Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Respecing that Oathbreaker?

So, yeah who needs to repent when you can respec.

I'm sure Larian have thought about this. I doubt it will be that simple unless you want to respec out of Paladin entirely. I doubt you can just respec your way back into the good graces of the gods.

I would argue that the price to get back into your god good graces is already very cheap. You can decimate an entiere town and just pay some gold, and bam you are redeemed.

In the final game I would expect there to be limits and escalations there. Maybe the price of redemption escalates with the number and severity of the crimes or there is a limit on the number of times you can be forgiven, etc. There's a number of ways in which this can be handled by Larian.

Honestly ...
Inability to spec as Oathbreaker bothers me thousand times more than cheap ability to stop being one. xD

I don't think think you'll be completely unable to respec as oathbreaker, if you want to respec into another class it should be fine. But surely it wouldn't make sense to be allowed to respec back into your old oath as if nothing happened. That would make no sense. Now to clarify I have no idea how the final game will handle the matter but I very much expect that once you break an oath you can't just respec back into it. If you want to go be a barbarian or wizard or whatever else that should be fine though.

Now that I think about it, respec'ing into a sorcerer makes absolutely no sense. Does it makes your ancestors retroactively bang a dragon when you do it?

That is a mechanic that we know is allowed in the game. Though you can't change your race or looks through respec without starting another game. I'm sure there will be a loose explanation for being allowed to completely change classes and this will be done through another character. Now this isn't completely out of character for D&D as there are reality bending high level spells like the wish spell for example that can do just about anything you can dream of even if we as players won't be able to get access to it in BG3. But even that has certain limitations of its own. But given how cheap and easy it is to respec and the fact that you are still the same person that broke the oath I don't see it as being that simple to buy forgiveness from the gods.

I think this is the sort of thing that's best just left as an unexplained game mechanic as any explanation that tries to make in-world sense of it is likely to be unsatisfying. I think Pathfinder WotR had something like "I and/or my party need training" to a certain NPC, which obviously was a totally insufficient explanation of a feature that let us change not only our class (as per what we hear of the BG3 respec) but change their race and appearance as well. But I guess something was needed as an option to select, and I don't think trying to add any extra detail would have made it any more plausible.

Some things, I think, just need to be handwaved if you're going to use them in a way that makes no sense, and if it's important to you to have an in-world explanation then either you need to come up with one yourself or just not do it. (Personally, though I kept cocking up my WotR character's build and tweaking it, I never actually changed her race or appearance )

But yes, to the OP, good point. I wonder how the Oathbreaker will be handled. Like others, I am sure Larian have considered this, but am not sure what they will have done. I'd guess something like not giving you the option to pick any other paladin subclass at any respec once we've committed to the Oathbreaker path, but who knows. Possibly they'll just let us make a nonsense of our roleplay if we like. Personally I wouldn't do that, but I guess it does me no harm if the option is there for others.

I mentioned this in another thread on reclassing, and I think it's in the same neighborhood as RQ's hand-waiving; I think of features like this as in-game method to retcon the character, I'm changing their entire life and past.

But i said spec.
It bothers me beyond reasons that my character is forced to uphold his oath for his whole life ... until they meet first NPC and murder him for litteraly no reason just to get this subclass. :-/

Larian calls this "narative" ... i call it immersion breaking!

I think we should be able to break our oath prior to this game story.
Ergo: Start as Oathbreaker.

Have you read/seen the book/movie Time Machine written by H. G. Wells?

The only way to make time stable is when change that happened, was allways part of curent state.
Ergo ... your ancestors allways banged dragons, no matter what you pick.

I don't think that's what this is though. You are completely changing a character's abilities and stats but in terms of relationships and story progression, that still remains...you are still the same person, and you still have to live with the consequences of your past. Also the new tadpole progression mechanic...I don't think a respec will undo or allow you to change that. The exception here are origin characters other than the dark urge which if you respec them into another class that will break at least some if not all of their story as parts of their origin stories depend on their classes.

There is at least some leniency...you can get your oath back at least one time for a price so one accident won't be the be all end all. But you are swearing an oath to a god that in this universe is real and watching and the source of some of your powers. It's not immersion braking, it's consequence. If there is an NPC that for whatever reason annoys you beyond reason you do have to mind whether it is worth the risk of breaking your oath to kill him. Especially if you had previously gained forgiveness for past transgressions.

I'll rephrase. It's a retcon of their class, stats, etc. And the new character still did all the same in-game choices, only they did them as the new them

I don't know what you even mean by that as it makes zero sense. You don't go back in time to re-make the choices you did as the "new you". You made the choices as who you are. It's better to think of respec as a change in career...it does not change the person you are. You can forget things and learn new things(though granted in a faster, more extreme, videogame sort of way) but it does not change who you are. You can behave differently, change everything about your personality, etc. but it does not change who you are...you are still the same person who made those choices in the past and you still have to live with their consequences.

I think we're free to head-canon it in whatever way makes best sense to us in our own playthroughs. Which might even differ from character to character.

Though I assume that it's true that we are limited in that head-canon to something that makes sense of all the tags that will have been set in our game. So even though we might tell a different story about who our character is, their motivations, etc if we choose a retcon-type head-canon, the things they have actually done in the game will remain the same, or at least anything that has consequences after the point of respeccing.

I can see a case for thinking of it this way, and I guess that is a fair characterisation of what I did when I respecced my WotR character, who I'd started off as a rogue then took levels in sorceror intending to make her an Arcane Trickster, who needed two levels of sneak attack as per Pathfinder rules. Once I took the Trickster mythic path and realised that would give her the two levels of sneak attack without taking rogue levels, I respecced her as a sorceror at level 1 and pretended that is what she'd always been. So yes, I definitely retconned my WotR character. And I'm not even sorry

I'm a bit iffy about respec, but understand why Larian is doing it; however, the fee to do it is absurdly small. Fex mentioned it's 100gp. Perhaps it should be logarithmic. Also, given how it likely works, I don't see why you can't cheese it (after all, most of us know how much Larian loves cheese) with Oathbreaker even though you shouldn't. As everyone likes to say, 'don't like it? don't use it.' :P

+1

The reason you can respec at anytime is because you are a doppelganger, who is tricked into thinking you are who you are- I wrote a theory about this a few months earlier, can find and read it under my profile. Dopplers abilities always are what they mimick, a doppler that is connected to a mindflayer hivemind has the ability to pull from any source of hero abilities and specs that they have ever enslaved. The tadpole is that direct link. AKA when you respec it will likely be because the tadpole overwrites your conscious mind.

I mean it's not entirely out of the question but I think it's extremely unlikely and you are probably looking too far into it. The big problem with D&D in videogame form is that unlike a regular D&D game there are no other humans at the table to tell the player if he is making a catastrophically inept character and a lot of people who will play BG3 have never in their life played a D&D game. So it's important to be able to learn by trial and error without potentially having to throw the save file away and start over from the beginning every time. D&D is an incredibly complex game. So I don't think there will be any form of forced explanation there like a doppelganger plot or anything of the sort.