Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Herosexual NPCs

There are as many lgbt people that dislike playersexual characters as there are straight, just saying.

I'm interested, do you think there's no difference between a game like what we've seen of Baldur's Gate 3 and a game like Dragon Age Inquisition? In this regard I mean. You also seem to conflate gender and sexuality, I play these games for as long as they have something to show me and that includes all of the above, as it were.

You're the first person to ever call me a troll....Thanks?

Non-herosexual NPCs can and do include NPCs that are:
-straight and not available to my gay/lesbian character
-gay/lesbian and not available to my straight character
It doesn't have to be all "me me me." I want Alistair/Cullen/Solas to be straight, even if this prevents me from romancing them, because it defines them more as people. They have specific wants/desires/preferences, same as many people in real life.
I like that Sera is only romanceable by a female inquisitor for the same reason (again, even though this prevents my Male inquisitor from romancing her)

Yes, there is "nothing a straight person can be, think, or like a gay person couldn't" and games obviously shouldn't give gay characters offensive stereotypes. But added detail, especially about something as defining as sexuality, can often help make the NPC seem more real and relatable.

Their preferences can be shown in dialogue as who they remark on while traveling, how they respond to the other companion party banter, how they respond to the player's advances/actions, help flesh out their background, etc.
e.g., Wyll. @KillerRabbit says that devils "assume the gender they think is mostly likely to get the response they are after." If this is correct, Wyll should be more interested in women according to the rules of the universe. Making him herosexual (equally amenable to either gender PC) contradicts this story lore.
Now, if Wyll was willing to sleep with the player regardless of gender but was less aggressive about pursuing a romance with a male PC, that'd be fine.
Edit: Wyll's patron is a cambion. But my example stands as a theoretical

You're right. I keep forgetting that cambions are the exception to most of the rules of hell.

The Tome of Foes doesn't specify what they look like normally:

if...if one puts on the Girdle...does the world end?

I'd love to see this added as a possible Custom MC

It's a fantasy game. People should be able to romance whoever they want. I love DA, and the idea that there are characters that were explicitly gay, lesbian, and bisexual was nice except that they were stereotypes, Dorian was the flamboyant, sarcastic, drunken fop who had a story about family issues related to his sexuality, Sera couldn't be more lesbian if she tried. There characters wer mostly about their sexuality., but they were there so, cool, but it was MY game- why couldn't I romance the character I found most interesting or appealing? Even the DAI thing would be fine, but in most fantasy worlds you get one gay character if any, the world is somehow devoid of them, and it sucks when they do appear it has to be the same character every time.

It is a FANTASY ROLEPLAYING game. Why wouldn't you allow more people's fantasy and more people's roles. Sexuality doesn't even have to work the same way in that world. Sexuality isn't as simple as some would make it in our world. Fantasy. Roleplaying. Game.

All of this, if the game dealt with it, would make for exactly the type of thing I think is typically lacking from herosexual npc design. I hope it does come up during Wyl's story, especially if you're romancing him.

The quest to girdle Lloth! Drow society is instantly destroyed.

I can agree with you that the characters in Inquisition could have been better written, the story as well, that game was rushed and it felt like it, but design-wise I feel like characters with less 'floating variables" are more interesting than ones written to encompass whatever fantasy you're after. What I think is more to the point is, is a character that is written to be Gay, Straight, Bisexual and Pansexual be convincingly any? To me it's playing a game, knowing that the game is more or less humoring me in these regards.

Characters need to feel like they are individuals for them to be interesting in a story. That's why the human NPC meme was created.

I don't care if Gale turned out to be the notorious bull buggering cat strangler of waterdeep. If sexuality is such a big deal why is it so hard to represent it? No two individuals are attracted to the exact same things sexual or otherwise. To represent this correctly surely wouldn't involve everyone having the exact same "one size fits all" sexual preference?

I mean Githyanki are basically egg laying celestial Nazis ffs. Can't imagine a halfling getting jiggy with a half-ork as they would need an arch-cleric to resurrect the poor halfling afterwards. I mean is romance as important as creating a strong bonded friendships?

Gale is in love with a female god but after a few beers he is eagar to whip out the poppers and lube. I mean sure why not but I am getting mixed signals here mate. We all do weird shit after a skinfull but I wouldn't wan't to poke your netherese magic prostate and end up blowing up half the FR. Even worse get weave sucked up your bum via the magic nether portal.

I mean objectively speaking sex and sexuality is hardly something to be taken that seriously is it? You wiggle about, make stupid sounds, pull silly faces before making a mess and falling a kip. This is basically uniform across all sexualities....I am aware of at least.

In short I think giving characters a "type" is better character development IF romance is such an important addition.

Rest at ease you've understood me perfectly, I was just commenting on exactly the thing you're talking about here, how these approval systems that truncate relationships don't reflect how relationships work but do reflect a worrying side effect of romance as 'feature' in games. People take them for granted, they don't roleplay into one, they choose who they think they like most then just pump their points up to see the content, very "game-y" , very dull and not conducive to good story-telling by the player or the writer.

By making that point about how the player is the only active party in the relationship I was criticising it, it's something you expect because of the medium yes, but it also creates this same dynamic, like you said, where players hit checkpoints by spamming the NPC, the NPC is 'activated' (give you dialogue/quest), you continue their story.
'Very few' is generous and fucking annoying, there needs to be a real NPC revolution in RPG games if they want to keep making stories about them being characters in their own right, as opposed to hangers-on to the PC.
I'm not sure I agree that it has to be this way, playing with narrative control is something games haven't done, not something they can't do.

I'm gay and I think that it's a great conversation, and I don't believe that there's anything either overtly or subtly homophobic about it.
I'm a little rusty on math, but if we PEMDAS this shit, I think that we cancel each other out and the conversation can move on productively.

I prefer having all companions able to romance a PC of any sex. For a simple reason : player freedom (described above).

But that doesn't make the companions bisexual in my eyes. Because multiverse.

In my mind, every time I start the game with a new PC, a new instance of the fictional world is created. In this instance, all companions happen to be interested in (at least) people of my PC's sex.
For instance, if I rolled a female PC, Gale is interested in females. If I rolled a male PC, Gale is interested in males. Unless the story explicitly portrays the NPC as bisexual, there is no need to assume that they are (they may still be, it's just not mentioned).

As a player I may play the game with PCs of various sexes, but each PC will see only one world, and this world will be consistent.

This is the most coherent case for the herosexual dynamic I've seen made yet, it's what I would expect every character relationship to be like, playersexual or not, platonic or romantic...but it's not what we're getting,

I see herosexual npcs as being a fait accompli, they're designed to sex you, whoever you are, you're given the option of declining. There's no real back and forth, you don't start out in a platonic relationship (Shadowheart maybe?) which progresses through a few stages of compatibility testing that might tip into a romance, it's all about your player, you paid $60 to see romance by-gum, slam the dolls together!
This also means there can be no platonic relationship before a romantic one, because they're prefigured to be your romantic partner, it isn't until you've turned them down that they're set to 'friend', I think this is what people find offensive about how up front everyone's sexuality is, the party camp scenes are like mixers, everybody's fair game because that's what they're there to be, unlike in what I would consider a better scenario where that would come out of that back and forth, like in your examples.

Because I've seen threads on this, let me be clear, I have no problem with our characters indulging in a bit of casual 'relations', it just made the above all the more apparent when in one night everyone makes a pass at you like you're the Queen of Sheba selecting her harem for that night.

I don’t think it is necessary to lock characters to a specific preference. I don’t see how that would objectively improve the writing. Having characters with a specific preference does allow you to tell specific stories about how that affected their backstory, but that doesn’t need to be part of the story in the first place.

Due to the nature of games there is going to be a finite about of content for each companion’s dialogue and backstory. The writers can fill up that finite space with some other compelling content. The trade off for the lack of specificity is an abundance of player choice, which is preferable for me. Why write separate stories for straight and gay relationships when they can write relationships that satisfy either type?

"Rest at ease you've understood me perfectly, I was just commenting on exactly the thing you're talking about here, how these approval systems that truncate relationships don't reflect how relationships work but do reflect a worrying side effect of romance as 'feature' in games. People take them for granted, they don't roleplay into one, they choose who they think they like most then just pump their points up to see the content, very "game-y" , very dull and not conducive to good story-telling by the player or the writer."

That! I think that covers my view on this subject. Anything sexual that is forced on the player is always going to seem a bit well..forced. One of the many wonderful things about romancing/dating in real life is you are never quite sure who you will find/discover. That makes it interesting. Thats how I like my intimacy in RPG's. Keep it interesting by allowing nuaunce, ambiguity, wit. Saying that, I've not actually had any in game action as so far my attempts to woe shadowheart have so far failed to impress. I mean, how high do you have to stack the bodies to get some womens attention..

Exactly!!! I LOVE the DA universe, but the writers deliberately wrote 'human' gender and sexuality biases into the games. BG:III is NOT set on earth, and (to my very rusty knowledge) there isn't any explicit canon in D&D to say that the world at large even HAS any of these hangups!

I wouldn't even say the companion characters are playersexual as I've managed with no effort on my part to get two of them actively disliking me. I'm not seeing any "I hate you so much I must kiss you" sentiment like we got in DA:2 for example.

There is a world of difference between "Playersexuality" and universal pansexuality in a fictional setting. This game comes across very much as the latter, and I'm here for it.

Playersexuality is now a convention of modern RPGs so Larian has to stick with it or risk generating controversy. Hopefully some of the romance scenes will be humourous or non-sexual, how it should be with Minsc.

https://external-preview.redd.it/oI...594aa10709b38a43845251d3da4de5b200336399

Fits here perfectly.
I think this small meme is the best example of "herossxual" (nice term) at its worst. If there is one good thing inquisition did, it's the handling of this topic. Aside from the fact it's just jarring that everyone in your party wants to bone you all the time, I think it just makes things weird. However, I do think that if developers want to give us strictly gay characters, "gay" shouldn't be their whole character arc