Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Downside of using the "worm" dialog options?

I see Swen using this mindflayer worm wisdom check option all the time in the stream like a get out of jail free card. I'm guessing it's actually very far from free. Anyone know just how bad the consequences of using this option are going to be?

He did hint at consequences, something about losing a part of yourself... but that was all as far as I can remember.

It's hard to sure. I imagine using it too many times would at the very least lock you into a bad ending.

I think the most likely consequence is that using the tadpole too much costs you some amount of time needed to find an alternative option to taking Raphael's deal. There is probably at least one way to avoid taking the deal with Raphael, but it'll likely be difficult to find and happen very late in the game. My guess is that if your tadpole infection has advanced to a certain stage, it locks you out of some options which are less costly. My guess is that the more you use it, the more costly the remaining tadpole-be-gone options are until perhaps at one point, you get pulled into a cutscene where Raphael tells you your time is up, and it's take his terms or die, and if you refuse, he shrugs and you get a game over.

Whenever he used the psychic powers a voiceover starts saying how pleased the tadpole is. I hypothesize that could speed up the process to become a mindflayer. Maybe that will give you more powers or we start to see some changes in your body ( Kotor dark-side-mutations and empowerment comes to mind).
But at some point you could lose yourself in the transformation, and that sounds like a game over (or a very strange change of character middle-game)

it looks like a dark side thing.
Which just seems weird.
illithids arent about making you evil, they are about turning you either intoa meatpuppet or into one of em.

the whole tadpole thing has to be one of my least favorite parts of this entire premise

You have 7 days to remove or 'deal' with the tadpole before you die, I imagine that there are multiple solutions to the problem that depends on what you are willing and unwilling to do. To paraphrase a certain pirate.

Raphael offers one very straightforward deal. In exchange for your soul, he will cure you of it, allegedly. The thing with Devils is while they can't lie, they can bend the truth. Selling one's Soul is not done lightly in the Forgotten Realms. Denied your proper afterlife no matter which god you worship or your alignment, and condemned to a miserable existence as cannon fodder for the never-ending Blood War between Demons and Devils.
Constantly using the Tadpole/Worm allows it to get more easily invested in your delicious brain, remember the wording whenever we saw Swen us the worm "sated". As in the beast is slowly eating more and more of you the more you use it. Nothing major at first it is a little thing after all. But the more you use it and the longer it stays in your head, the more and more it will take.
However, you deal with it is on you. Sell your soul to a Devil? Look for a Githyanki creche? Look for a powerful cleric to heal you? Find a Wish spell? Tick-tock, tick-tock.

I don't see any meaningful benefit to not using the tadpole. I brought up this very question a couple of months ago. Seems like playing evil gets you a lot of nice benefits, whereas playing good is only about you getting to pat yourself on the back for having been good but you get nothing else. Or at least this is my hypothesis. We'll have to wait and see.

The benefits of being a "bad' person are often much more tangible than being a "good" person. The benefits of being good are often reputation, self-satisfaction, and a slightly better world.

I would be willing to bet there are going to be pretty serious consequences to using the tadpole. I would be willing to bet that after even 1 use, certain dialogue option will be removed permanently. Not sure what the effects of that will be...but if I am right who knows how many conversation branches have been sheered, how many potential side-quests lost, etc.

This is just an example of how I can see this having an effect later on in the game. If the main protagonists of the game really are the mind flayers, then in the fight against the mind flayers there may be certain guilds/groups/whatever looking to recruit but if you have any portion of the tadpole left over in your brain, you might not be trusted to join their group. It could be that one use of the tadpole ability during gameplay increased the CD by +2 or something, and maybe 4 or 5 uses makes you ineligible to that group or something. That would make sense to me. May not be in the game, obviously, but something along those lines is what I am imagining for consequences.

Also reminded me a lot of KOTOR. Force persuade was a lot of fun (although this is even more grounded in well known star wars setting).

I could see very much the reward in not using the tadpole powers. Not choosing the easy (bad) path, not being controled by another force but stay yourself, is kind of a challenge.

genuinly of the opinion that beeing good should be just hardmode.
beeing evil should be the easier option.

beeing truly good is hard. it requires to be altruistic and not to pursue what helps only yourself

I think that is really how the game is going to be naturally; choosing any other option besides the tadpole is going to be a harder DC check. Basically, take the easy route and chance becoming a mind-flayer quicker or take the hard-route and delay the ceremorphosis a bit longer. At least that's how I see it until they give any more info on that.

I think that even Evil PC will want to resist the tadpole. Take Lae'zel or Shadowheart, for example. A Githyanki warrior and a Cleric of Shar, both evil and both want to be rid of the tadpole for their own respective reasons. The Githyanki hate the Mindflayers and yet they still want to conquer the multiverse. Shar has been one of the evilest gods in the Forgotten Realms, certainly one of the oldest, and she wants people to worship her. The Mindflayers don't revere any gods, so no worship.
Don't forget that traditionally evil rarely sees itself as being evil. Devils, for instance, see themselves as the great defenders of existence, keeping the neverending hordes of demons from the Abyss at bay so that we all can live.
The tadpole isn't just a threat to our own lives, it is a threat to one's very identity and personhood. Not only are you killed by this thing, but your own body is also twisted and mutilated into an aberration that will continue to plague the realms, everything that you were, everything that you could be, gone forever and all that is left is a brain-eating monster.

Maybe the game is designed so you can get away with using the tadpole one or two times, more than that and....well just don't. I wonder if the hit will be per character or per party. If each character could get away with two shots of this tadpole that would make eight uses.

Swen could use it a few times before a message popped up saying that the tadpole reacted. I think those messages are the indication that the progression has advanced slightly. So you can use it, maybe twice without it advancing a stage, but the third use tips it over. We don't know how many stages there are.

in yesterday stream the use of the tadpole option seems very tempting.. it usually has easy DC checks. also swen actually mentioned it is related to evil playstyle? i'm not entirely sure.

from Svens most recent interview it sounds like its a "Dark side" option rather than a failure state.
we also know theres a cult using the tadpoles to mindcontroll people so maybe its something in the vein of becoming an evil puppet master so to speak.

I still find it odd that mindfalyers rather than demons or literaly any other evil thing in dnd is the "evil temptation" angle, but ill see where it goes.

if you can actually become a mindflayer (which makes very little sense) then id be positiveley surprised

I think its use will be like the slayer in BG2... the more you use it, the more you descend into evil (or a rep hit in BG2).

In the recent gamplay video (#2), you see Lae’zel feel the tadpol getting stronger and her getting a bit dizzy after using it about five times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSc17QXxfyU&feature=youtu.be&t=4998

Who knew that allowing a literal brain-eating parasite access to one's brain would have such unfortunate side effects.