i'm having a hard time understanding what you're saying. It sounds like you're just saying what we currently have is good, which if you're fine with, great, but some of us are not, hence this discussion and trying to solve the "problem"
Not at all what I'm saying. I'll try to explain it better with an exemple.
1) Solo playthrough - Playing a custom character :
Tav is the only one to have dreams and powers.
2) Solo playthrough - Playing an origin character :
Your origin character is the only one to have dreams and powers (+ his side quest and dialogs answer)
3) Multiplayer : Every character has the dreams, custom or origin characters. Or only the host have the dreams.
TBH I don't care, I won't ever play this game in MP.
except that it wouldn't make sense. I mean, all companions have the parasite, it's obvious so far that whatever is happening in the dreams, it's one of the results of it. So, what you're saying is that they should rewrite their story to make Tav the only important special kid and the rest... the rest.
There are ways to make Tav interesting without the need to diminish the companions in this regard, for once, I think a nice solution would be the actual backgrounds, change them in a way that what we choose will give us special dialogues to show some sort of connection to the past of our custom character. If I choose Soldier, give me soldier dialogues, etc. This is just an idea I had ofc, but I think they'll come up with something in time. At least I hope so.
I don't need my Tav to be the next Inquisitor or MC where everything is around them, where it's frustrating that the world cannot spin if I don't give them the final word. I actually like that the companions are so important to the story, and sometimes even more than my MC. Again, I just hope they give the custom character the same attention as the Origin ones.
The backgrounds idea wouldn't be terrible, but the problem is that Larian would naturally just add those dialogue options to their Origin characters too. Why wouldn't they? It does not appear that Larian grasps the not exactly suttle difference between "playing your own character" the way you would in a table setting versus "here's our bullshit pregen, complete with background, goals, dreams, aspirations, emotional baggage, and questionable life choices, this is now your character", which just alienates any pretense of actually role-playing.
The only time this whole "this is your character" approach actually works, IMO, is when the preset character is ambiguous enough that you still get to define that character. The Witcher series works because Geralt is a very grey character and all the options he can choose are all fairly plausible for him, but they will all have consequences, leading to more plausible choices and more consequences. PST works because TNO's current incarnation is a fresh one that the player defines while learning about fixed incarnations that came before. But doing something like that with these excessively rigid Origin characters is quite impractical, because either one acts completely at odds with the character as it was defined or else one just does an adventure game with Larian's protagonist party. And that feels wrong on multiple levels.
One, D&D is about rolling your own character. There's nothing "mine" about Larian's posse and the only way for me to make "my" character is to be more or less in the background of the Larianites.
And wrongness number two, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 were always about one character and that character's journey and eventual fate. Then comes Baldur's Gate 3 with what feels like an MMO plot, everybody has a special tadpole and let's all have team-up at Baldur's Gate and head out for a raid boss. No protagonist at all. Or everybody is the protagonist. It's a completely unfocused plot that isn't about a single character's development and impact on the world and which isn't meant to be "play YOUR adventure" in style at all. It's more of a "play Swen's adventure with Swen's characters".
At the risk of sounding a bit whiny, I find it quite aggravating that Larian wants to make a game about a mixed bunch of Larianite misfits rather than tell Tav's story about the journey that Tav had to go on and the people Tav met. Should Tav be at the center of Tav's story? Yeah, that would have seemed like a sensible choice. But not for Larian, apparently.
