Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Anything for the club of healthy brain enjoyers?

I guess you might get additional content for the tadpole experimenter, but team healthy brain has more companion interactions, which would be missing in team tadpole.

You've to have an absolutely madcap of a character to go around collecting tad-poles and inserting them into their head. You can't make this stuff up. I was willing to accept the change to the lore of ceremorphosis in order for the story hook, but one needs to draw the line somewhere. I'd like to think the system is there for those who care nothing for the overall narrative, but I can't imagine Larian will place too much malus on the player that utilizes their tad-pole mini-game. As they themselves saw it as a necessary sub-system for player customization given the size of the game relative to the level cap they decided on.

As far as balance between those that partake and those that don't, I can't imagine they even care about that. All their supposed 'balancing' simply unbalances other parts of the system, as far as I can tell. These last few 'reveals' have made me more apprehensive about the game than ever before. If nothing else, I think this game is going to be absolutely hilarious.

Wrath is a bad example for your point considering is gold dragon is essentially unbaked compared to the other paths.

Also angel along and azata all suck in the whole make good feel good department too. The funny thing is the original adventure path had a lot more options for making good feel good. Instead of just pulling the rug out from under you and make you feel bad you actually thought you were an Angel.

Very much this. Certain alliances might be locked, or hells, you could just flat out die at some point. 'Power comes at a cost', says Swen, and I like that. Either way, I'll be doing many runs in this game, and I'll not be sad by missing out. It's just different.

Okay man, from seeing you for a bit here whenever Wrath is mentioned it looks like you seem to have a more personal problem with Wrath.

I don't think Larian spent so much time and effort implementing this upgrade tree with different and unique powers for every player class only then have a ham handed approach where if you use it it's game over or something. No, this was put in there for us to have fun with it and they even outright say that you can use these powers to save the forgotten realms...so you can push this all the way and probably still get a good ending though you might be more alone with companions leaving you of forcing you to kill them.

Larian didn't put this in the game so you play scared with it in and never use it.

I am very interested to see just how far I can push the tadpole powers. If at the end of my character can still maintain self control without falling under the total influence of an elder brain or some other evil god then I'm going all the way. I will also try to see how far I can push to gain mind control powers from the tadpole as well.

Yeah wrath was a shallow unfinished game. And it doesn't help the argument you were trying to make at all.

Even with the good mythic paths you get melancholic endings, for every companion, at best.

You get mass effect 3 level pick your color but everything else is the same.

They take the idea that you were an actual angel or azata and pull out the rug from you and then spend 2 acts with the railroaded Frankenstein monster plot.

Even with angel, which should be all about uplifting badass goodness you just get more and more torture and misery porn, it was among the worst of the paths from a "goodness" pov

Azata was the only one that actually felt kind of ok Tell supprse! You wre oblivious enough to let a devil into your circle, silly mc!

The neutral and evil paths still have the same problem of being essentially the same thing just recolor, but atleast they are slightly more unique.

In the end Demon gets the closest to anything unique and it even gets two branches, one as a loyal son of your mom and one where you kill mom go make your own demon kingdom and threatened the world wound even worse.

Tldr in wrath the Demon, the unmissable default evil path, gets extra reactivity and is the only one that gets an ending other than the World wound is sealed/stabelized. So wotr is an example of evil being favored narritivly.

Yeah... I'm not even going to say how many things are wrong here. I'll just say we should stop derailing this thread.

I've thought about this quite a bit.

On one hand, it's really great that a game at last puts something *really* tempting into my path, that some of my characters might actually end up using and not feel they've gone the risky/evil path for no good reason. That's great.

On the other hand, there seems to be content on it that from the player perspective, you wouldn't want to miss, and not at all for gameplay reasons. Just think of those dream sequences. If you consistently refuse to use illlithid powers, then you won't get them. And they appear to be such an integral thematic element of the conflict within yourself that is created by the tadpole.

From yet another angle, giving the tadpole anything seems really stupid from any character's point of view, so can I justify going down that path with any character of INT 10/WIS 10 or higher? As far as our characters know, using those powers might just trigger the ceremorphosis we've been apparently unexplainably lucky to avoid. So, as I imagine my current character telling Astarion thinking about it: What does survival matter if that which survives is not you?

In the end it comes down to this: no, I'll not feel shafted losing out on those cool powers. That's part of resisting the temptation. What I will resent is losing the narrative elements which are thematically important, like at least some of those dream sequences, if I do the intelligent thing and not use those powers. And I also don't like that I have to be stupid to make a decision to use them.

Maybe I will just feed all the tadpoles to Asterion, by way of being a science experiment?

All you healthy brainers ... just means more illithid powers for the rest of us.

"Greetings, mortal. I offer you great power, but first, you must give me your soul!"

"Oh, goodness no. I could never give you my soul. No deal."

"Behold, mortal! Here is thy gift of power!"

"Whoa, whoa, wait just a tic. I said I'm *NOT* giving you my soul."

"Well, technically you get the power either way. It's just in this case I don't also get your soul. I guess you found the loophole."

*

--regarding a comment above about the dreamer and how using the tadpole is essentially an inherently "dumb" thing to do... the dreamer has been changed to the guardian, and there is dialogue now that goes into what's going on. It's not the same scenario as it was. This is no longer a mysterious dream persona who may or may not be the tadpole and who can't seem to give a straight answer.

There are so many massive conclusions people are jumping to. It makes me wish I had bought stake in that "jump to conclusions mat" I heard about years ago. Sales for that thing must be skyrocketing.

*

@Darth_Trethon, I almost don't want to say this because you're so enthusiastic about it, but you might want to consider that the illithid powers probably aren't "tailored" to each class. There are 25 unique illithid powers, and they are more than likely the same 25 powers regardless of which class you play. A rogue, for example, almost certainly has the same interface and choices as, say, a wizard.

Yes they are...not all 25 change based on your class but plenty of them are marked as "class powers"...those will be different for every class. So there are way more than 25 across all classes. But I don't think it works with multiclassing. I think the tadpole powers available to you will be based purely on whatever class you start the game as at level 1.

Yes, I am now tempted to not stab him, when he attempts to force himself on my PC, and instead use him as a tadpole dump. I think I will keep tadpoles for my 2nd playthrough.

Which reminds me I really need to get around to doing 2nd playthrough of Prey, and invest heavily into Typhon powers.

Where are you seeing that?

I may be mistaken, that's always a possibility.

But I suspect you saw that some of the powers were listed as "Passive Feature" and some were listed as "Class Action."

The "Class Action" just means that you have to activate the ability with an action, as opposed to the passive abilities.

Please point me to another source if you have one? In all the mix of information that's been coming out, it's possible I missed something. But again, this is what I currently think you're referring to.

Why would an action be called "class action" if it's not class specific? It's kind of in the name...if not class specific call it an active ability or just an action. Putting the word class in there means a very specific thing.

Love this!

Yeah game studios can't win. Either you get called out for morality boiling down to blue colored or red colored powers, or you get accused of ignoring/favoring one side or the other.

Narrative and gameplay mechanics linked in a meaningful way like this is one of the lessons I hope other studios learn from BG3.

Yeah right.... please forgive me for basing my conclusions on the actual evidence. Without using the tadpole, you won't have the dream, so if that dream is now somehow reassuring - which granted, I can't say for certain since I've only seen it in a video, though IIRC it wasn't that old - you won't see it if you did not already take the plunge. So yes, still seems stupid from a character's perspective.

Also, honestly, would you trust a figure that suddenly appeared in your dreams right after a tentacled monster put some worm-like thing into your head? You say it now explains a few things. I'll wait with my judgment until I've seen it, but it'll have some explaining to do.

And again, I don't mind not getting any of those powers. That's part of the story. Do I risk my mental integrity for them? Or perhaps rather not. It's more about the narrative elements since I think they're representative of the major theme of mental integrity and power this story has.

But we don't talk here about getting power if we don't go with a tadpole. There is a possible issue that the game will give you no CONTENT if you don't use a Tadpole. Again. Larian made that system to make the endgame more engaging as there are less level ups, but from this it looks like they fixed this problem only for ONE group of players while ignoring the other, giving them no content of their own. Is that supposed to be good?

Level up your tadpoles: fabulous cosmic power!

Don't level up your tadpole: able to complete a crossword puzzle without drooling on it