Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Disapointed with Paladin

If I get oath breaker by bug, I'll take that as open season for Astarion on vendors. Last time I did that, I racked up 20k gold with a daily heist routine.

Then I'll contritely offer 2k to reaffirm my oath.

Not at all (and this is to respond to @Krom as well). The old games were made 24 years ago, and in that timeframe my expectations and those of most others were limited to what was both available and possible at that time. Our reactions to something like a video game are entirely based on our expectations. And based on my expectations for a D&D video game in 1999, BG delivered heroically. By contrast, based on my expectations in 2023, and especially given what so many other contemporary RPGs are delivering, BG3 falls waaaaay short. And yes, that means that if the original BG games were given to me today, in exactly their same form as from back then, I would be HUGELY disappointed in them. I don't see anything strange about my position here at all.

There's a huge difference between 'unspecified' and 'nonreligious'.

There might be unspecified options in BG I+II, but it would take an awfuly selective memory to come to the conclusion that Paladins and Clerics in the original Saga were nonreligious.

Paladins in those games are followers of one or more of the deities Torm, Helm, and Tyr.

Clerics either follow Helm, Lathander, or Talos (Tempus and Tyr with the EE). Aerie and Viconia don't have specialty classes but worship their own unique gods. Anomen isn't a specialty cleric either afaik. Not choosing a specialty class does not equal not being religious in BG I+II.

Anyways, in regards to BG III, there has been evidence found and referenced from the PHB, SCAG and the twitter account of the creator of the setting. 5e Paladins *do* get their power from the gods in the 5e Realms. Whether Larian is going off of this popular misconception, or cut it to time/labor restraints, or it's just the way 5e is going and WoTC want's Paladins to be divorced from religion in all settings now, incl FR......either way it is extremely disappointing. It might not mean as much to a casual D&D fan, but for me retconning out an essential aspect of the setting. Larian's played fast and loose with the setting in a few ways in EA, but above all others this one bugs me the most.

In BG2, as a Paladin you can join the Order of the Radiant Heart (it is their "stronghold"). They venerate Torm, Helm and Tyr. It's the order Keldorn is a member off and the one Anomen wants to join too. Keldorn worship Torm and Anomen worship Helm even if he is unkitted (because he's a dual class and the game doesn't allow you to select a kit on class #2).

And I do think WoTC wants to move away from gods being super important in the Forgotten Realm settings. They already setup the "rule" that gods are way more silent since 1489 DR. And way too many people are complaining about it (why don't they play in another setting?). I personally think it's what makes the charm of the FR setting: whatever you do, you're just a cog in the divine order/scheming and if you don't worship someone a little bit you might as well be dust...

Also, Larian had Paladin with deity selection since the first early access version. It was datamined a long time ago. The lines are still in the game files and can be enabled in-game, they hide it for patch 9 so I don't think the idea came from them...

I think the issue i have, not with you, but in general, is that i don't see those other RPGs delivering. I was disappointed by a lot of things in both pathfinder games, by all dragon age games, by solasta, by the divinity games and so on, there are many.

In my opinion BG3, according to what i want always obviously, remains good enough, although there are lots of things that can go wrong( plate armor models i'm looking at you)

So my expectations remain rather low.

Even the original BG games had tons of issues for me, although they were enjoyable enough.

A long story made as short as possible (From a Fantasy Grounds 5e session ...)

After a very intense battle (our ship had been attacked by pirates in the Shining sea), I defeated the Pirate boss (solo...cuz teammate 2 dangled 2 over the side trying to recruit them, teammate 4 ran off to do something colossally stupid, and teammate 3 was saving teammate 4).

The battle appears over, when out of nowhere, two pirates hold menacingly sharp knives at the throats of a young couple. Their eyes are desperately pleading for a miracle to save them from this nightmare!

Teammates 2 and 4 begin to negotiate for them to join us, while the pirates remain insistent that they will be sailing away in their craft.

I try to sound intimidating, offering them their freedom in exchange for them lowering their weapons.

My teammates tell me I'm endangering the innocents lives, and "that I don't get to negotiate".


I then target one of the pirates and roll a hit with an eldritch blast, issuing the following dialogue (basically...maybe not every single little syllable, but basically these words).

"Lay down your weapons and we will let you go free when we get to shore." "If you do not we will kill you".


What should have happened next was the DM asking me to roll an intimidation check in the tower (BTW I had high charisma, proficiency, and Inspiration points available to make it advantage).

Instead, the DM joined with 2 and 4 in declaring me evil...I always played Chaotic Good...cuz laws can be Evil.



Some here will agree that I was evil, because I jeopardized the lives of innocents.

While I saw clearly that if they chose to die rather than live and gain their freedom...AND if they spent their precious last seconds killing innocents out of spite, then:


1. I did not kill the innocents, they did.

2. I made the right call in not giving them a boat to sail around finding new victims, because they were clearly crazed killers at that point (choosing to kill over self preservation).


The point is Good and Evil are subjective and Larian should not dictate what the player's outlook should be. This game is all about the freedom to choose who you want to be and believe.

Great idea (being able to break a vow), almost impossible to implement with a favorable outcome. With a live DM who gets you to state your own standards, as to what breaks a vow (same as an internal auditor does), then yes.

Is Larian willing to dedicate the time to program the the equivalent of an AI internal auditor?

If no..then scrap the idea.


Tommy Lee Jones

~"I don't negotiate"

Yes, the stronghold was what I was referring too in regards to paladins. The point about Anomen, Aerie etcbeign that the 'generic' cleric class not having a selectable deity does not mean that using that option means no god.

I noticed in the survey about the upcoming movie (set in the Forgotten Realms) one of the questions was about how you felt about atheist clerics

So I do wonder if this shift by Larian (since by all indications they were initially 100% going with Paladins having a deity requirement-making this a complete 180) is something WotC did, or something done merely to streamline the Paladins for ease of development. The weird stuff with the drow lore does loosely match up with the recent retcons to the drow while coming out before its official announcement. (just switch out the stuff about eyes for tattoos and it's remarkably similar)

Yeah for me also, I think at the end of the day the thing about BG3 that generates all this anger in me is that the lore of the FR setting is not just being ignored but being treated contemptuously. It is so very obvious to me that the dev team of BG3 doesn't give a damn about the FR setting, and that they see it as actually an obstacle to their making the game they want to make, even though they chose to petition WotC to make this specific game, a game that by rights ought to be ALL about the FR setting. And since the only thing about BG3 that interests me greatly *is* the FR setting of the game, I of course am reacting rather negatively to it.

I suspect this is how it is for many people here, even though they of course won't admit to it, which is that they have set rather low expectations for this game, and relative to those low expectations the game is delivering awesomely for them. In this respect, I very much appreciate your honesty.

For me, however, the expectations I have set for this game, right from its announcement, have been extremely high. And justifiably so. Furthermore, video game expectations for me are very heavily driven by the extent of game development resources available for developing the game. By that measure, BG3 *should* have sky-high expectations attached to it, given the sky-high amount of resources Larian is throwing at the game. By contrast, studios like Owlcat and TA, and even pre-MS Obsidian for that matter, have had very limited--even extremely limited--resources available in developing their respective games. So it is precisely those other cRPGs for which it is eminently reasonable to have had low expectations. And as such, I am extremely happy with those games because they definitely beat their expectations.

I'd be curious if you could share this evidence... in return, here's the evidence from those sources which shows that following a deity is not essential, even in the realms:


To be clear - Paladins absolutely do get their power from divine sources and are channelling divine power. Deities that favour a paladin's personal actions may sponsor that paladin and serve as an intermediary for them, but the paladin doesn't need to worship or follow that deity, or even really know they exist, as long as their commitment and actions continue to support values and virtues that that deity approves of. Deities do this because the promotion of their values and virtues upholds their folio and increases their influence in more general ways. Other possibilities exist too; some paladins draw their power from divine portfolios directly, without the influence of the deity that controls it, and others draw their divine power from the upper planes directly.

Paladins haven't been absolutely required to follow a deity, in any realmspace, for the last fifteen years of the game in our world - almost longer than any other edition at this stage. It's not retconning out an essential aspect of the setting any more - it's not been an essential part of the setting for almost a generation. You can always make it a necessary part of the setting in your home games, but understand that you're the one doing the homebrewing when you do.

If you have something that is an official word to say that 'All' paladins in the Forgotten Realms 'Must/Do' follow and worship deities, I'd be interested to see it. (I mean that legitimately, as it would be something to think on and I'd have to work out how I feel about how differing sources interacting, and how much acknowledgement differing sources warrant for myself - it was distinctly not the intention of the design and philosophy of 5e, but a lot of people, designers included, still had the god-following paladin baked into their minds a lot of the time, and it shows.)

Triadic Knights, the Order of the Radiant heart mentioned earlier, Masked Traitors, etc. You can be a paladin/cleric etc devoted to more than one deity, although rare.


Being dedicated to a deity is presented as only one possibility, with other possibilities arrayed alongside it.
Look at the source. PHB. Covers Forgotten Realms as well as stuff like Eberron. Not all settings require deities for divine magic, but the Realms is a case where that is very much explicitly the case.

For official word? I'd say read the novels, read the sourcebooks, play the games. There is a wealth of material touching on this matter. The background for the Baldur's Gate series in the Time of Troubles is a perfect place to start looking if our are looking for evidence of 'do divine casters get their power from the gods'. The 'Silence of Lolth' is a another similar big event (though more localized. (answer is yes) Non-religious clerics have been a thing allowed for decades-3rd edition had them as an option. But that's the thing-it was an option, and not intended for every setting. And the Realms is a setting ill-suited for such an option, since divine magic flowing from the gods to their followers is just....how divine magic works in the setting. I'd think it practically impossible to read up on the nature of divine magic in the Realms and come to any other possible conclusion, and if Larian and/or WoTC want to be contrarian to that, then that's an unfortunate retcon and not anything I would in any way applaud.

But if you really want to go hunting for definitive sources, go look at the stuff Ed Greenwood said on the subject of the '5e paladin controversy' on his Twitter- It might be enlightening. But to save you the trip, he said much the same thing as said here-Paladins do get their magic from the gods, and retaining their power is conditional on their relationship with the divine.

This is nothing new man. The FR wiki and SCAG conflict on so much, nevermind other source material like Descent to Avernus.

Like, I'm putting together an Eltural based adventure and lore conflicts abound. I have to make judgment calls about what truth I'm going to implement for our game.

It's hard to follow canon where previous authors have diverged or mistyped and the next author before you has carried the mistake. Heck, I read the whole Companion sun over Elturel thing was one author simply muddling names.

And WoTC loves swapping things around when they shift editions to explains the new rules at the lore level (instead of just handwaving them) and sometimes just change stuff to focus on specific thigns. The Forgotten Realm setting is basically a new setting every editions since the 2e to 3e move.

Of course you should be able to pick up a deity this is wrong. Please fix this Larian studios. Well and I must say I like the old way to create character better then this new one . Before character creation was more logical. It seems the game does improvements in some aspects and steps back in character creation.

Implementing deities should result in changes to dialogue trees all throughout the game. I'd have liked it to be in EA and expect to see it on release. But I understand excluding an incomplete experience from patch 9.

Fair enough. I've enough anger in me about this issue to go around, so I'll gladly direct a bunch of it towards WotC. But with WotC, FYI, it is well-known this is a recent thing. Up through 3.5e, the FR setting was revered within WotC. Then there was a wholesale change in the D&D dev team within WotC, and the new guys (who were the same people who took us into 4e) openly told people how much they hated the FR setting.

Hay just do like the Elder Scrolls and call them a Dragon Break lol. Seriously if you don’t know what that is look it up. My thoughts it’s time for Atropus ( https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Atropus )to reset the FR (6th Ed). From what I can tell 4th Ed was bad and 5th Ed was it’s bandaid. Never played those so this is only from what I have looked up and what appears to be popular opinion.

loucrotta

Being dedicated to a deity is presented as only one possibility, with other possibilities arrayed alongside it.
Look at the source. PHB. Covers Forgotten Realms as well as stuff like Eberron. Not all settings require deities for divine magic, but the Realms is a case where that is very much explicitly the case.


So this is to include the people who say, "Diety?!...I don't care about that! I just want to play a Paladin."

This gets complicated

From a code standpoint, If you included an option for picking "None of the above....I don't care", then your being inclusive...DMs do this.

As far as dialog...that's kinda set. It would have had to include [tag] religious to filter dialog that was important to some and not there for others.

The thing is, we know that there are [tag]s for each religion available to clerics, specific to the paladin class, with unique dialogue options associated with them. Apparently there are already one or more mods that restore this feature. So that work was already done or well underway months ago-we know this from the datamined stuff. For whatever reason, Larian decided to do a 180 and remove all faith-related dialogue and instead we have the oath tags. But they did a bit of a hack job, which is why sometimes it seems to think you are a follower of a god (sometimes a specific god, like Tyr or Lolth) in dialogue.

From a code standpoint-as you put it- it actually looks like they made *more* work for themselves if this is indicative of the final state because they did a large amount of work giving paladins dialogue options comparable to the clerics and then completely removed them and started from scratch.

And if this is intended to be inclusive (at the expense of the setting and lore) than it falls flat, because it actively excludes those who *do* want to play a paladin follower of a deity, as is traditional for the Realms.

Is "The Wall of the Faithless" still a thing in Forgotten Worlds? If so then that's a pretty good reason for *everybody* to have a deity, not just Paladins.