Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Need More Ways to "Deal" with Kids

Arabella. The goblin kids outside the goblin fortress. The goblin kids inside the goblin fortress. The tiefling tyke thieves (I assume, since I haven't raided the refugees yet). No matter what route you take, chances are you'll probably witness (or commit) the murder of a child. One dead kid? Fine. The scene with the snake should you fail the dice roll is fantastic and has its intended emotional impact (well done, seriously). But at a certain point in my playthrough, it all began to feel somewhat gratuitous. Like, "Hey, look! Unlike Skyrim, we have ALL the killable kids!" And this is only the first act, which makes me terrified for when we arrive at the city which will of course have more children.

The kid killing is especially jarring when playing as a good character. (I tried and failed to play evil, since the evil routes to tadpole removal all seemed highly suspect--why the hell would I trust a witchdoctor with a tadpole in her own head to remove the one in mine? Or a hag who has a lair filled with her backfire cures? There's amoral self-interest, and then there's stupidity.)

I adore the original Baldurs Gates and DOS2. Have played . . . way too many hours of the BG3 EA, and overall love it! But I'm also a kindergarten teacher (which may make me oversensitive to this, I admit, since I love children). It feels wrong that I have to slaughter them in order to not suffer gameplay repercussions. Hot take: child murder (even goblin child murder) probably shouldn't be rewarded, and companions should respond negatively to it (at least Shadowheart, Gale, and Wyll should? Vampire and Gith probably wouldn't care overmuch.).

So can we have more options on how to deal with children? For example, an option to intimidate the goblin kids into silence when rescuing the druid. Maybe conk them out and lock them in the druid's cell so that they don't warn their entire camp? Cast a sleep spell on them? I want more options than "let them escape and bring the wrath of every goblin down on my head" and "backstab a seven-year-old." If I must kill children for the sake of practicality, at least let me resurrect them after the fight is over. (If there are actually more solution options to rescuing the druid, and I'm simply dumb, could those alternate routes please be made more obvious?) Note, I'm not asking to remove the ability to murder children. I'm not trying to mess with anyone's "immersion." I would just like more options to not kill kids.

(On a side note, I'd also like to be able to offer Anders and Raphael the "soul coin" you get from foiling that bugbear assassination. I get that it probably isn't the same as a fresh soul (is it?) and that the offer would probably need to be rejected for plot reasons. But I still want to try. And, as someone already posted, a helmet toggle because character creation is fantastic.)

I am completle agree with you, we need more way to deal with kids, to ex:
1. Some quests, where we can sacrifice them in rituals.
2. Some choices, where we can use them (Like use one of kids to lure owlbear from the cave)
3. Use kids as cannon fodder. They are useless anyway in fight, so why don't we move them to the frontlines, so the better troops will get more time to prepare.
4. I am certainly sure there is hidden option with that kid in druid temple and we can offer to execute little thief ourself.
Thanks, buddy, you have clever way of thinking.

I don't know whether this is intentional, but if you load the map with the druid/bear and leave and come back (I did so by doing a long rest) the druid will have gored every single goblin in that area, kids included. He doesn't seem to be weighed down by this at all. But hey, my hands are clean... ish.

Yea seeing Arabella die and savescumming 14 times to save her was bothersome playing a cleric with both lesser restoration and cure wounds memorised...

I LITERALLY TOOK LESSER RESTORATION TO CURE POISON AND SHE SPENDS SEVERAL SECONDS CROAKING WHILE MY CLERIC MAKES A SHOCKED PICKACHU FACE!!!

*Clears throat* so yeah, if Larian wants to kill children that's fine. I think the writing of it holds up but to not give our good characters a chance to save them when we have all possible reason and ability to do so?

Not enough child murder actually, the goblins killed the tiefling kids before I could.

+1 Although you could probably use the knock out/unconscious on them.

I agree, it should ve possible to save the kid. I want to be the one doing the killing so I cant let some wimpy druid do the deed. >:)

+1

I doubt they've factored this in just yet. I tried it on the 2 men accosting the old lady and it treated it like I killed them.

I get it. You guys want to creatively murder children. (Ok, I don't actually get it, but it's a fictional world and I play single-player. You do you.)

I'm not asking that your playstyle be taken away. I'm just asking Larian to let me roleplay as someone who DOESN'T treat kids the same as adult opponents. Because they're not.

Yeah I don't think they were ready to make a DnD game, since they don't allow the number of solutions a real party would have

I write IF, so I'm fully sympathetic to the fact that writers can't account for every possible choice players may want. (And obviously this is still early access.) Overall, I think Larian has done a fantastic job, and I've been pleased by most options. Being able to coax Priestess Gut into a quiet room to kill her without raising an alarm? Perfect. As was using the ogres to kill the other leaders without implicating myself.

However, I feel like being shoehorned into killing kids no matter which route you take is something to be fixed sooner rather than later. Rescuing the druid healer left me with a bad taste in my mouth, especially since I had just played with those same kids outside (or maybe kids like them? It's hard to tell when their names are numbers). We kicked a dead body together and bonded! I should've been able to convince them to leave before killing everyone else in the room.

Yea, like I like to play evil sometimes, but sometimes I also want to make a good character, and it just feels...weird to murder kids when you're supposed to be a good guy, you know?

Good people in DnD are not "good" in the modern sense. At the core every adventurer is a sociopathic murderhobo who has different targets based on presumed morality and a graverobbing hobby. There is not much difference between them for a modern human being. But hey, it is a game and fantasy so don't worry. Pixels can't feel real pain. (If you want to get into the racial determinism with Gnolls being made by a demonic being and Orcs, Goblins and Drow almost always worshipping evil nutjobs you can open a can so big it could fit all murderous liches and the whole Illithid race inside so it is best to just kill a bunch off pixel kids and not got there).

The balance between game mechanics and story is hard, I get it.

But it's pretty ridiculous that (as someone who doesn't want the kid dead, which weirdly seems a minority so far...) I'm standing there with a scroll of True Resurrection in my hand and no option to intervene. You're also seriously telling me there are six druids in the room with not one neutralize poison between them? Alright, Kagha wouldn't burn the slot, but the rest of them...?

I hope in the finished game there's an option somewhere with better than 25% chance for a good party with means, motive & opportunity to not just stand by. Currently it's the opposite of player agency.

I had the same experience, trying to sneakily kill the snake with a ranged attack before entering dialogue and thinking that even if it turned into combat, I would prevent Arabella from being poisoned to death. But on the death of the snake, her corpse just suddenly hits the ground.

It's early, not the end of the world, etc etc, but it would be nice to not feel trapped into a single dice roll outcome.

As of right now, the Tiefling-children seem immortal...
Attacking and reducing them to 0 HP does nothing to them. Tested on: Mol (the thief, that threathens you). Mattis and Silfy (The Tiefling traders).
- No comment on the idiocy of some random children being open weapon traders and the main Tiefling traders.

I dislike this 'solution'.
I can understand, if Larian doesn't want any bad publicity from videos showing off the corpses of children. That just stinks of bad press. (The snake quest can be seen as a 'good example' how child death can be handled. Also, a snake did the deed.)

Possible solutions for Larian:
Upon 'death' of a child. >> Replace its corpse model with a container.
(Cheap, easy, no fuss.)
This avoids showing children's corpses, while allowing access to any quest relevant items, that they carry. This also sidesteps immortals, that keep mouthing off, despite beeing dead or any children that stand happily next to the corpses of their parents.

This is something that bothered me too. A lot, at the moment.
Immediately when it happened did I think of the cleric in the group or a potion. Most poisons do HP-damage and can be mitigated by healing spells. It's possible, that the snake did enough damage for an instantaneous kill. Still, you can't know until you try your spell or make a health examination. So, Rath should have at least tried to heal the child. He could have failed, but he definitely should have tried to save her.

This is for me on the long, long list of lacking conversation options.
A very common problem with computer games that incorporate D&D, since the tabletop game expects the Game Master to just make more story content up, whenever a player does something unplanned.

So, for me, this has two different aspects.

The first is this: kids die. They die in war, they die from neglect and abuse, they die from exploitation and slavery, they die from terrorrism, they die in genocide. They die in the Mediterranean trying to cross to Europe as refugees - and after the EU frobade assisting them, they died in Aleppo from indescriminate bombing, they died in camps on the American border after being separated from their parents, they died by the Khmer Rouge, and in German concentration camps. They die as collateral damage (like the hundreds of thousands killed by the American atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), they die deliberately and specifically (like in the facilities built by the Germans in WW2 to investigate specifically the mass murder of children), and they die because we don't care (like the girls who die in sweatshop fires in Pakistan, so that Western stores could sell cheap textile). The human race is aweful. That is the reality of our species, and there is no point denying it. In a way it is almost criminal to do so. (the above is just stating facts, not an invitation to discuss politics)

Which brings me to my second point: The framing of this infanticide. I think we can all agree that killing children is an evil thing to do. Even if you are one of those, hmmm... I wanna say trolls, who advocated for more ways to kill children. And so killing them in the game should be framed as evil. The killing of Arabella was well done because Kagha was portrayed as a corrupt and evil individual (which is why her repentence seems a bit too easy, for my taste), But Halsin's slaughter of the goblin kids is presented in a very different way. Yes, goblins are evil (although Larian stated several times that they were stepping away from portraying whole races as one alignment) , but these are still children. And Halsin should not be presented as a kindly uncle after this murder. So yes, if he is to stay a positive character (or at least a non-negative one), we should be given at the very least an option to restrain him from infanticide. The same goes for any non evil character who kills children.

If the intended emotional impact is "Refugee good, racism bad" then congratulations on falling into an feelings trap, I suppose.




That's because you are meant to care for the Tieflings and the writer sort of forgot to communicate that to the people in charge of the goblin story. There is even a goblin child "mourning" the loss of its parents that says they must have been weaklings if they died to REALLY hammer home to suffer not the greenskin.