Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Companions mixed fan base (some spoilers)

"It's possible."

Anyone could be lying about anything. We could be a giant pink elephant dreaming all of this. Everyone could actually be rebel illithids in disguise. This might actually be a giant roleplay LARP using high-tech holo-deck effects on a spaceship, with everyone present merely playing roles in a fantasy setting. All of these things are possible. In order for a supposition of one of these things to be fairly worth entertaining, however, there must be evidence to support it or to point in its direction, and it must be reasonable.

It's possible that Astarion could be Cyric, secretly using a foppish vampire guise to spy on Selune, who is using the guise of a brainwashed Shar cultist, and she can't help making a mockery of doing so because she thinks it's funny. Gale might actually be Azuth who is also here to keep an eye on Selune, whom he actually believes is really Shar, because he's concerned about his only recently restored divinity and he wants to make sure that nothing untoward happens with the Shadow-weave... Meanwhile it's possible that Torm tagged along because it seemed like there was some kind of god convention going on and he was not about to miss a good fight. It's possible his real motive for pretending to be the famous Blade of Frontiers is that he's concerned about Vlakith's reasons for intruding upon the material plane and suspects it's something to do with an attempt to capture Azuth's divinity for herself - it's happened before, and if Asmodeus can do it, so can she, or so he worries she thinks. It's possible that, in reality, Vlakith is only venturing to the material plane because someone stole her phylactery, sealed it inside a shielding reliquary, and sent it away; she's found out that Selune has it now, but doesn't know how to safely get it back and recover it yet, because she doesn't know the how to open the device, yet. None of them are sure why the party is being led by a mortal, except that none of them wants to actually draw too much attention to themselves, but they are all interested in getting on the mortal's good side, just to make sure there's no suspicion cast on them. They're all doing a pretty rotten job of it. The real secret comes out only at the end - the mortal isn't actually a mortal, either, it's actually Bhaal, Bane and Myrkul who are temporarily cohabiting a single mortal life (of which Jergal is curious about their opinions on the value of...), but at the last dialogue option we'll get to pick exactly what their reason for doing so actually was.

It's Possible. Is it being possible a reasonable grounds to hold suspicion towards these characters? No, it's not, because nothing presented thus far supports the idea in a reasonable way.

Anyone who treated these characters with suspicion and claimed that there was something sus about them, and that they were suspicious and leery of them... and then said that their suspicion was on the grounds that it was possible that the above was actually the case, would get raised eyebrows and not taken very seriously. Most would assume they were joking, and ask what the real reason for their suspicion was. This is because most sensible people understand that "It's Possible", if it can be used to justify a particular case for suspicion against someone, can equally be used to justify any amount of suspicion about any one and everyone over anything and everything.

So, yes, it's possible Gale is deceiving us in the entirety, and that the majority of what he has told us so far is entirely false. It's Possible. Just as virtually anything at all is possible, when you bring "we might be being deceived" into the equation. Literally anything I could think of to suggest becomes possible with the simple caveat of "But everything else we might be being told might be false!". It's possible, but not reasonable as grounds to treat him suspiciously, for the same reason that the above paragraph is not reasonable grounds for treating the party as a whole suspiciously.

In a normal game of D&D, there's a tool that exists for players to work out when they are being lied to... it's the insight skill. We get to use it, sometimes... when people lie to us or deceive us in game, we often get a chance to discover this and act on it.

It is made painfully obvious to us at several point in the game that we cannot keep secrets from our companions because they know via the tadpole anyway. We are rarely allowed to lie to them directly, and even in the few cases where we can lie about something, we get immediately called out as lying, with no checks or rolls. Our companions, on the other hand, are allowed to deceive us over any number of things, and it's a coin flip whether we're allowed to find out with an insight check or not. We often are not, and must simply accept what is said to us even if we the player know we are being lied to. Yes, I can supply instances of this as citation if needed, but I simply do not have the energy to do so right now, so instead I'm just going to ask you to take on good faith with reference to my sterling record on these forums for never stating anything as fact about the contents of the game that I cannot also back up, that they exist in game and are there.

So, yes, it's 'possible' that Gale is completely deceiving us, because of this unfair imbalance... he might well be allowed to lie and deceive us about everything without ever having to make any checks or rolls and without us ever being given even the slightest, barest wisp of an opportunity to find out, not even when we probe his mind and successfully read his thoughts without getting detected... it's possible, just as the spaceship holo-deck supposition is 'possible'. It's possible that he is carefully curating every scrap of everything we get from him, including the insights and successes - that when we succeed he deliberately shows us something different, that he had pre-prepared, compared to showing us nothing, or something lesser, if we didn't do quite as well, which he had also pre-prepared just for us... it's possible that his entire emotional state and the fluctuations in it that we feel and cause are entirely fabricated, controlled with deliberate curation because he's able to literally control how fast his heart beats and align that with the emotions he's decided that he's going to pretend to be feeling, when he wants to, and it's all part of that carefully constructed facade. And that he's devised a way to use powerful magic to emulate the effects of having an aberrant ilithid tadpole in his mind, including letting other people study it and gaining ilithid psionic powers from it... and that he's able to maintain all of that while being reduced in power to the equivalent of a fresh-faced adventurer... and is as weak and fragile as one, enough to get killed by a stray goblin arrow... and is only exerting a small fraction of his magical capabilities in order to not draw suspicion... and will even go so far as to let himself and others be killed in order to maintain this facade... And that he's also so absolutely perfectly duplicitous in the extreme that he's able to do all of this without letting even the tiniest wisp of any of it ever be detectable to anyone at all, ever... It's possible. Is it reasonable to say "I find him suspicious because that (the aforementioned) is possible."? No, it's not.

So, if you want to say that you are suspicious of Gale, and you think something is off about him... and your reasoning is that "It's possible that he's lying to us about everything", then as above, I'm going to raise my eyebrow at you, and not take you very seriously... because that's a pink elephant dream case. I'm going to think you're joking, and I'm going to say to you "Yes but literally everyone could be lying about virtually everything, that's a permanent given, and you're not equally suspicious of everyone all the time - you singled out this individual..." And then I'm going to ask you, "So seriously, what's your real reason for feeling suspicious of him?" And the funny thing is, it could be as simple as "I'm just naturally suspicious of that 'type' of person"... and that'd be fine! It'd be a genuine legitimate explanation... Again, sorry if this seems harsh or snarky, I'm too tired.