Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Why does everybody immediately accept us as leader

It is rather something I asked myself often during the dialogs in the game. I mean a typical DnD group consists of more or less equal partners and if there is a leader it is determined at least in some way. In BG3 we immediately become the group leader and it seems that none of our companions objects. Not even if we act completely against their wishes! And I cannot think of any event or ability that makes us so special that our companions decide to make us leader of the group.

- Gayle is kind and laidback, so he probably thrust you and let you take the lead.

Shadowheart seems to want to take charge a lot when she is in your party even though we are the leader.

The character's will go it alone if you do not recruit them though, so it's not like the companion characters are helpless without us.

It is rather something I asked myself often during the dialogs in the game. I mean a typical DnD group consists of more or less equal partners and if there is a leader it is determined at least in some way. In BG3 we immediately become the group leader and it seems that none of our companions objects. Not even if we act completely against their wishes! And I cannot think of any event or ability that makes us so special that our companions decide to make us leader of the group.

When the player moves a character and the rest follows you can interprete this as a groups will, that's fine. But if one character talks and makes actual decisions and he is not especially nominated by the story in some way as group leader I expect his companions to act in one of 3 ways:

- stay neutral
- approve
- disapprove

And with act I do not mean a change in their approval towards the player character but direct intervention in dialog. That is nothing that has to be happen in every dialog but in some it seems to be missing to make them believable.

Here is an example: In the grove there is a dialog with a Tiefling who will be interrogated by Lae'zel if she's in your party. If you go against Lae'zels will and try to be friendly with the Tiefling she will respond very harshly but do nothing in the end. I mean: At that point Lae'zel thinks of herself as far superior to you and sees some kind of abomination in you. And she is just staying behind thinking "Fine do what you want"??? I would rather expect in such a situation that we get an Intimidation check against her and if we fail we have the choice to either led her interrogate him (with approval loss) or she might even attack us.

Or why is Gale not doing anything during the Arabella incident even if we keep quiet and do nothing although he is definetly pissed about it?! If we manage to prevent it he will just say how angry he is but why didn't he react if we choose to do nothing?

Currently our companions often feel like puppets with an approval value who follows us and let us do however we please in nearly every dialog interaction. It would make a huge difference if Larian reworked a few key dialogs like the two mentioned above to really show that our companions are living beings with a personality and own goals. That want to have a word or two to say in what we are doing. I mean they have a tadpole too. It's not as if they are following you for fun...

Because this would require genuine effort and interest on the developers part as they would have to learn a lot of lore and backgrounds to FR/D&D and discover concepts such as narrative cohesion which where not only completely absent in their previous titles but they didn't even consider something as basic as narrative continuity.

Lae'zel [snip]. I feel like she would actually appreciate someone showing strength so putting her in place with rolls, and also keeping her strongheadedness in check, makes twice the sense.

No need to throw stones now. D:OS (from what little I've seen) has a very different tone to the type of high quality narrative that players expect from Baldur's Gate. They expect the companions to feel like living, breathing people that are just as invested in the story as you are. That's a high bar, and it may take several passes for Larian to get it right. It's stilly to think they didn't put in effort or don't have interest.

I don't want to see companions break (yet). That's fine if we get the 17 NPCs like we had in BG2 but with only a handful of companions, a companion going their own way means a broken game.

Something needs to make Tav McBlanderson * a compelling character. Perhaps instead of everyone being freed because of damage to the ship perhaps Tav could flip a lever that opens all the cells at once? Then everyone we meet would start with "wait, you're the reason I got free"

*( I stole that)

That thing that's supposed to make your custom character compelling is called imagination. If we're going to call for Larian to write them for us, we may as well just petition to remove custom characters, because that's essentially what you're asking for when you want someone else to define them for you.

You sound angry. Let's see if we can have a different kind of conversation. The point is have just enough of a background to let the imagination stick. When you really want glue to work you first rough up the surface and then apply the adhesive. I'm asking for something similar -- Larian needs to better prepare the surface. BG got it right -- there are thousands of different Bhaalspawn stories, Biowere was able to give just enough detail to let people flesh out their own stories. Compare this to DOS2 where I really just playing Fane's story.

Now in 5th edition there are a number of role play characteristics that ever PC bring to the table -- background, bond, flaw etc. So far Larian has put in background but it doesn't really do much -- much less than backgrounds in PoE1.

Also, we could / should have background creation option and some compelling reason for the NPCs to follow our lead. We had it BG -- child of destiny. Now in BG3 we have a blank slate. "savior of the imprisoned would be one such 'bond' "

Perhaps instead of everyone being freed because of damage to the ship perhaps Tav could flip a lever that opens all the cells at once? Then everyone we meet would start with "wait, you're the reason I got free"

I’d hate to say it but I’m just not sure this dev has any interest in plausibility. Little things like downplaying the other characters uniqueness, establishing why the PC is in charge just didn’t make it into the priority list.