Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Party Size Discussion

The only issues i've noticed is that Wyll got stuck with camp dialogue about his father after learning of the kidnapping; his camp dialogue options didn't clear up 'til most of the way through Act 2. Also after the meeting with Gortash, Gale comments on finally getting to Moonrise Towers... Though either of those could just be in game bugs completely unrelated to having Gale, Wyll, Laa'zel, Halsin and Karlach, in the group.

Those of you modding the game to play with 6:

I imagine the game is way too easy on balanced. Is it even remotely challenging on tactician?

Well yeah some people use build guides and cheese and arent even really challenged on Hard.

While other people have trouble to solve the game even on Easy.



About Party Size, I was super against 4 when I heard about it, but it turns out in D&D5 a party size of 4 is quite manageable.

For example you're no longer forcefed a Rogue in your party, as it was the case in AD&D and D&D3.

And it also turns out that despite all the praise of Larian Studios for their special mechanics, well I dont really feel too challenged. Positioning is sometimes king in BG3, but often its not.

God I still feel so stupid every time I tell a companion to wait in camp.
The mechanics of party size is basically a moot point in face of how profoundly stupid it narratively is to leaving anyone in camp instead of having the entire party out at all times.
Full party use is truly what the game should have been balanced around.
Instead if we don't want to play as a team of idiots we have to use a mod to not moronically leave people in camp, then another mod to adjust the difficulty to make up for it.
And sadly all the mods I've seen difficulty are nothing more than stat boosts/nerfs for enemies/us, which is isn't a good way to increase difficulty

That would be difficult to do, because the number of companions can vary wildly. In one of my two campaigns, I am playing a feminist drow dark urge sorcerer and due to how things went, I only have three companions (about to face Ketheric Thorm in his tower).

What is needed though, is a very good explanation of party size limit. Perhaps more than four tadpoles close together will reach critical mass and cause a devestating explosion? Perhaps fast travel magic only allows a party of four? Perhaps Withers will get upset if you cross the four treshold? Perhaps there is an ancient prophecy that must be adhered to? It doesn't really matter which explanation is cooked up, but there must be one.

You are forgetting about hirelings.
They are there for a reason.
The party limit at a given time should be the amount of companion characters you could have had, +1 for when you play as Tav/Urge, and the player somehow notified that if their story has left them with less companions than that, they either accept the increased difficulty resulting from it, or use hirelings to replace the missing companions.
if a Durge kills all 6 companions you can get in act 1, they should still be entering act 2 as a party of 7. Durge and 6 hirelings.

As for contriving a narrative reason to limit to 4, it had better be a VERY good reason, because if it's not leaving people in camp will still come across as narratively profoundly stupid.

Indeed it is. And every time you come across lines like "it looks like your party is full at the moment" the profound stupidity is rubbed in again. But is this really a problem for Larian to solve? The lack of explanation for fixed party size is a problem for all CRPGs. Shouldn't some organisation come up with a solution that can be applied to all present and future fantasy RPGs? For SF RPGs the solution can always be that your planatary landing craft only has four seats, so that's covered.

What if a player doesn't give a flying fuck about Larian's way of doing things? What if said player just wants to play for laughs? Oh but wait, you wont get your little Achievement badge saying what rough, tough adventurer you are.
I have run around Skyrim with 70 followers in tow. The game is designed for 2 if I recall correctly.

Depends on how the game deals with XP but increasing the party size could result in slower level progression.

I recently downloaded the Unfinished Business mod for Solasta just so I can play it with a party of six. Wow!! What a huge, huge, HUGE difference it has made in my enjoyment of that game!! And all the encounters have remained just as challenging as they were before, because I don't min-max in creating my characters and am running with an ecclectic gaggle of under-optimized characters that are built for my personal fun and enjoyment.

I simply cannot envision any scenario where I would be willing to play BG3 without being able to have my party of six.

If swapping out characters wouldn't be such a tedious mechanism (), party of 4 would be really great as it is. But the empty kilometers one makes in camp... well...

This is it. This is the whole reason there should never be hard party size limits. There is just no way to do it that doesn't shatter immersion. In every game that has one, from New Vegas to Mass Effect to Pillars of Eternity to Dragon Age, any game you can name, it's dumb and forced and makes the opposite of sense. "OK gang, we're going to go fight an entire ship full of geth, so we should probably all be going on this mission." "Not so fast, Shepard. You see, it just so happens that every single friend you have ever made in the entire galaxy has a peccadillo about traveling in groups larger than three. You know how some people don't like cilantro? It's like that. Every single one of us hates being in a group of more than three."

If I never again hear a companion character say some variation of "it looks like you're already traveling with a lot of people" or "I just prefer a little less company on the road" or whatever, it'll be too soon.

I can accept party size limits if they're tied to something the player can influence. As far as I know this was only done in Fallout 2 and no other game that comes to mind. Your party size limit was directly derived from your Charisma stat. Simple, elegant, makes perfect sense: it takes a charismatic person to keep a group of so many strong and often conflicting personalities together. They still had companions saying dumb lines like "you already have a full party," so that could have been improved on, but conceptually it's perfect. You could even iterate on it and have certain Charisma levels required for specific pairings or groupings to be together in a party.

Choice and consequence. The best games incorporate choice and consequence even into the mechanical aspects, and party composition should be one of those aspects. It's not the developer's responsibility to balance a game around literally every possible choice you could make with your party composition. You could respec all your characters into clerics with the exact same healing spells and equip them all with armor and weaponry that they aren't proficient in; should the game be balanced around that? That's an extreme example, but I'm not just talking about out-of-universe, video-gamey considerations. I'm also talking about in-universe factors. If you're roleplaying as a character who did some light genocide in Act 1, then your character should have to live with the consequences! And not just the consequences of "I don't have this companion as an option," but the consequences of "my party will not be as large as it would have been had I not done this." If your character goes through life being a dick, they're going to have fewer friends, and maybe that's not a great idea in a world where hobgoblins and evil wizards are common problems.

The greatest trick Starcraft ever pulled was indoctrinating gamers into an obsession with balance, this fervent and almost unshakeable conviction that players (in all genres and styles) should have distinct options, but all of them should be exactly as good or bad as the others. They shouldn't! That's the whole thing about choices, is they impact your life! We're roleplaying as characters who are living a life, right? Well in life you make choices and they materially affect the rest of your life and the world around you. They don't just make numbers on a character sheet go up or down, they don't make someone's approval score go up or down, they don't unlock the good ending or the bad ending. They meaningfully impact your life, including how much support you'll have when you go through hard times.

The premise of RPGs that have parties is that you are explicitly gathering allies for a fight, or to help solve a problem, or so you can all help solve each other's mutual problems, or just that some of the people you meet like you and want to help you out. Every single one of those options implies that you are going to have an easier time of it if you try not to alienate people. If you want to roleplay as someone who alienates people, that's great, but you should absolutely have a harder time as a result.

Of course it's a problem for Larian to solve. It's a problem for every developer who makes an RPG that has companions to solve. Come on, imagine if Larian (or any other developer) approached other problems that way, just doing the same obviously dumb things because fixing it isn't their problem. That's what Bethesda does, and no one should be emulating them. Also, there are easy solutions that take zero intellectual rigor:

1) No party size limit, balance the game for full parties and let players live with the consequences if they don't want a full party.
2) No party size limit, combat difficulty and skill check difficulty scale with party size.
3) Party size limit based in some way on Charisma or a similar stat.
4) Just don't have more companions than you want people to play with! If you really think good adventures only happen when you have a group of four people, then just don't have me meet more than four people! And don't tell me that limits player choice, because you're already limiting player choice by insisting that I only have three companions.

Too obvious and too easy.

You can't have a party size of greater than four people but you can turn your camp into a menagerie. You wont get a larger party size because that would require writing a lot of extra 'romance' options and there's nothing more needed by a group of badass adventurers who are out to save the world than a nice romance. Well, except maybe coloured horns and pronouns.

I'm currently running a party of 6 with this mod:
Recruit any NPC - Transform NPC Into Playable Character - Make Full Custom Character Party - No party limit - Resurrect Dead
https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/1646

I use other mods so the combat is not a breeze (e.g. no 5 attacks per round for me). My level is about where a party of 4 would be - I hit L9 in the fight at Moonrise gates (or maybe in the building somewhere).

What even developer don't understand: Some people don't want a challenging fight sometimes ... or a realistic story, world whatever .... some people want sometimes just to ... relax and dream.

My real-life is challenging enough ....

There is already a game mode for that. Explorer mode is exactly what your looking for.

I am interested though in the original question, does Tactician mode keep the challenge high for an RP style of play? (Not min maxing)

I mostly agree! I do very much want a well-crafted and realistic story, world, quests, and characters, but combat is something I see in an RPG as the thing I have to tolerate in order to egt those good parts of the game (story, world, quests, characters).

The point is: it is a recurring problem for all party-based CRPGs. In that respect, it is very similar to being able to carry two department store's inventory around as loot, in your invisible back pocket. Like a party size cap, it is considered a necessary gameplay mechanic. And likewise, no-one has bothered to come up with a reusable explanation. I'd say: let the masterminds behind the D&D franchise come up with good explanations, instead of thinking up bunny people and turtle people.


Those solutions might take little intellectual rigor, but they also don't meet requirements the game developer is likely to have.

Yeah, this right here was THE best mod for creating a custom party (and expanding the size of your party):

Recruit any NPC - Transform NPC Into Playable Character - Make Full Custom Character Party - No party limit - Resurrect Dead
https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/1646

Unfortunately it is not working with patch 3, so yeah; my save is completely broken.

It is SO frustrating to not be able to play the game how I/we want to play it....

As many people have said: this should have been in the game to begin with; the simple ability to create as many custom companions as you like, and have the party size that you like (with some limitations ofc). Because: why not? It doesn't matter what other people do in their game, as long as each person has fun with playing the game however they want.

I would rather have a party of 5-6 and then not use/abuse speed potions, haste, ridiculously OP builds etc. With 8 partymembers, I would probably still have less actions in a round than most people playing vanilla has with 4. Meaning that difficulty problems are actually not tied THAT closely to party-size, but other mechanisms/exploits.

My point being: Each to his/her/their own. Shouldn't we all have our pick of fun (within reason and based on what most other RPG's offer) in the highest rated CRPG of all time? According to Larian: No. Truly baffling.

(And don't even get me started on the completely stupid hireling system)

I am not starting a new playthrough before I know for a fact that I can play this game the way I want to.

And this is exactly why we players should never have to depend on a mod for some fundamental aspect of the game, for any game. Mods should be only for some superficial or aesthetic change or addition to the game or for user-created optional content.

In what way is the mod not working post Patch 3? I was running a party of six pre and post Patch 3.

It seems to be working for now, if you use an older version of the mod. But my main point is that something like this should be in the game, and not something that we have to add with a mod.