Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Tadpole and its Removal

I finished my first play-through of Early Access about a week ago. I'm not sure if this particular question has come up, but I think there may be a plot-hole in ways to remove tadpoles. I came across Edowin and Nettie (who tells the PC about the dissected drow). In both instances, the tadpole crawled out of their eye after their deaths.

My question is why doesn't my party realize that this is a viable solution for removing tadpoles?

There are no game parameters that prevent us from killing other 'True Souls' or other 'True Souls' killing us. Why can't we all basically meet around the campfire, make a 'murder pact' (possibly with Halsin as intermediary), and off each other one at a time, have Halsin collect each tadpole --then resurrect each other via the Revivify scrolls or the Talkative Skeleton?

The only character I see having a problem with this is Astarion, since the benefits outweigh the bad (currently).

I could see at this point, if this became a quest path, that the baddies in the Moonrise Towers would start sending their lackeys to collect the party and re-insert tadpoles. Or the party wages war on Moonrise Towers to stop the tadpole invasion.

Have I missed an explanation in-game to counter this tadpole removal idea?

Self preservation i presume?

Some players had the same questions than you a few months/weeks ago.

I don't think there is an explanation in the game and I'm not sure we'll ever have one... But we only played a small part of the story

When a player character dies in combat, the tadpole doesn't creep out either.
Those things somehow KNOW that its host is going to be resurrected.

Everyone could be ressurected.
In BG3 it only cost 200 gold coins and you don't need to be proficient with magic to use those scrolls

I'm pretty sure that's because this plot-hole never occurred to Larian's writers, so there is no explanation.

...huh, seems like a plothole to me. Hope Larian gives this some thought and addresses it now it's been pointed out. Good catch. Even some throwaway dialog about how the PCs are super special true souls extra bonded with their tadpoles would probably help this feel less bad, but actually thinking through an explanation or redoing some death mechanics would be great.

That said, I don't remember tadpoles coming out of some other true souls either. Does Minthara have a tadpole when you kill her?

Well, normally death and dying is supposed to be a big deal in DnD and lore-wise in Forgotten Realms. The very cheap 200 gold revives kind of cheapen this a LOT. It is not neccesarily a plothole (as you would not just kill someone to cure an affliction like that just to raise them, a normally VERY taxing and draining experience for the soul), but it is more the case where it clashes hard with how available raises and ressurections are and how much this has cheapened death.

As a comparison to 5e from a mechanic point of view, Revifiy as a level 3 spell has a 1 minute limit before a body cannot be raised from the dead anymore AND it requires a diamond worth 300 gold. Raise dead as a level 5 spell (so much higher already and much less available) has a 10 day limit but requires a diamond worth 500 gold. Oh, and an hour cast time, so an hour of uninterrupted chanting and rituals and stuff. The better ressurections are likely beyond the level cap limit but are even more expensive.

In earlier editions, you would even lost exp for being raised from the dead, or require checks to actually succeed. Coming back from the dead is a huge drain and intense journey for the soul and is meant to carry weight. Dying in BG3 is just a case of 200 gold really, the Phoenix Down idea that you can just stock up on. It is a game-mechanics decision that kind of ignores lore and actual raising of the dead in dnd.

So it is less a plothole and more a result of a change in mechanics by Larian really

It's not a plot hole. It's a very simple rule that should be obvious - tadpoles only leave bodies that cannot be revived.

Did you try using a revivify scroll on Edowin or the dissected drow? You can't. You also can't ask the undead guy at your camp to revive them.

So tadpoles only leave bodies when there is no chance for them to complete their task with that body. Otherwise they wait.

Even if it were that obvious (it isn't), they could certainly support it with some dialog in the game. Have Nettie talk about how they tried to revive the drow to interrogate, but were unable to.

That is a fact, yes. But according to which logic does one know, if a dead body can be resurrected?
Is it the time passing? Edowin died in front of us, so time seems not to be the issue.
We can resurrect fallen companions even after days (or at least after a couple long rests. How much time really passed is impossible to say, because the game does not keep track of time). So time of death has nothing to do with it.

Is it how someone dies, to which injuries, poisons or diseases?
My companions died to all sorts of physical, elemental & magical injuries. The tadpole did not mind, obviously. And Edowin died due to wounds he got from an owl bear. So nothing "unusual".

So if it is no plothole, then what logic explains, how the tadpole knows the body can be revived or not?

Gut and Ragzlin have tadpoles that try to escape, and if you're quick and accurate (or are sharp with jumping back into turn-based as soon as combat ends), you can kill their tadpoles as well.

Minthara does NOT have an escaping tadpole like the others, however, Minthara is also built and coded like a recruitable companion - when you take her gear she end sup stripped to her underwear, for example.

Thanks for the tip - I hadn't noticed that before. Of course, I tend to kill both of them with explosive seas of fire, so perhaps the tadpole dies anyway...

I know this would be a bit counter to the way standard D&D is designed, but I feel like this is a plot hole that would be solved by saying the party members are just incapacitated in some way, not dead, so that it makes sense why they can be revived so easily and why the tadpoles stick around.

Maybe they can introduce a permadeath mode to the game where your party members actually die when they're killed and you see the little tadpole crawling away from the corpse. XD

It would not be too difficult to invent a reason why the tadpole prevents "real soul-death" and could linger on for a long while in a mangled coprse to nable a kind of pseudo-resurrection.
Like the tadpole can change his host into a tardigrade husk.
But what seems far more difficult is to make this happen only to the PC"s, whereas all the other (non-IC) true souls lose their tadpole a short while after being slain.

The ease of resurrection also conflicts in a major way with the storyline of the necromancer's book of Thay. This powerful red wizard struggled hard with arcane magics and never succeeded to resurrect a close one, whereas all the PC's just start the game with a perfectly working resurrection scroll.

I think it would be satisfatory to not even bother with an excuse. PCs just get the privelege of being KO'd instead of killed so they can be pseudo-resurrected. PCs already have the privilege of "death saves". This would just be an extension of that because it's a video game and permadeath would just lead to save-scumming with most players.

You can create a narrative reason for the death privilege (eg your idea of deathproof tadpoles). But I think having an excuse is optional. Whether there's a narrative reason or not, they're not going to fool anyone into thinking it's not just a convenient video game mechanic.

Either way if we can avoid explicitly saying that player characters die, it would be better. I mean, setting aside the tadpole problem, I feel like literally dying several times a day would have to be quite traumatic.

Maybe that dwarf brain (or other organ) was damaged so much it was beyond possible ressurection ...

What i find more interesting is that you see tadpole crawling out only for him ... and you have option to kill only his tadpole ...

You can also kill Gut tadpole, but without cutscene.

I must have missed that, thanks

I wonder if Rag has ignored me... I literally just mentioned that when someone else asked a few posts up...