Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What Companion don't you Trust?

Of course I would only try it if he wanted it, it would also not work otherwise. Though the whole situation would be a bit ... awkward, especially when Tav is romancing Astarion. But hey, they already had a discussion about how they would kill each other. This would definitely be the weirdest romance I had in a game so far, but I like it.

Your last sentence made me think of a "reverse bite night" situation, where Tav sneaks up on Astarion. "It's not what it looks like, I swear!"
But no, my Tavs are too kind for something like that.

If the True Ressurection spell would be available, this would also be a quite costly option, I wonder where we can get diamonds worth at least 25,000 gp. A sprinkle of holy water should be easy, and we would need a cleric or a druid, so most likely, we would have to drag Shadowheart or Halsin into this mess.


As for the discussion about Gale or the possible goals or intentions of our companions in general: I think the dialogue options each companion gets when standing in front of the magic mirror in Ilyn Toth's lair are very interesting. I know, these are just options, but the choices are quite revealing, I think (and I like that every companion gets three options, except Lae'zel, who is very focussed on her two primary goals).

Silver/ was so kind as to link the screenshots in another thread:

Major spoiler:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/jppkbd/companions_at_the_magic_mirror/


Personally, in this discussion, I do not equal "trust" with liking a companion or agreeing with them; for me, it is more like "do I know where I stand with them?"
This is more easy with Lae'zel, who is very direct, and also Astarion (even when he is trying to be a bit more manipulative, it is so obvious I can hardly call it that at all). They do not even try to be "nice"

I just wanna pipe in to say that Niara, KillerRabbit, I finding your conversation incredibly interesting. Not just from an analysis perspective, since even when I don't agree with points, you are both providing brilliant analysis, but from the perspective of people who really know the setting. I know nothing about the forgotten realms or Mystra so all this other knowledge is just fascinating to me. The game thus far hasn't done a great job making me feel like the world really has thr deep, rich history thar you guys have really presented, it's made things far more interesting. So thanks for that. Before reading this stuff I hadn't given a moment's thought to the idea that Mystra just left Gale. She's a god and gods aren't the most charitable to their followers. Nor did I even understand the implications that he was her "chosen" and that that was even a thing. I figured it was just a more consensual version of what Zeus would get up to all the time, with some blessings thrown in. I'm shocked how much depth there is and a little dismayed because I'm not confident Larian has given it the same thought you both have and that they aren't just going with the surface meanings I took initially.

And KR I do want to speak up and throw iny two cents about your bomb opinions. I'm with Niara on that point, I'd go to New York too since to me it seems obvious that I'd find an expert who would be able to help me there. Granted I'm not an expert on bombs alike gale is on magic, so Gale probably has a better idea of just how likely or not actually finding an expert who can help him is. You say it's about Gale facing facts, but his condition isn't cut and dried. There's still a decent chance of finding a solution that let's everyone live.

Also it's worth pointing out, our character is doing the exact same thing, every companion is. We have tadpoles in our brain that will turn us into a deadly, mind-controling abomination and we're trying to find a cure rather than just killing ourselves on the spot. Gale at least knows a definite way he can keep from exploding. Initially we all believe that we have a hard limit of 7 days. Being out in the wilds doesn't even help in our case since if we transform the mindflayers we become are perfectly capable of finding their way to the underdark and going about their wicked work.

Yeah I think this whole conversation is implying wayyyyyyy more depth to the characters than Larian actually intends to implement. Odds are, there's an evil Gale and a good Gale depending on your choices, which will recontextualize his behavior, but he will not betray or operate against the party in any meaningful way. If you take the evil route, Gale's more arrogant and selfish nature becomes more pronounced, whereas if you choose the good route, Gale's care for others and desire to be better than he was becomes more pronounced.

Not to knock the conversation; by all means, have it. But anyone who played DOS2 knows where this is going.

Thanks for the kind words.

On NYC

More than likely.

Could be right - it's still fun. And if the finished game doesn't treat FR lore well . . . well then I will heff to be mehd

how interesting, i never try my companions stand in front of the magic mirror, and i will have a try!

maybe i can intercept my companions' desire, such as i get mystra's favor, i bind mizora serve me, ... and so on.

that will make me the most sworn enemy of gale and wyll.

and this doesn't violate my belief -- i never and will never sign dark evil path(such as helping goblin camp)
i am a true neutral one for the toril balance.

I'll try to wind down, because I think we've both articulated about as well as we're going to.


It's okay, don't stress yourself ^.^ He does definitely say those things, in a couple of places – there's also the line where he talks about how the catastrophe would extend far beyond the confines of his body alone.

My point there was mainly objecting you to recriminating him and judging him on the particular dialogues you mentioned, and your grounds being that your interpretation was that he was invoking the deaths of many and putting them on you for not doing as he wanted – when he did no such thing in those lines for which you were judging him, and that it was, in fact, you who had inserted those elements into those lines where they did not exist, and then judged and blamed Gale for your own fabrication of those elements. Quite a manipulative move on your behalf, wouldn't you say ^.~


No, it's not. They likely wouldn't sell it, granted, but the other suggestions are all perfectly valid. The player character inserts the concept of theft into the conversation, not Gale – but you blame Gale for it. That's not fair.


This is possible too, yeah, and it does fit, you're not wrong. This is where I fall back again on the 'above table' tools we have indicating that he's being honest. The sneaky, back-handed thing that I'm doing with pushing back on that so hard is that I genuinely Don't trust that Larian are not god-moding our tools unfairly for the sake of their weak story-telling. There are places, where all of the characters are probably going to be 'shock-twist' revealed that they were deceiving us in some way, and have lied to us and misled us directly in various ways... all which we were not allowed any chance to detect, despite having the tools to do so and other opportunities where we were shown that those tools do 'work'.

And yes – I want to trust Gale and take the majority of his motives at face value, because I like him, and I'll be annoyed if/when (and let's be honest, it probably will be 'when') Larian turn around and pull back the curtain to say “Ah-ha! He was actually doing THIS!!”, because I won't buy it, and it won't feel believable or acceptable to me.


Yeeeahhh.... let's just say that I absolutely do not trust Larian to do a comfortable or appropriate representation of poly relationships or ENM, at all, and I'm bracing myself for their attempts at such feeling gross and being deeply unhealthy. As someone who lives in a three person household, I'm always on the lookout for proper rep for these styles of relationships, but it's rare to find one that is done well.


Not really... you, the player, manipulate him into staying, otherwise he would abandon your course, no matter the cost or danger to himself (the likelihood of a “Well, I can't let you leave, can I” heel turn from the player and party, for example). Shadowheart goes along with it without question, and feels rotten about it afterwards (but not as rotten as Gale, it seems) – and she's the one that so many folks like to cast as a sweet cinnamon roll that is really a good person underneath her brainwashing. Wyll also goes along with it without question as long as he's not standing right next to you when you tell Minthara that you'll do it... and at the party, Wyll does not seem to have any regrets of negative emotions At All, and is just caught up in the victory celebration, if I'm recalling correctly. Gale turns up as the best of a dubious bunch, on this score, at least in my opinion.


No, it's not... and I say that with as much regretful sincerity as I can for your position. It's simply not. If we wanted to go full behaviourist, we arrive at a point where every possible human social interaction is a case of manipulation and counter manipulation... because we always have some purpose or desire when we interact socially with someone, and whenever we have a discussion with anyone, we say things to them, and those things we say have a purpose and are intended to evoke some kind of effect, response or reaction – so, by that definition, literally every word ever said to another is a form of manipulation.

But that's not practical, and it's not fair, and it's ultimately not a legitimate stance to take. You are seeing manipulation where it is not happening, because you've trained or been trained to be hyper- over-sensitive to it, and to see it in everything and to interpret everything through those lenses. If someone looks at the world through green-glass lenses, they see that everything in the world is a little bit green to some extent... but they aren't correct in that perspective. It's their lenses mapping something onto the world that isn't there, and I'm concerned that that is what you are doing, whether you are aware of it or not.

However, this is really getting well off topic for talking about companion trustworthiness, so I'm going to stop analysing your mindset here, and apologise for maybe going too far with that train of thought. My apologies, and nothing but good intentions.


Well, this probably supports your confidence, but, it may not surprise you that I'm, let's say, intimately acquainted with that latter (strongly on the /s side, contra to my intellectual personality and general outlook on life) as you might have gathered from some of the things I wrote in the Minthara intimacy discussion.


I'm not going to accept your apology – because to do so would be to affirm that you did someone worth judgement or reprimand, and you did not.

==

Just trying to keep up with the rest – the irony I'd mention is that you don't let or tell Nettie to end you safely now – you tell her you'll end yourself if the transformation is about to happen... but until then you'll keep searching for a solution. Soooo.... you're also choosing to fly to NYC. You're going to keep looking for an answer, rather than immediately self-terminating because you're a danger to others. You're doing the same thing as Gale.

I know there's a bunch of bits and pieces that you didn't choose to address or come back to, and I won't push it – I think we've about covered the most interesting aspects of our very different reads on Gale's character for now. It will be interesting to see where it goes when the game launches.

Thanks again for staying candid and cordial ^.^

For your sake then I hope I'm wrong.


Yes the Kingmaker romance was a nice attempt but flawed - to my surprise I found myself liking Reg more than Octavia. Somewhat interesting representation an unhealthy relationship but Octavia wasn't a well written character, she didn't seem a real to life, more like a magpie's collection of personality traits.



If you speak this lingo it's not behaviorist - indeed the problem with the behaviorist position is that it's all manipulation and that's just fine because freedom is a feeling not a reality. It's just old fashioned social influence with a smattering of field theory some symbolic interactionism and some object relations to put a cherry on top of my manipulation analysis sundae.


I think it's great that you've been so careful to check in on the tone so often - you will leave the conversation thinking your views on this are better and healthier and will do the same. Indeed so arrogant am I that do my best to ensure that others see the world the way I do - I think it's a POV that helps people recognize and escape exploitive relationships.


As someone once said to me: "I'm not going to accept your apology – because to do so would be to affirm that you did someone worth judgement or reprimand, and you did not"


I had gathered that, yes and has influenced my interpretation of your position. Am I right say that we see the same things but you simply see them and think "but that's not a bad thing!"




That's true - I am unduly influenced by the "avoid the game over screen" And it does weigh on my toon's mind - but there is a matter of scale. The four of us transform and we take out say 30 - 50 flaming fist and few clerics? Gale will take out 140K ?

We can end here or you can ask me to address something I skipped over - your choice I did skip over the NYC discussion because you said that is something you'd rather not talk about in a open forum.

with respect, awfully fighty rabbit

Mine tells her the same thing. But the way you talk about what Gale should do, you make it sound like as soon as he realized the orb would explode, he should have gone somewhere unpopulated to die, and by that logic as soon as our toon wakes up and learns what the tadpole will do, they should have killed themselves. They should have just dived straight off the nautiloid in fact. We should have let Lae'zel kill us, or let Nettie do it without fighting, instead of scrambling for a cure nobody seems confident we'll find, out in soke random patch of wilderness that has an inprovablt number of places ro even look for a solution in the first place. We start out having a hard timer and after the timer reveals itself to be flawed (by your argument we're bad people for letting it get that far in the first place) it's a looooong time before we get a truly reliable opinion telling us we don't have to worry, so before then the change can sill happen at any moment without any warning at all to let us do something about it. In contrast, Gale can reliably keep the orb dormant indefinitely if he keeps feeding it magic items.


The way I see jt, a mindflayer could be just as dangerous as the orb, just on a longer timeline. They're able to strategize, plan, they're able to hide with their mental powers and above all, they'll try to make it back to their brethren and eventually reproduce more mindflayers.they can potentially live for a long, loooooong time if I understand correctly, and in that time they could do far more harm all added up. People are clearly terrified of what they can do and the threat they pose. Plus a group of mindflayers starting out? Probably even worse.

True, it's problematic that the we let it get that far - but that was the DM's decision! I think my toon tells herself if does get too bad Lae'zel will take us out.

We don't know how long Gale has had condition but I get the impression he's had weeks at least. It's pretty clear these were not the first artifacts he's destroyed. I think he probably should gotten to the astral plane when he still had the ability to do so after 5 days or more?

Sure if the Mind Flayers were somehow able to survive and get to an elder brain they could cause lots of problems over the years (how long do they live btw? mind flayers are something of a blind spot for me - I don't have any source books on them)

But if my theory is right and gale is helping to reincarnate the shadow weave then he will be guilty of even more deaths. Luckily Szass Tam seems reluctant to use the shadow weave but imagine what could happen to Faerun if some other necromancer king was able to build a army of super powerful undead that could resist weave magic . . .

I just think that it's clear the game was written by people who are more in Niara and eye's camp vis-a-vis plane to Antartica, plane to New York, so in that light Gale's choice is intended to not be a bad one or to reflect badly on his character. Though then you get into a whole thing about authorial intent and death of the author, that's a whole rabbit hole.

As for Gale getting to the Astral plane, I really don't know how difficult it is to do that. I had the impression he's been living with this for like, months. I honestly haven't given as much thought to what he could have done to figure it out and in hindsight Gale probably could have figured something out. What? I'm not sure, I lackthe lore knowledge (for instance Szass Tam? No idea who that is) but I also assumed that when Mystra left him, that was what knocked him back to a first level wizard and he's been like that ever since. Maybe the timeline is that he was apart from Mystra for several months, possibly even years before finding the orb, which was more recent. I don't know, I'm just speculating.

Speaking of speculation, I initially thought your suggestion of him worshipping Shar or having a connection to Shar was out of nowhere, but then I thought about it. There are a few lines he has with Shadowheart that suggest... something. I don't think he's a sconnected as you theorize (I think it would feel weird if we had two disconnected Shar-related characters in the story this way) but I can believe there's SOMETHING going on with that.

I'll put this first bit in spoilers this time because it's actually substantially off topic now, but I did want to at least give some answers to these bits ^.^


For the game related bits:


As others mention, a handful of highly intelligent mindflayers can become the enslavement and downfall of entire civilisations, if left unchecked. If they go to ground long enough to set up a base of operations, spawn and begin to expand their influence, the problem grows rapidly. In time, one will transform into an Ulitharid, and when a suitable location is found, it will become a new Elder Brain, creating the lair and brine pools necessary for its growth in the process. This is far, far more dangerous and has an overall much higher potential for loss of life than a single explosion that happens once, and then is gone – even if that explosion flattens a city. These tadpoles are tampered with, and we don't know exactly what that entails, but it seems unlikely that it would reduce their ability to dominate the world, or make them overall more benign a threat.

It comes off as pretty repugnant and very “Fine for me but not for thee”, to say that it's okay and morally acceptable for you not to self-terminate and to continue looking for a solution, because you're only endangering 30-50 sapient lives, you think, probably, but that Gale is a bad person for not self-terminating immediately upon the understanding of his condition... Despite the fact that you have no idea if, or when, your condition may become lethal to those around you, or if you will have any warning signs that you can react to... while Gale has an exceptionally good grasp of his time fuse, and a reliable method of prolonging it that can be tangibly met.

If it's okay for you to fly to the city for your tadpole, and all its uncertainties, then it's okay for Gale to fly there for his orb, with its much more reliable management. You cannot condemn him as selfish, and judge him for that, without judging yourself as even worse.

==

The timeline for Gale is fuzzy regarding when he was cut off, when he lost his power, and how long it's been – and that fuzziness doesn't do him any favours. The only way it makes sense in the present situation, unless he is lying about the whole situation, is that his loss of power happened pretty much exactly when the shadow orb attacked and latched onto him – he wasn't able to invoke the magic that would let him deal with it at that moment, because that was the moment when he was cut off. We also have to suppose that, since that time, he hasn't actually had access to any of his other resources as a powerful mage of Waterdeep – since if he did, those resources likely would have availed him of assistance, as much as he hopes Baldur's Gate to now. That fuzziness is indeed a potential problem for Gale's good character.

The likely scenario is that, as described, his cutting off from his powers and the massive reduction of his capabilities happened when he discovered that cut off section of shadow weave, and as a result he literally couldn't get himself back to the material plane at all in the condition he found himself in – that he has not, in fact, been back to Waterdeep since acquiring the orb, and the ex-planar pocket he found it in may have afforded him other options to get out, but not sufficient to get him home before he was picked up by plane-hopping Ilithids – Or even that it was those very Illithids that found him stranded in that pocket and took him there, since we know that the illithids have been working with netherese magic, which is related to his immediate situation and the shadow weave chunk, and the pocket he found it in.

==

Szazz Tamm is a powerful lich, and the current long-standing ruler of Thay. His hobbies include necromancy, enslavement, the murder and soul-reaping of his enemies and the puppeteering of their undead corpses, and domination of the entirety of Toril, turning it into a dead world populated only by the legions of undead that are all under his control. I think he also plays the cello.

i have tried all companions, and i found gale might be hidden his thought the deepest.
i know if one's int high enough, he can only show partial the truth to the magic mirror.
gale's point 1 and point 2 is shown in front the mirror that seems ok.
but read again careful, "forever with a woman" only "mystra" can be forever.
point 2 talks about"mythal", and read back to point 1 that talks about "in a mage tower", the meaning could be "controlling mystra forever".
in this light, gale's ambition is much more than become a god, gale is crazy about mystra!!!
thus, i will list gale the NO 1 distrust.

to me, i only want mystra's favor just as other chosen one, but i would like have more freedom and less binding.

i am surprised that astarion's ambition isn't high, the most just replace his master, this makes me accept him as an ally again. i list him NO 3 distrust.

wyll is just a hypocrite, when i see the point 2 shown in the mirror, i think after all mizora saved wyll's life, but he wants reverse his soul contract. i list wyll the NO 2 distrust.

if there is a choise between wyll and mizora, as long as mizora provides a reasonable soul contract to me for saving her, i will abandon wyll immediately.

shadowheart wants to be shar's chosen one with great power, and wants see her parents once, this is normal, NO 4

lae'zel is simple, NO 5

gale's power is banned by mystra, this is gale personally says to the player character.

mystra doesn't only abandon gale, but also ban gale use the advanced magic weave, this is the real reason that gale lost his magic power.

gale isn't such noble.

the interesting thing is, gale cann't recognize that i am a sorcerer, gale says "you, i think you can not understand the knowledge XXXX."

this make me feel angry, and i think "this mage can not sense that i am a sorcerer?? is this mage an idiot?", and i reply "i am a sorcerer, i am more powerful than a mage."

but gale senses shadowheart the first time meeting, gale praises shadowheart's eyes as he senses the shadowheart's relationship with shar(the meanwhile i don't know, but gale can sense it?? ).

Thank you for this information, Niara, I must admit I did not know about him.

Since Ilyn Toth had been on the run from Szass Tam, I think he has also most likely stolen the necromancy book from him, to try to bring an unknown person back to life.

Given the hobbies of this gentleman, it seems like a really good idea for our Tav (or Astarion, or Gale) to try to use this book. What could possibly go wrong? 😄

As a player, it is quite obvious you maybe shouldn't try to use this book, but I have to try it at least once.
I want to see what kind of disaster my poor well-meaning Tav accidentally causes.


Another possibility could be that the necromancy book had been added in the game to allow players to use the True Ressurection spell, but to not make the use of this spell too easy.
If you only need a large amount of gold to buy the required diamonds, it would be a bit anticlimactic.

The formula: book (-) x Astarion (-) = Bookstarion (+)

Means
If you give the book (very negative, bad) to the companion already turned evil (by negative energy, bad), it's a win! For, for us I think?

Let's see if math applies to vampire spawn!

I wonder what this "Bookstarion" would be like. Astarion inversed? Kind, but also a bit boring, not very talkative and definitely not flirtatious at all?
The "kind" part is nice, but the rest? Maybe this experiment was not fully successful

You're right. We should use pokemon logic. It must be his evolution item! Gale wants to eat it for fun, how cruel.