Currently I'm on my 7th playthrough, and gosh.... I really wish there was a way for us to gain the flying skill without using the astral tadpole. I have a couple of reasons for this:
First, jumping kinda sux. No matter if everyone in your party has a high jumping distance, you still have to be lucky for all of them to follow you. If you don't, you have to go through your characters and wait. If you accidentally select the one that's been left behind, the rest of them will all jump back. (for some reason they never have a problem doing this lol).
Second, jumping costs a bonus action while flying just costs movement speed. So when you take the astral tadpole, jumping becomes completely redundant.
My third reason is story-wise. If you play a character who trusts the Emperor and goes along with it, then this is no problem. However, if your character is more sceptical then this makes no sense. You've been tadpoled and try to get rid of it, but along the way you only put more tadpoles in your brain. And then the Emperor happens to have a super-duper magical tadpole he also wants you to use. Your face and teeth get completely messed up.... but hey, you can fly.
Having done multiple runs where I used tadpoles and didn't use tadpoles, I can say that using no tadpoles at all gets me by just fine. There wasn't an instance where I thought: I really wish I had this Illithid skill. Apart from flying. That's the only one I miss.
It would be really nice if you refused all tadpoles you get flying as a reward. What do you think?
