast a sufficient cure spell to regrow the lost bits, but still.

To be fair, there's always been a tricky situation with crafting... Between not wanting to make things too easy to access, but also not making things so obnoxious that a player would have to spend an entire session just making 1 potion.

There's been a lot of homebrew that has expanded on crafting in ways that feel appropriate, but WotC themselves have never put much into it and just keep it relatively passive...


Aye, it's an original D&D rule.

As far as the ingredients, the general idea was that players could acquire ingredients by doing their normal thing - Killing monsters. So the logical step was to make it so that monster parts could be used as ingredients. It's just that this didn't account for the absurity that would arise from having vendors that will supply the things being crafted and/or these crafting materials.

Like, if your campaign had you fighting a bunch of giants. Then being able to harvest part of said giants you killed to distill out a portion of their magical strength makes sense as a way for you to create consumables without having to go out of your way to harvest ingredients.

But when the ONLY way to make a specific elixir is to use body parts of giants and you have these elixirs and their materials readily available at vendors because they're a common commodity... Then you run into the issues of how illogical this implementation actually is...

In the case of giant fingers in BG3 and brewing potions in your backpack while walking, I think I simply assumed it to be video game logic and tried not to overthink it. When asked as a DM I completely agree, though. Potions and potion-making were even more restricted in pre-wizards D&D, but the cruel practice of killing giants for buffs goes back to at least 1e AD&D, if not original D&D, with various girdles of giant strength. Those are made of giant muscle fibres. Boosting ability scores, like strength, was very hard in the first place, and these girdles would give you the strength of the respective giant. So, they were supposed to be rare to the point where there may be only one each. Of course, this won't stop players from wanting to create their own.

When my group reached mid-to-high-level, using campaign economy and ecology thus became a necessity to keep the world balanced. It was a bit of a shock to some players that they could permanently break things in the world and do bad things by doing good things. This went as far as the players now enforcing a dragon hunting ban on their allies, after they had once killed too many dragons in an adventure and thereby caused a swamp's troll population to explode. The campaign had begun with villagers complaining about many troll attacks. For strength potions, we use renewable giant hair these days.

It's magic, there is no logic. This is a magic shop with jars of eye of newt and bat wings and belladonna. In a world where someone's hair can be used to make a doll to control them, there doesn't need to be a logic to fingers.

As for dragon hunting, that's a poor job by the DM, not making them the fearsome ancient creatures stronger than an ogre and as smart as an ancient wizard in the ways of magic, before you even get to the breath and adamantine-like scales.

I have problems with dragons letting humanoids ride them, though as a "cool thing", I think that's a losing argument!

The only way to make a campaign world that only exists in the heads of the gamers immersive and believable, is to apply logic and reproducibility even, or especially, to such fantastic elements as magic. As a DM you will get those questions where all the giant fingers come from and you want to be able to answer them. Without achieving a decent level of verisimilitude or some overriding stylistic element that replaces it, campaigns usually don't last long because players stop taking it serious. BG3 takes place within a region and few tendays in Eleint 1492DR, so after the events of the game there aren't so many giants missing fingers, yet. But you correctly identified a huge issue with scale.

You're also right that an ancient dragon would surely wipe the floor with a bunch of dragon hunters, but the youngling black dragons which controlled the troll population in my example were no match for a high-level party. In most RPGs, dragons become more dangerous with age. Pulling out an ancient dragon in a swamp that wouldn't support it only as a punishment to dragon-hunting players, would have been instantly gratifying, but it could have knocked the players off the path of the planned campaign which was about a proper ancient evil in a different bog that had chased those young dragons into their new habitat in the first place. It would also have caused more of those giant finger questions - like, why has nobody ever heard of an ancient wyrm in our backyard before, what did it eat, and why didn't it react to earlier campaign events that would have affected it? Of course, you can come up with conclusive answers, but you'll do those repairs on time you should be spending on pushing the campaign onwards. Also, if the ancient wyrm survives the encounter as intended, what will it do next? You end up derailing the campaign if it attacks the home of the heroes next. Instead, I ended up with players thinking they had achieved victory, only to find out they were wrong, and not only wrong about having won, but also about killing five teenage dragons who were victims themselves. In terms of role-playing, this was way more gratifying!

Those red dragons who serve as Githyanki-steeds aren't always happy about it, but it's a deal struck with their goddess Tiamat and since it's usually younger dragons doing that, it's also a nice way for them to gain experience while doing what they love - carnage and infernos.

Thar be poverty amongst the giant folk like such as thar be throughout the lands. Those such cursed sometimes find themselves faced with the dire choice of eating this day at the cost of a digit or starving and losing all.

Cloud giants live in the clouds among splendor. Hill giants are poor tribals in huts. They should be amenable to certain...sales...to help themselves move into modern subdivisions.


Of course, if you're gonna hire male giants to do something that's highly profitable, well, best to not apply verisimilitude too much.

I think the biggest irony is that technically the ingredients you use for making the elixirs are "Salts of ____ Giant Fingernails"

Meaning that vendors having stocks of elixirs is actually plausible because giants can simply sell their nail clippings, at no harm to themselves.

"I need some money. Can you direct me to the plasma and fingers clinic?"