Niara, what the heck? What is this attitude? Your posts are amongst the longest on these forums, may be boil them down to a couple of sentences, alright? Something among the lines of "every companion is too cool to my taste"? laugh

The other user gave actual examples of games that failed to create the perfect narrative around the MC's leadership. There will very likely be a moment in any role playing game when your party members stick with the MC instead of doing something of higher value to their made-up story/personality. This derives from the "player factor", because games are played by players, not characters. Especially in a game with a lot of sandbox elements, a player can make erratic decisions, made with the understanding that the world they explore isn't real and there is no necessity for actions that would contribute to a cohesive story. For example, if a player decides for their MC to run in circles for an hour or to go fishing for a week or be rude to a character their MC was always polite with. Some of those scenarios are almost unpredictable and they won't ever be considered to be the ones triggering companion reaction. Thats why your leadership only needs to be explained to an extent, in broad strokes, such as tadpole or the blight and so on. Especially when it comes to the role-playing game, in which you can have additional justification layers of your leadership based on your background, race, class, made-up story etc. I mean, if you want to? Another option is to demand everything worked out for you on a plate with a silver lining.

BG3 does exactly what you described in the previous posts - its plot has a common denominator of the tadpole problem, which creates a purpose for the infected characters to stay together. You say that it does not justify leadership. So you basically discredit your argument about how the games handle leadership, if its not the way to handle it, according to yourself. Develop your thought further if you want to tie those things together.

Also, saying that the fact of BG3 not having its acts 2 and 3 yet, is not important and that it is past some point to solve its problems is nonsense, imo. Acts 2 and beyond can hold the crucial development of the tadpole factor into the attitude/approval factor. As the writers said during the PfH - what started as a forced cooperation will shift towards friendship/rivalry etc.

By the way, before you label my post "arguing for the sake of arguing", let me put it straight. I argue because I disagree with some of your points. I also argue because I don't like people trying to make witty commentary about other people's words. smile