Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Skills in Character creation

Hi!
I discovered a problem in character creation skills.

I made en Elf Sailor
He got Perception as race AND Background.
In the rules D&D5, if you have a Skill x2, you can choose another skill to replace it (from all the list it seems).
In BG3, you only loose 1 Skill training!!!

So be carefull of "cross-skills" to give another for exchange

I don't know about "picking a replacement", but if nothing else I think the UI should highlight if you are picking a redundant skill.

PHB p. 125 (section about Proficiencies gained when choosing your background): "If a character would gain the same proficiency from two different sources, he or she can choose a different proficiency of the same kind (skill or tool) instead."

Hmmm, I managed to miss this. Thank you for sharing this information!

I wasn't questioning if it was true, just pointing that an UI highlight would already solve a lot.
"Other games that won't be named" do it, for instance.

It read like you weren't sure about the rule, so I thought I'd drop the pertinent text. It's very easy to overlook.

Also, I fully agree - the UI here doesn't do what it needs to do (and not because it can't be done).

I really hope i could playing a Sailor Elf without loosing a Skill training

Very few classes get many skills, and proficiency bonuses are vital to success, so I think I would go so far as to have BG 3 completely prohibit you from taking a redundant skill. Since the Background is ONLY for two extra skills, the Background should be something you can change - or at least customize from the skills page.

The game should also, of course let you customize your background (within the limits of what the game's version of the background allows). This is important because some skills are available in multiple backgrounds, while others are found in no PHB background at all. (Three different backgrounds give proficiency in Athletics, but none give proficiency in Investigation or Nature.)



You're lucky in that the other proficiency is Athletics, so you've got some choice. For the moment, since there is no customization and no story attached to backgrounds, pick a different background. If you want to keep Athletics you can choose Soldier, and imagine that he was a soldier in the Navy. Or Outlander and get Survival as your second proficiency.

Hey Aqualonde, thanks for pitching in!

This issue has been brought up before, but every fresh report is one more voice, so dn't eb discouraged ^.^

If you (or anyone else) is interested, a larger, more detailed thread discussed this point, as part of a more in-depth break down on the way character creation works in the game at the moment (pre druid patch, if I recall, but nothing has actually been improved since then anyway).

You can have a read of that thread Here!

For what it's worth, I think that Background is one of the weaker parts of the 5e rules. If Larian is looking for something to homebrew, that would be a good place to put some attention.

If not for the fact that they've commented specifically to say that they are not going to be doing anything with backgrounds because it's too much work. I wish I was exaggerating or making that up, but I'm not. People wanted backgrounds to do more and be more, and their official answer was that making backgrounds doing anything other than granting a couple of proficiencies was too big a task and they weren't doing it.

Bummer. I'm sure it would be a fair amount of work, but it's not like this is a small project. It's just a little frustrating to see all of the house rules breaking things that work well, but they're not touching something that would actually benefit from some creative reworking.

Thats just disappointing tbh. I was hoping Backgrounds could be a way to make the Player Character more unique by giving them something like how every one of our companions have something special.

No, they said they aren't going to take backgrounds into account in dialogs and plot, because that's a lot of work plus taking away player agency. As in "That's how your character became a Folks hero".
No one said anything mechanics-wise so far.

That I am fine with cause they already have the challenge of accounting for spells, class, race, and other tags in dialogue and have taken on the challenge to give voices to corpses and animals. Not accounting for chosen background with dialogue I am fine with as a tradeoff.

It makes sense that Backgrounds here are only used for proficiencies. If you look at what Backgrounds actually do in the PHB, it's largely just flavor anyway - not really any mechanics associated with it. Many of the features are DM-dependent and situational anyway. How often will we be needing passage on a boat in this game? Probably not a lot, and even then it isn't likely to cost any money because that could soft-lock the player in a videogame.

They should still add a Custom background which lets you take any 2 skills and one tool proficiency (if there will be tools).

Depending on the campaign or DM the effects granted by a background could actually be "a lot" for the roleplay. For example an Entertainer being able to get free room and board for entertaining people can be a good way to save the party money and roleplay how the party is covered. And those backgrounds that grant a "contact" can create entire questlines or be an invaluable resource for learning things. It is all in how it is handled and what campaign they are in.

Background could be used for a lot of things other than just tweaking dialog options. A few ideas:
-Starting money/equipment

-Who you know/have a relationship with when you get to Baldur's Gate. A criminal might already have a job from the thieves' guild. An entertainer might have a rival to face off with. An artisan might have support from their guild. This isn't something that has to impact every single dialog throughout the game, but might give you a personalized NPC/mini-quest when you get to a later stage of the game. Maybe the player can define a bit about the relationship through a dialog just before they get to the city, where someone in the party asks what sort of life they have to return to or if they miss something in particular or something like that. Something like this might go a long way towards making custom PCs feel less flat without having to address every dialog in the game.

-This game badly needs to do a better job of teaching people how to play the game. A day-in-the-life tutorial before your abduction, with flavor based on your background would help it to feel like you are inhabiting a character with a life rather than someone who was essentially born on the mindflayer vessel.

Wrote some of this long ago https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=738010

Sure. In a pen and paper campaign with a human DM.

But since every element of content put into BG 3 is going to be pre-generated by the developers, that would be a lot of work for a handful of options which couldn't come close to satisfying the possible range of players ideas for their character backstory.

What is the Hermit's "Discovery" feature in BG 3? That one literally is a big shrug and "work with your DM to figure out what it is". Some features might have possible uses, others few to none. So the better option is to just do what they did and leave the background as empty as possible.