Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Inclusion in the bodytypes? Character Creator

I know there are some threads about bodytypes here and there but I saw there is one thing that hasn't been mentioned and that is inclusion. It seems Larian is trying to be inclusive of different genders but I wonder if it is going to be the same with the body types. Not having a single fat or big hero or NPC is strange.
I understand it is more complicated to fit the clothing and armor on different sizes of humanoids but I would have thought they had this planned for a game where characters can be of many different races some of which are definitely larger than others.
I still have hopes, if we have different body sizes for gnomes halflings and dwarves I hope we can get some others in the middle, like smaller an bigger humans or if they are going to add the orc race maybe we get curvy or bulky bodytypes?

And in regards to the faces, I read sliders are not going to be a thing but maybe Larian can use the faces they already have and morph them with zbrush or something and make like 5 different faces out of each of the ones existing, just to add more variety and improve Replayability. Right now we have so few options that if we use custom heroes after the second playthrough they all look like the heroes we used before...

If the reason why we don't have sliders or more faces is because they wanted to keep those cinematic conversations with the "sim-like" facial expressions I can say now that the cinematic dialogues were so unnecessary! And they costed us so much in terms of time and limitations!

at least a bigger/bulky model would come to the game compared to the current lean body type on medium-height races. (See Halsin and Karlach's model for what that body would look like).

That's great, I hope we get a big bodytype that isn't fit and muscular as well. Also I was saying how the faces were very few and I remembered an issue I encounter that is when one of the enemies or NPC's is a clone of one of my characters and I confuse their faces in the initiative tracker. It is so annoying that there is a rival with the same face and beard!

Unless they are loaded to the nines with magical items and/or spells, does an obese adventurer make sense?

Low dexterity? We can hve scrawny mages, why not fat ones? Or fat bards, etc? Also it's worth pointing out that there is a gap between outright obese and just being heavy.

First I dont think you using the word obese is a coincidence, I think you are hating on fat people by using a term that is more extreme. Second, it's like saying that it wouldn't make sense to have a small adventurer because they would be at a disadvantage. I can recommend you a series of books called Lord Of The Rings that has a thing or two to say about it.
Also have you never seen a person who is overweight but still an athlete? Many basketball players or american football players, even rugby players are like that and they can run faster than you.

Also, if they’re a sorceror or wizard, for example, then by definition they’ll be loaded with spells!

(Moderator aside: but let’s not jump to uncharitable conclusions that others are “hating on” fat people, it’s enough to disagree that there’s any reason why a fat person, or even an obese one, wouldn’t be a perfectly capable adventurer.)

While it is unlikely someone would have got at least some of the existing available body types without lots of exercise, as has been said it doesn’t follow that everyone who is physically active and capable would have such a body type.

And any Tav might struggle with the physical demands of trekking through the wilderness if exercise hasn’t been part of their back story. Which might be quite fun from a roleplay perspective, so personally I think having only obviously reasonably buff character models for some race/sex combos is more limiting: a fat character model might be physically fit or might not be, whereas it’s harder to imagine that someone with, eg, the human male body type hasn’t worked at it.

Like the OP I appreciate the challenge of making multiple body types work (we already see lots of issues with hair, weapons and armour clipping in some body types), but would appreciate more variety. Both for our characters and for NPCs, as I think it would be more immersive if not everyone of the same race and sex had the same shape.


I agree with this. The first time I met Karlach, before she got her unique model, she was almost identical to the character I was playing. It was spooky!

I completely understand the economy of Larian using the custom character options for NPCs, but surely they could implement alternative appearances for NPCs so as to not use the specific face or hair we pick for our custom characters? Though I suppose the fact that there could be up to four custom characters in multiplayer games means each NPC would need five options. Gah!

I think people are focusing on "obese" too much here.

There are a huge variety of body types that are able to adventure lol. You know, short people, tall people, someone who's 280 pounds of muscle, someone who's 130 pounds, etc. Also, it's silly that people are really trying to pull "could a fat person adventure though?" line. Really? So a 140 pound person that grew up in a palace and never exercised a day in their life would be capable of adventuring because they're technically not fat? It's a silly excuse to justify NOT changing something imo.

That said, it's not going to happen. Larian isn't going to add something like that this far into development. Hell, i assume they're getting fairly close to going gold.

No hate: just simple biology. There are exceptions (as I indicated with a mention of magic...ye olde high-level spellcaster that can move in a variety of unconventional ways or compensate for lower attributes), but significantly decreased stamina isn't particularly advantageous when one attempts to lead a consistently athletic lifestyle. Also, please, if we're going to play the word game, "fat" is the snappier and quicker term reached for when a mean word is required whereas "obese" is more technical and not quite so readily tossed about when the playground-level insults start flying.

And it’s already been said that (a) there’s no reason to assume that every character had led a consistently athletic lifestyle before the adventure starts, (b) that even with the amount of exercise that would be expected of a fighter or barbarian, they could still be fat, and (c) if we are going to assume that our character being fat (or thin) impacts their abilities then we can reflect that in their physical stats - whereas at the moment we could have an 8 Str, Dex and Con human male wizard who looks like he works out consistently.

So, from my perspective, there’s nothing intrinsically unrealistic about allowing some of the custom characters we create to be fat, even if we did agree that such a character (on average) would find physical exertion more challenging than an (average) character with lower BMI.

Regarding words, obese as you say has a technical meaning and it’s possible to be significantly fatter than the existing human female model, for example, without being obese. “Fat” is more general and seems to be the preferred term these days, having been somewhat reclaimed from those playground bullies, so let’s go with that for the purposes of this discussion.

I mean, an overweight adventurer doesn’t make much sense, as the process of daily walking long distances, regularly fighting, and living off travel rations would naturally slim anybody down quite a bit, but the list of things that don’t really make sense when you think about them in Dungeons and Dragons is pretty long so who cares?

That said, the chances that they are adding in heavier body types is pretty low. Those who want to play characters with a power lifter build will just need to do what they’ve always done: play dwarves.

I've always thought it was weird how DND has always had a "it's a game, have fun" golden rule, and yet people get so caught up 'what makes sense' and the purity of rules arguments.

Of course, we don’t actually need to walk a long distance each day in EA and there’s tons of food just lying around so no need to subsist on travel rations . Plus most fights are over pretty quickly from the perspective of a single character, and aren’t necessarily physically arduous for every class anyway.

But as you say, picking at the realism on this specific point isn’t really here or there anyway given the setting. And I agree that unless Larian have already secretly added this, we’re unlikely to see it at release!

A long while ago, Chubblot datamined an overweight body model, possibly just for npcs (and since it was a while ago and datamined, it might not be in the final game).

Indeed ...
But that body model didnt work at all like other body models, bcs it didnt have detachable head ... also in next patch he datamined NPC that clearly used that model.

It would be interesting to see if the developer went that deep: a character that starts off overweight/fat/obese during character selection becomes slimmer as they move across the land (perhaps down to the steps they take?). I don't anticipate that kind of foresight, but I'm happy to be unexpectedly surprised.


Not just that, but pre-industrialized societies consume less refined sugar and the sort of fats that make their way into substantially processed foods. If an individual in (quasi-)medieval times has put on - and keeps - the weight, chances are they reside on a higher stratum.

Personally, I’d see that as overly complicated as well as oddly judge-y about fatness, given (as folk have already said) the lack of enforced realism in other areas. Not that it would be a bad thing to be able to change our characters’ body types (along with other features) in the course of the game, but I definitely think that it should be down to the player to choose rather than the game forcing us to change or trying to model changes to BMI, which sounds like a can of worms that shouldn’t be opened. It would make no sense for it to only apply to fat character models, so if it’s not to pick on fat characters then feasibly any character could gain or lose weight. Would it calorie count our evening meals as well as measure activity? If we select more than 40 food units per night, or rest multiple times without having walked far, will our characters put on weight if they start off thin or normal? Might we starve if we rest too many nights without food? Should we see our characters slowly grow or shrink, or does the body shape just jump suddenly to a different model at a certain threshold? Why would only our character’s fatness or thinness change over the course of the adventure, and shouldn’t we also see them, eg, become more muscular if we increase strength?

I just wouldn’t go there, and would simply offer players the option of fatter character models and let us decide whether or not they were realistic for our character concept (if indeed we care about realism in that way). And let any supplementary features be driven by people who actually want to use those character models, rather than those who wouldn’t use them anyway because they think they’re unrealistic.

Interesting idea ...
Puting aside all those reasons why not do this ... i have single question:

If our overweight character would become slimmer during the adventure ...
Shouldnt our regularweight (or however you call it) character become underfed ... or even die from starvation?

I mean ... pure hypotetical question, no pesky moral involved ...
But since our characters are eating and drinking during the adventure ... and they would get slimer anyway, their energy gain would be clearly lower, than their energy expenditure(?) ... right?
So, if other, not so fat, character would go trough the same ...

No. That’s not how exercise works. Something that slims down a heavier person isn’t necessarily going to malnourish or kill a normal BMI person.

Unless the calorie intake is dangerously low, the same thing would happen to both the overweight and the normal weight adventurers: they would start to get fit. The normal weight person will just get there more quickly.

Hmm ...
Okey. Shame.