Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General If the main hero dies, and you don't revive them, can you still finish the game?

In TT there's a trap where the odd player sometimes thinks they're the main character and it causes problems at the table. This is because the game's true focus isn't any one character, it's the _party_.
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One little doodle I do as a DM is paste character portraits and draw connections to make a relationship map. You can also ring the party with a few important NPCs. The arrows are widened or narrowed to show strength of connections. Anyway, this little activity shows the characters most immersed in the setting, you guessed it - the de facto party (co)leader. The real purpose is to expose weak characters - and work to fix it up with those players.

I remember us having some interesting conversations, even if most of the particulars escape me. I do remember head canons coming up quite a bit before on the forum, there are two camps of crpg players that have very different expectations from their characters, and what constitutes customizability.

I think the tadpole is a perfectly valid reason for all of our disparate characters to want to journey together, it's why Tav is de facto leader where I have to eat my ludonarrative pease.

This evident intrigue around our condition is part of the mystery box that I was referring to earlier. The dynamics of the party and our MC might change drastically at the climax of Act 1, but as it is, most of us seem to be treating this thing as a tadpole we can remove, this becomes less and less the case as we draw closer to the Moonrise plot, but it still doesn't change that Tav problem.

There's a reason I hardly play BG 1 compared to BG2, the companions are mostly just memorable catchphrases that I projected a lot onto, so we can agree there. But I don't think you need to say its a trade off to have more companions or better companions. Not to mention all the speculation around having our roster locked in after Act I. Who knows, all the characters you kill or avoid meeting might end up at Moonrise anyway, similar to the end of DOSII, and we'd have less reason for them to subject themselves to our party in the interim.

Your murderhoboism makes my lawful stupid self apoplectic.

1. Why is it that my MC, one of two remaining Grey Wardens in Fereldan, is doing all the dirty work, instead of sending out their companions to do it, while making sure they survive?

2. In Inquisition, why is the Inquisitor doing all the leg work, when they have a whole force they could be using? Something that gets touched on with the War Table missions.

3. It's a pretty common observation, across a multitude of games, that the MC is really super important, and yet, they're chasing down some old woman's frying pan...

In TT there's a trap where the odd player sometimes thinks they're the main character and it causes problems at the table. This is because the game's true focus isn't any one character, it's the _party_.

The other user gave actual examples of games that failed to create the perfect narrative around the MC's leadership. There will very likely be a moment in any role playing game when your party members stick with the MC instead of doing something of higher value to their made-up story/personality. This derives from the "player factor", because games are played by players, not characters. Especially in a game with a lot of sandbox elements, a player can make erratic decisions, made with the understanding that the world they explore isn't real and there is no necessity for actions that would contribute to a cohesive story.

Other games - even the games that Robert suggested, all do this correctly.

1. Why is it that my MC, one of two remaining Grey Wardens in Fereldan, is doing all the dirty work, instead of sending out their companions to do it, while making sure they survive?

2. In Inquisition, why is the Inquisitor doing all the leg work, when they have a whole force they could be using? Something that gets touched on with the War Table missions.

3. It's a pretty common observation, across a multitude of games, that the MC is really super important, and yet, they're chasing down some old woman's frying pan...

It is not what-aboutism, it is about high statistical probability of ruined immersion applied to players with a certain mindset, which is not applicable to role playing games, but more to books and/or cinema or visual novellas, where there is no interactive elements and therefore high demand for a certain level of logical coherence. Broad strokes are in place in BG3 and they make sense. The specifics of the genre allow plot stretching and interpretive thinking and justify some of the smaller plot holes. If BG3 was a linear visual novella with a set protagonist, plot coherence would become much more crucial. But BG3 is an RPG with a high emphasis on replayability and changeable characters. It is not that kind of game that "plays itself" but the one where you are free to justify your leadership as you see fit, according to your character's lore. I am all in for more dialogue options to help me project that lore onto the world, but it has nothing to do with other companions being interesting and unique. They are unique, yes, but they are also flawed. And that is what makes them interesting and not at all Mary Sues.

You know, Robert... I don't think I've ever seen you jump into a thread without doing so seemingly for the sole purpose of being contrary and fractious. What do you get out of it? It's fine if you don't see the problem as being one - but a lot of people do. We're not stupid, we just care about immersion in space, especially in story-driven games.

Your sole comment here boils down to "It's the mechanics, don't question it!" ... which is a valid opinion to have, and which you could have said in a couple of sentences and saved everyone some effort.

We are all aware that the player character is the main character and the driving decision-making force in purely mechanical terms; we are the single player playing the single player game, of course we are. That's the mechanics. That's not the story; that's not the setting; that's not an in-space, in-world reason. It's the out-of-character reason - there is no in-character reason presented, and that's a problem. Having such a reason is important, and good games provide one. BG3 does not... and as I discussed "It hasn't yet!" is not an adequate response; it is past the point where it needs to have done so.

Immersion and consistency in world space matter - and if they don't matter to you, or you've just gotten used to playing games that treat them like they don't matter (in which case, BG3 will be excellent for you, I'm sure...), that's fine - but there are higher calibre games out there that don't do that, and do treat the in-universe story as meaningful and relevant, and any good story-driven rpg should do as much. Most of the ones I've played do.

No, the tadpole is not such a reason; I discussed why it fails to be so above, which you suggested you would address, but didn't. It doesn't serve to justify why everyone with their very important histories and very important personal goals have decided to make those goals second fiddle to the choices that our player character makes, and to designate them, specifically, as the defacto leader of the group. It's a shared danger that serves to keep the party together and justify them travelling and working together as a group, but it doesn't justify making our player character the leader and decison-maker.

Yes, the reason that we are the defacto leader of the group and the others are following our decision-making should be established right away, from the time that others start doing so. That doesn't mean starting at the end and spilling all the beans on everything right away - it means giving a sensible, in-universe reason for an obvious and mundane question (Why are you the one we're all following the lead of?), the lack of which is jarring and immersion-breaking.

I do complain about the mary-sues, though mostly because of the writing, and the way in which our character often exists purely for them to dunk on and to feed them the fall-guy lines that they can respond to, to upsell their own awesomeness... but the complaint here is mainly around such important, established and epic people following our player character and bowing down to their decisions, when none of them have a reason or disposition to do so. That's a problem. The reason to follow our character should put the character at least on reasonably equal footing with the importance of the other characters and their other objectives, and enough above or more urgent enough to make the choice from them of putting those personal objectives on hold and to put their opinions on what we should do secondary to what this other person says we all will do, seem like a reasonably believable and sensible decision. Right now, BG3 does not provide this, and it really should.

I would argue that we don't have the choice to justify our leadership according to our character's lore. The game never asks us to justify it, it just assumes we're the leader and that's it. Everyone treats us as the leader of the party, it's never really called into question. Sure we can create all kinds of headcanons for our characters - I am a big supporter of that - but as far as this point is concerned, it doesn't matter if we make our character the lost heir of a far off kingdom, groomed from birth to be monarch or a country bumpkin who was working as a caravan guard and is used to taking orders. We'll both be equally the leader. You think the Dragon Age games aren't a good comparison, I'll bring up a game that I think is a perfect comparison; pillars of eternity. In that game you start off as some random traveller. At the very start of the game you get to talk to someone about the specifics of your past, at least some of them. And then going forward, you pull the party together yourself. Everyone follows you because right at the start they agreed to follow you for whatever their reasons are. They all have their own things you agree to help them with, and in turn they're helping you with an explicitly personal problem. You don't realize the full scale of the threat until a while into the game, until that point your problem isn't anymore important to the wider world than any of your companions' problems are to them, so it wouldn't make sense forone ofthem to want to take control. Not so here, where most companions have their own opinion on how to fix this problem afflicting all of usand no reason not to try and take control.

There's also the influence of the artifact at play, at least it forces Shadowheart to stalk us, driving her mad if we refuse to journey with her. If maybe there were some more subtle clues in that direction i'd certainly be mollified.

Other games in this genre handle it by tying your MC directly and intrinsically to the core plot of the game in a way that the other companions are not; this gives them a very good reason to follow and ultimately defer to the main character's decisions

The same thing happens here, in a narrated cutscene even.