Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Backstories for "Tav"

But you still are bothered by the fact that you had to choose them? O_o

Well ... i gues its up to your headcannon then, to answer why your character did it.
I would most likely in such situation tell to myself that my character was just testing that NPC.

In order for a background story to make sense it needs to be integrated into the conversations throughout the game. Having too many background stories to choose from would likely make things too complex for the designers and most likely to fail. But having no background story at all feels a bit poor. On the other hand, having one fixed background story could make it hard to justify certain races and classes, unless very elegantly written.

Before we complain too much about this, maybe we should wait for the full release. There are some hints that BG3 will link to the story in BG2 in ways we have yet to discover. Perhaps we have just yet to experience the background story of the main character (and companions), idk.

Once release happened it will be too late though...

Also, we don't need or want a fully fleshed out background story as has been stated multiple times. What is asked for is having a few key points that show up in various dialogues, especially a way to replace the Balduran tag with a tag appropriate to certain backgrounds (e.g. Outlander).

Perhaps the backgrounds would be easier to use, if you got to choose two skills from a short list.

Entertainer for example gives performance and acrobatics. Acrobatics is a complete waist for my Strength based Valor Bard.


I want to pick this background, but only Urchin and Sailor have two skills that I ultimately want to choose....feel me?

It's the hard knock life.

I remember this too, but I always just assumed that Baldurian was there as a placeholder.

I am still not sure how I feel about this. I'd prefer a more of the blank slate character so that like many people here I could create my own background, or at least for the game to acknowledge a background selected at the CC. But for better storytelling I can understand that they might need to stick to some sort of predetermined background and personality to make Tav as engaging as other origin characters - a point that's been excessively discussed here on the forums as well.

That said I've been recently replaying DOS2 with a custom character, and I think they've already done a far better job with custom Tav in the EA. Custom Tav seems far more interesting and fun than DOS2 custom character, that is all over the place and lacks individuality. So hopefully in the final game Tav will be more fleshed out, and have more background options to select from?

This is taking the thread off the topic of Backstories. That being said, I share your issue. As I request the same in the past, I'm just going to copy-paste :


Note : since Larian has started making the world react a bit to our Background (through the Background-dependent gain of Inspiration points), the above suggestion does not render the Background variable completely useless. However, it does allow players to roleplay their character as they want.


Coming back to the thread's topic a bit, I want to emphasise that Backstories and Background are very different things. Many Backstories can be associated with a given Background, and a given Backstory can work with multiple Backgrounds.

So I very much hope that Larian doesn't plan to use our chose Background to inform the Backstory of our Custom Character. Then again, it's largely because I hope that Larian will not impose us a Backstory, however sketched and vague.

For the purpose of receiving more efficient and valuable feedback, I really, really wish Larian communicated. And told us what is Placeholder, what is Bug, what is Working As Intended, what is Not Gonna Change, what is Being Worked On, what is Under Consideration, etc.


I'm not sure it has that much to do with better story-telling. Rather, I think it's more a matter of "making the PC be as central to the story, important and cool, as the companions". And for this, my general opinion is that people who want their PC to be as special as the other companions can play an Origin Character. Alternatively, if they choose a Custom Character, they can select the/one of Larian's pre-determined Backstories. But even if Larian writes only one, I hope that Custom Character can choose their Backstory between : Pre-written One, and None (i.e. Blank).

This 100 times.


I think the important of PC to the plot is a little different to the backgrounds. I had in mind what Dragon Age Origins had done with their Origin stories when I wrote about storytelling. The world sometimes reacted differently whether you played a human warrior Cousland, or a Dalish archer Mahariel, or a Dwarf noble Cadash, and different options opened depending on your background. But then the game made you a Grey Warden and you were central to the story at the leader of Grey wardens in Ferelden. Your backgrounds gave a good flair to the story but they did not overwrite your importance as a Grey Warden leader.

Coming back to BG3, we still don't know what makes Tav important. We knew in DOS2 that everyone was a Godwoken, but unfortunately the custom character was the weakest because everyone else had an additional backstory and personality, heck Lohse and Fane had their "special" secrets. I agree that so far all BG3 companions seem cooler, but personally I like playing as Tav because I found their writing for custom character more interesting in BG3 regardless of their background.

Drath Said: This is taking the thread off the topic of Backstories.

Whoops!

OK in online tabletop we get to present our character and the DM helps us flush things out (Even backgrounds, that can get a hand-wave to change one skill...maybe one wild-card skill to replace any one skill in your total line-up).

I like the idea of an "invent yourself" software wizard (in character creation) that lets you make some manageable choices. Something to compliment the players own personal "theater of the mind", and not break that immersion.

Heck you can even have some fill in the blanks.

Greetings Snuggit of the Deep Gnome Collective. We are most pleased to meet the Slayer of fowl smelling purple back mushroom pickers.

...hmmm, you get the idea.

To be combat/skillchecks effective ...
Or to have character that is faithfull of their story ...

That is the question that bothers people since DnD was born.