Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Fextralife Video - Race and Class and ability scores discussed! *Major Spoilers*

I notice Pact of the Blade lets you summon or bind a weapon to use with Charisma. However, unlike PnP it does not appear to give you martial weapon proficiency (or any additional armor or shield proficiency). So that is going to make racial weapon proficiencies useful. If Wyll gets board with his rapier he can use a glaive instead. Pole Arm Master Wyll.

Hold that thought Laezel I gotta put this tadpole I found on the ground in my head.

Pact of the Book gives you three cantrips, but they are fixed as Guidance, Vicious Mockery and Thorn Whip. In PnP you have a free choice from any class list. I wonder what the reason for this nerf was?

Yay for elf sorcerer!

If putting the tadpoles into your brain, with all it's possible negative side-effects, isn't addressed really early in game through a npc/book/cinematic, this is a horrible decision. Just from the ui look alone, with it's black tendrils covering your brain, it feels like this will have big ramifications and the incentive to go "bad" with these extreme good bonus abilities is massive. The vast vast majority of players will have ONE play through not multiple to see different outcomes of bad/good/neutral play-styles. This might ruin the games overall experience for a lot of players if there isn't a counter incentive for the tadpoles in your brain or a huge red letter warning. Furthermore an dialogue option 30 minutes before the games ending to make it all undone and just remove the brainmaggots without any consequences would be the worst path this could take.

What if the counterplay of the tadpole powers is having friends? I know it sounds cheesy as hell but in PFH Larian said something about being able to gather many allies in a way or another and a power hungry monster might not have some helps or gifts along the game.

So we're going on a quest that has the primary objective of removing the tabpole from our brain but yet we're going to stick more tabpoles inside there while we're on the journey? Eh, I don't know about that. And if I don't want my PC to do it because it literally makes no narrative sense whatsoever, then I miss out on all of these really cool abilities. Come on.

Honestly, I really liked how they had it before, where you could manipulate others' minds and have one ability that you could use or not use. It was tempting enough but didn't feel like you had to do it, in other words, I feel like the EA had a good balance going.

At least if they wanted this progression system they could have just made them powers given to us by the single tadpole FORCED into our brain as opposed to putting new ones in as we simultaneously rush to figure out how to get them out. Man, that makes me confused even just typing it out.

And what's the reward for sticking on a good path? Is there one? Because there are a lot of players out there, probably a good majority, that want to play a good-aligned PC.

I was more excited about this game's release than I have been for any other game in years but my excitement the past couple of days has been tempered a bit. Between the reveal of this news and even more so the news about the potential multiclassing changes. Idk. Larian is so close to making the perfect game but it looks like they might be screwing things up in the zero hour. Imo. I know others will disagree and that's fine.

What about Half-elves and Shield Dwarves? Did they just get nerfed?

Having friends or factions or maybe even a deity that sprinkles some magic in an important encounter would be a great counterplay to the abilities. However in the video he mentions that you meet the guardian in act 2 and there are no dreams anymore so i just hope that players get a somewhat good early in-game explanation/warning about the tadpoles, because the abilities look really juicy and far more tempting than the EA tadpole ability.

This made me hopefull ...
But as i listened to the video, it shows out it was false hope.

Yes.
And Humans too.

Yeah there are definitely some conflicting mechanics there between story and gameplay and definitely some concerns as well. This communicates much more clearly, precisely what you get and it allows you to choose which is far better for playstyle. I don't think people would be tempted to mess much with the tadpole if they didn't know what they were getting or if they got predetermined bonuses that didn't fit their builds, etc. In terms of gameplay this is better and cleaner, but messier in terms of story and lore. What I really wonder though, is what happens when we reach the remove tadpole part of the story...do we lose all the abilities learned from the tadpole? That would be a massive debuff to the character that can set the player back a lot. They say this is to give a sense of progression between levels because you don't level up a lot and that's true but then if we have to give up all that suddenly it could create a lot of problems. I suppose we'll have to wait and see. If we can have the tadpole removed and we keep all powers then maybe there will be some other story ramifications where you lose on other rewards elsewhere.

I will say that I don't think a written warning is strictly necessary because EVRY PART of this feels like a warning. The image of the atrophied brain, the tadpole BURROWING into your brain, just the thought of putting a tadpole into your head, its visceral upsetting and you don't need to try hard to convince anyone it's a bad idea.

But Buria makes a good point about it from a story perspective. It feels like this isn't the sort of thing we should be able to do until later in the game, when we have a bit of a clearer understanding of the tadpole and we have a thread to follow specific for controlling rather than removing the parasite.

I am sad that we have to tell people that putting additional illithid tadpoles in your brain is probably a bad idea. Then again we have instructions on packs of toothpicks.

I would choose to see this as an option for people who choose "power at any cost" - this is pure Lord Voldemort and Horcruxes. You gain power at the expense of yourself.

Remember, Astarion WANTS the tadpole but wants to control it because it "frees" him to some extent. So this is related to that.

What is incredible is that this is likely just a tiny part of the game that incorporates a path you can go down and its supports how much you want to descend into iniquity and self destruction.

Bravo!

As it seems lately ...
What happens is that final credits will run, since that will be end of the game.

Some people are going to stick more tadpoles in their head for power, some want them gone asap

But you can't do a story about corruptive power if the power trying to corrupt you isn't attractive.

Lore wise it's a mess because more than one tadpole in one host would almost certainly guarantee the ceremorphosis fails and there is no lore precedent for people wanting more tadpoles in their brain or gaining more power from more tadpoles not to mention these things kill the host and so on. I feel like this could be done in a better way like maybe the tadpole in our character's mind could learn from others and enhance our character without us inserting it...that would make much mores sense in terms of our character does something that is beneficial but not clearly dumb. Realistically our character couldn't have a visual idea of what it does to the brain so if it was just something like, yeah it offers more power by learning from its kind without insertion it would make more sense and players would be more inclined to do it. But the gross visual also emphasizes that hey, this is probably a really dumb thing to do. Though back to gameplay ramifications I don't know how they want to balance "well we just wanted players to have a bit more progression between levels since those are rare" with something like suddenly losing all that late game if you extract the tadpole/s or maybe a really bad story outcome that maybe ruins your ending if you don't get rid of it or being punished for having leaned into it because at that point there are a lot of asterisks attached to this mid-level progression the say they want us to have. So not sure.

I don't think people needed a warning to understand that tadpoles are bad in the EA, but now you see a whole screen and upgrade tree related to them and nothing that actually encurages you to ignore a system of the game that seems to be a large part of your potential character progression.

I won't use it myself, but at the same time it feels like by ignoring the tadpole and ignoring the murderhobbo background your character is basically just a spectator to witness other origin character's animations/storylines.

I agree with the idea mentioned that it could be by ignoring the tadpole you might end up with a larger party as less people leave you. Overall though it feels like Larian's main effort from the get go was to make the evil path the actually interesting way to play the game and they didn't really bother filling out the holes in gameplay and story you get for not going down that route. Or not playing the Larian characters.

I think you're slightly overestimating how long we'll potentially have the tadpole. I think it's more likely we'll get to choose between keeping or removing the tadpole just before the last dungeon and have to deal with the ramifications of that for good or for ill. I think it would be a cop out if we got to keep the powers the tadpole granted us and never had to materially deal with the fallout of removing it in gameplay.

Absolutely.

And the really interesting thing about this is if you take that route, it might end up pushing you towards a 'good' outcome in Act 1 simply because you want Gut, Dror's and Minthara's tadpoles for power. I think there are actually going to be a lot of subtle permutations in gameplay based on your rp instead of an obvious 'good' and 'evil' route to take.

Just looking at the screenshot for the powers, it's obvious you will be way, WAY more powerful than a standard 12th level character by the end if you can retain control

I don't think it will be nearly that simple...not even remotely. I'm sure there will still be branching paths at play, ramifications, ways to deal with it. It's fine you can probably cut a deal with some deity to help you out for a price, etc. It's D&D...nothing ever as simple as "if you do this then game over".