Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Which Origin Character are you looking forward to playing?

It's nice that you don't assume you need to be the group's leader. Unfortunately, the empirical fact of the game is that you ARE. There is no avoiding this and no circumventing it. You ARE the leader, whether you want to be or not. What you say goes, everyone agrees to follow you unless you specifically drive them away, the party is your party. The game cannot progress without you deciding what to do. So, as much as you many not feel like you need to be, that doesn't change the fact that you are. you can imagine subtext of party decision and agreement, but you have to put that there yourself because the game isn't doing it - the game is making your character the Boss.

Relying on meta-game "You're here to form a party and travel together, so do it already" and "They obey you because you're the PC" is not good enough, not by a long shot, and it never will be. In a video game context, however, they cannot make you Not the leader, because I'm sure you can imagine how well it would go down when the party discusses what to do, you state your opinion, others overrule you and then you lose control of the whole party and are left on your own, because THEY have decided to go to the hag's lair next, and you just have to follow or f-off... yeah, that's not going to work. So, by necessity of being a single-player video game, you are the party leader, both in-universe and out, and there's no way round that, realistically.


In my games my Pc is never named Tav, and rarely has any kind of a dick to swing around at all, thanks.

In your game, Lae DOES do exactly what you say, and your Tav DOES have complete control over the conversation, which will not and cannot progress until you tell Lae what to do, and she WILL do as you tell her to.

Unless we're talking here about our ideal styles of fixing this sequence and the design in general... in which case, it sounds as though in your writing, this plays out more as a non-interacting cutscene, that maybe gives you a chance to interject forcefully if you want to at some point ,and thence bring about the fallout that comes from that, on both sides most likely... to which I say sure, fine; as long as it makes sense in universe and is also still engaging and mechanically tenable for the player to play, that's great!

BUT... and here's the problem with running not-the-leader... but we still come back to the problem of you, with your PC, still functionally calling all the shots and deciding where everyone goes and what fights you pick or don't. The only way you can run a game where your PC is not the party leader and final decision-maker for the group is one where when the party reaches a decision about your next objective, you are then Locked In to following that objective and not deviating from it until the party decides what to do next... and that can mean at times that you can, as the player of the game, decide you want to follow a particular quest or objective, get overruled by your other party members, and be disallowed from following it... and that just isn't going to fly in a single player video game.

If you don't face that problem with lock-ins and overruling, though, you're left with the steep immersion dissonance and scene break of having the party decide together to go left, and then, following your PC's control,. going right to explore something else... and then all following you anyway, even though they just all agreed to do something completely different. However you splice it, you end up with serious mechanical and immersive problems if the player character is not functionally the party leader in universe.

You may not feel that, by character, you need to be the leader - and that's fine; in fact many people don't. My own characters are rarely leader material at all, and often are not the sorts to be assertive enough to insist on it in any way... unfortunately there is a reason why the PC being the party leader has been treated as a functional necessity within the writing of these games for just about as long as they've been being made, and it's not actually a power-fulfilment or ego-based reason.

As for 'My' resolution to this... no... you mischaracterise me. That's not generally the way it should work. The way it generally works is that the Pc has a reason to make the choices they do, and others follow because they deem that quest important enough to see through with you - the implication being that no matter what others decide to do, you're still going to be doing what you feel you have to, one way or another. It's not about leading other people at all - that's just a consequence and a side-effect. By all sharing the same identical reason, without the PC being set apart from them in any way, there is no reason for them to follow us if they think their idea for a cure is better, and people have pointed out the dissonance this causes all over the first act of the game, repeatedly.


Not quite, for the most part - rather it's people feeling like the game establishes the personality and behaviours of these characters very strongly, and we know them, and who they are... so players who are interested in being genuinely immersed in their game space will end up feeling compelled to act as they would and make the choices that they do, or else fee like they're violating/rewriting/retconning/AU-ing that character, and for many folks that's not a comfortable feeling, and detracts heavily from the game experience... but so does feeling compelled to make choices they don't want to at the same time. This is why making strongly characterised characters exist as companions, but also be playable as well, is ultimately a bad move that hamstrings itself in execution. Maybe it'll limp to the finish line despite that, and get some cheers from people... but it will be despite, not because of it.


Er... yes? Not a whole back-story, not a defined history like these origin characters, but a tie; an element that intrinsically connects your character to the story that is about to play out. The reason why this is you, here. Yes. Something that we didn't likely choose or pick, because it is the pre-defined driving force that will set us, and not someone else, on this adventure. That's what most folks asking for something like this are wanting.

In NWN2, for example, you were the survivor, the one being sought, and another reason besides that you as a character didn't know about yourself (but it's important to note for the conversation here - before you knew about the big reason, there were other smaller reasons that held up long enough in the early game to get you to the big one. BG3 doesn't have any of those yet, even if there is a big reason waiting to be revealed later). And that was GREAT. Everything else about your character - who you were, what you were like, who you liked, the kinds of decisions you generally make, whether you were a shut-in in your youth or a terrible flirt, all of those things, completely up to you to define for your character as you saw fit, and some of them had actual impact upon the story as it unfolded later, depending on what you defined for yourself when given the opportunity... But there was one element that was intrinsically out of our control that tied us to the plot, and was a Potent enough reason to mean that we were necessarily left to have to lead and make the decisions for the group (or at least for ourselves knowing that our companions would follow), even if we didn't want to and weren't a leader. It's just one element that is a strong enough element to hold up to the in-universe questions of "Why is it you, and not someone else? Why must it be you?", no matter who else you are or choose to be.