Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Lae'zel's Personality is just.... too much.

I think that it's definitely bad writing to include a character to fulfill a role whose personality basically cannot be consistent if she's in that role. Lae'zel seems like a very bad case of the writers writing an origin character rather than a companion character. It's bad writing in the sense that they didn't consider the limitations they were presented with. Perhaps if they had they could have worked within or around them in some clever way to get the desired result. Instead they didn't and the outcome is compromised as a result.

As for finding a way to make her work, I thin there actually is. It's just about making her more pragmatic. She thinks of us as tools? Fine, lean into that. A warrior knows that if you have a good sword, then you have to oil it, sharpen it, generally take care of it or it will become dull and unreliable. Same with armor, carpenter's tools, etc. So maybe take that angle. Give her a moment where she respects us as tools - still beneath her, but well-suited to achieving her ultimate goals. Or on that note, maybe have her justify for we the player WHY she thinks we're of any value to begin with. Something where she acknowledges in some way what use we're serving to her. She calls us slaves or tools, but we don't act like it, so what benefit does SHE think she's getting? Maybe we get the chance to read her mind and see her acknowledge that she's in a new, unfamiliar world and that much as she hates it, having natives who know the way things work is her best bet at this point. Something along those lines.

Also, having her confront our character and having our character actually come out on top in some fashion would go a good way towards addressing the problem too. It would make other people feel satisfied about 'putting her in her place' as opposed to her just getting to constantly talk down to us withonly fairly meager reprisal from our character.

I think another thing worth acknowledging is that I'm quite certain that most of the people who play this game will have never heard of Githyanki before and will have no context for them. I already sort of knew about D&D adjacent stuff and this game was my first experience of them. Beyond that, I didn't even learn much about them from the game thus far. The majority of what I know about them came from these forums and from a D&D actual play podcast where Githyanki are recurring antagonists who have Australian accents. So having her not be a perfect representation of her people isn't exactly going to ruin things. Larian has already demonstrated their overall lack of care for the setting and associated things with it. So if their reasoning behind Lae'zel's character is just about loyalty to the source material, that comes off as disingenuous to me.



The thing is, this is a story, which works on story logic. And by story logic, being evil simply CAN'T lead to happiness. Therefor wanting a character to become good isn't selfish, because the side of good is the only side that can really get genuine happiness.

Even in stories that trade in moral grayness and grittiness, the only people who are really shown as happy in their evil acts are usually psychopaths and genuine monsters. Otherwise they're shown occasionally enjoying the fruits of their evil labour, but any joy they find is usually painted as fleeting, as never satisfying them, and the things that do give them lasting happiness are things we associate with being good, like family, friendship, etc, and often their evil acts are done in service to those things, and will often end up putting those things in danger. Just look at breaking bad - his turn to evil ultimately destroyed his relationships and was shown to be self-destructive.

So yeah, in real life trying to reshape people is unhealthy. But by the logic of stories, trying to make others good is the right thing to do. Also in the narrative extreme of the Lae'zel changes during the adventure situation, the outcome would probably be that she abandons her people entirely after seeing them for what they are, rather than going back to them.