We must come out of the game space and say: "Okay, we can see that the tadpole isn't actually on a time limit and we're safe from that, so we can explore." - and we must step out of game to do that
Must we tho?
(…)
So basicaly once we lay down for the first night sleep ... IF we are still aware of oureself ... we *know* (without stepping out of our character) that our Ceremorphosis is alterned and time is not as precious as it would be with regular thing.
Also we can presume that something eating our brain alive would be quite painfull proces.
You should read an entire post, as Niara answers to your question in the post:
because no actual person in real life, finding themselves in this situation would simply "Trust" that they were not going to be transformed body and soul by this thing that annihilates a person's entire existence, just because ours isn't behaving in the traditional way exactly.
From my perspective the problem is enhanced by most of he content in act1 being irrelevant to the player character - very early on only Helsin is established as a credible solution. Rest is just faffing doing side adventures - which is counter intuitive if one has a potential ticking bomb in their noggins. It’s not even us being good guys and putting well-being of others ahead of our own. Us not making tadpoles our priority is bad news for everyone around us.
Even if this side content comes together narratively in later chapters, at this point in their story engaging it comes from meta knowledge (I know it is a game, and I know there is no timer, so there is no need to hurry). It is a common problem in games that offer plenty of side content and try to have an urgent film-like plot (BG2 had a similar issue) but BG3 feels to me much worse then any game I played before in that regard.
Here is an idea - what if we didn’t know we had tadpole implanted in our head (like so many other True Souls)? We would know something is off, would be experiencing side effects (generally positive, if not a bit weird), but wouldn’t know what it is. And then it would be revealed what it is through examination by one of the game’s medics - Helsin, Auntie or the Priest. Wouldn’t that work much better? Presumably by the time we learn that we have tadpole we would be on our way to the tower and presumably learning more about their nature.
