I'm not talking about characters leaving because you're pushing them away - I'm talking about them making their own choices because you haven't given them any reason to be there. There's nothing special about your character in this game. Sure, you want to deal with the tadpole, but there are a whole bunch of people in the same situation - the game gives us very little explanation for why they don't form their own group and leave you sitting on your hands.
In Torment: Tides of Numenera, when any recruitable characters aren't actively in your party, they go do things that make sense in their lives. They go home or they go to work or they go hang out at the docks and look for a ship to travel on. They have lives outside of just following you around, and they live them. And if you change your mind and want them to come with you again, you can go find them and try to recruit them. And when they are following you around, they have a reason to follow you specifically.
In BG3, there are a bunch of characters in a similar situation, but none of them has any reason to follow you rather than, say Lae'zel, Shadowheart, or Astarion. The idea of them sitting around like puppies, waiting for you to come home is ridiculous. They don't feel like characters trying to live their lives; they feel like mercenaries that you've hired to guard your camp. Except mercenaries get paid, so they actually have a reason to be there.
The issue of the camp is separate, but not unrelated. There's no story reason for it to exist, but plenty of reasons for it not to.
Of the ones who head to the camp, I think many/all of them have some pretty good reasons to follow you right now.
1) Laezel, Wyll, Shadowheart, Astarion, Gale, any future Origin Companions: You are all in the same situation, there is an Illithid tadpole in your heads. You are pooling your resources and abilities looking for a cure and overcoming stuff and all of you are far from home. The player character over time becoming the defacto leader of this oddball group brought together by shared experience and the need to overcome this overwhelming issue as a group. If one of you finds a cure they all will want it and working as a group is beneficial so the camp is acting as your home base.
Not Companions but people that can be in the camp as far as I know:
2) Volo: You saved his life and he is a man enthralled by researching monsters and by journeying with you he can see a lot more.
3) Halsim: A druid who is very knowledgeable of your very affliction and has shown himself willing to leave the grove.
4) Minthara: It is a war effort and a sort of alliance between the two of you to further the goals of the Absolute.
5) The talkative Skeleton: You kinda woke him up and there are hints to his identity, also the possibility of him having to follow whoever answers the question satisfactory via prophecy or whatever magic keeps him the way he is.
From what they said the last time. Your party could be set after Act 1, so you don't have to worry them staying at camp playing uno.
This concerns me cause I do not want people who are not in my party during X event to die like in another game I won't mention cause spoilers. BG series tends to have large amounts of party members available, and in past games they'd go off to the place they like to or just stay where dismissed, and I want to be able to interact with a large amount of characters and not be locked to the same 3 companions the entire game with personality less mercs being my only other option. So right now the camp serves that function of being a place where I can interact with a bunch of party members.
