Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback (Patch 9) On identity and whether it's even worth having in its existing form

Yep, that’s kind of where I got to as well, and why I said I couldn’t think of a workable significant improvement on the current approach, particularly when you add in the complexity of having to then determine for each appearance what gender they “look like” which might be obvious in some cases but less so in others. Particularly some of the female faces read as relatively androgynous to me, and even with the current female body model, if the NPC is wearing armour that de-emphasises their curves and doesn’t have a “feminine” hairstyle then different characters might jump to different conclusions about their gender. And that’s using my real world assumptions, which for all we know might differ from Toril’s. Only difference is, I’m not sure that I’d say that I’d “want” NPCs to assume my character’s gender based on their appearance so much as thinking it would probably be more realistic in some circumstances so I can see the potential benefit, as well as the possible frustration you also mention.

Oh, and yes I can see that in a language like Czech, if it is more often going to be obvious what gender NPCs are assuming your PC is, this is going to take on greater importance. It is lucky for me that in English it’s easier to fudge, though I think in other languages it would be easier still. I think I’ve heard Finnish doesn’t even use gendered personal pronouns?

Btw, do we have any indication from canon sources whether and how Faerun’s various languages, and specifically Common (which I guess we’re meant to be speaking in BG3) approach gender when it comes to pronouns or grammar more generally? I guess one way of handwaving oddities with respect to gendered language might be to say they’re due to imperfections in translations into our Earth languages from Common, though even as I say that it’s not sounding particularly convincing!

Rag, I'm not trans so I can't give the best answer to your question but for my general thoughts on the matter... it's complicated. Personally when it comes to the various -isms, my opinion is that a property shouldn't include it 'just because' or for the sake of a nebulous idea of realism. I'm of the opinion that for games in partcular, the best bet is probably to ere on the side of inclusivity unless it breaks the setting or story in some significant way. I think that if you're going to have isms in a game, then the game should address them in some way, they should serve some narrative or setting purpose. Obviously there are degrees of this, but it's in my opinion, a rule of thumb that's probably a good approach.

As you say, for some people playing characters whose gender identity doesn't match their gender presentation, being repeatedly misgendered and having to correct others would be frustrating. Hell, I'd venture to guess that MOST players would find that frustrating purely because it's a tedious chore taking away from the point of the story. And while that could be an interesting way of putting cis players in the shoes of trans people with regard to that particular lived experience, I think it's not worth it for a game that's not really trying to be about weighty real world issues in that way. Obviously if the game wants to actually say something about heavy issues then it's free to do so, but if it's not trying to say anything, then I don't think those things actually improve the work. Game of Thrones works with all its violence and abuse, inequality, etc because fundamentally its a story about power, what it does to people who have it, how far people are willing to go to get it, etc. So things like rape, slavery, racism, etc belong there as it all contributes to those themes, the conflicts of power and powerlessness and the horrors absolute power brings. In dragon age: Origins, the city elf origin involves a bunch of lords kidnapping elven women to rape and probably kill. That story fits because it's part of the tapestry of elven subjugation and abuse, an aspect of the worldbuilding that the game actively engages with repeatedly and unapologetically. A plot point like that in BG3 would feel gratuitous and out of place because it's thus far, not a game that's trying to thoughtfully engage with such topics.

So I think that while there's stuff to clear up and improve with Larian's implementation, I don't think going too far in-depth with regard to 'realistic' reactions would ultimately be in the game's best interests. It might even come off as a bit arbitrary, since you can play any race (in the real world idea of the word) and you can play as a man or woman without dealing with realistic prejudices that occur in our world either.

I’d definitely agree that having our characters face random transphobia or intentional misgendering isn’t something that I’d want. And I have no idea whether that would be realistic or whether transphobia is a thing in Faerun. I wonder if this is addressed somewhere in official media? My guess would be that in a society where there are fewer gender norms and no historic power imbalance between men and women, there’d also be less stigma attached to gender non-conformity of different kinds and so people on the Sword Coast would be less likely to be transphobic or blink at contravening what few gender norms there seem to be (eg around dress). Whereas I could easily imagine that Lolth-sworn drow society would frown heavily on those it saw as transgressing gender norms, given its entrenched power differential between males and females. I’ve no idea if it’s actually true that there’s a connection between sexism and transphobia (feels like that is something that there’s probably some real world evidence for or against), but personally, I think both sides of that might be amongst the interesting things that the story could engage with and add a new dimension to, and possibly take some heat out of, due to the fantasy setting. But I don’t think that simply having some characters misgender our characters would be a good way of going about it.

But yes, even if people aren’t transphobic, they still might misgender us just from not knowing from looking us what our gender is, and we might want to correct at least some of those people (personally, I don’t think I’d bother if I was intending to kill them immediately afterwards, for example!). And I agree that the net benefit of including a mechanic for this in the game isn’t obvious and it could easily just be frustrating, and that any changes would need to have a tangible benefit that adds to the experience and story.

It sounds like we might disagree on how much potential BG3 and the Forgotten Realms have for thoughtfully engaging with themes of gender and other weighty matters (I think there’s a lot), though I think we’re very much in agreement that what Larian has so far implemented doesn’t constitute such thoughtful engagement, and that any such engagement should be purposeful and add to the story or world building.

I have some members of my Guild that are trans - if you like I can reach out to them and see if they are willing to discuss this.

My personal thought/experience is that it's a really thoughtful and inclusive step that Larian has taken. So bravo to them. You can, - of course- always do more. What I have heard is that it would be nice to have some better body types and I agree on that. Fat, thin, muscular, androgynous, old - the more the better.

However, I was also thinking about Ellie from the last of Us Show played by Bella Ramsey. Bella identifies as non-binary and she plays Ellie that way. If you notice her stance and posture is very masculine, she takes up space, she stands with her legs apart, she hunches her back and drops her shoulders forward. There is more, but that's the kind of stuff I caught - she just has a very masculine way of moving and positioning herself. It would be amazing if that could also be part of it.

I certainly think the debate here would benefit from hearing their perspective on what has been implemented and what more they’d like to see - and what they’d want the game to avoid. More importantly, I’m sure Larian would benefit from hearing their views. But then if they’re already members of your guild they might have already provided that feedback via other routes, and I’d not want to put anyone out for the sake of educating a few strangers on the internet. But if any of them could be bothered to share a few thoughts on what Larian have and haven’t done then I for one would appreciate it.


I can see what you’re saying here but I also think it’s the kind of thing that Larian would have to be very careful about. For example, why might taking up space appear masculine to us? Might that be because of gender conditioning in our societies that consciously or unconsciously encourages women not to assert themselves physically? And if so, would that carry over into a world which doesn’t have the same gender norms? Done wrongly, having non female identifying characters in the game adopt a posture we’d view as masculine could possibly be perceived as perpetuating unhealthy gender stereotypes. But I also agree that more options for posture and gait could really help bring our characters to life, and as long as those options weren’t locked to gender identity then that would probably avoid potential issues. I know I would want the option to pick a more confident, swaggering pose for a cis female character if I wanted. And possibly a more contained one for a cis male, though admittedly my first thought was the former as I do more frequently play female characters.

The dilemma with this for me is that you could also create an inhuman looking, green skinned alien... and the worst outcome is being mistaken for a githyanki... but, you're not.

For games judging appearance, I would like to mention:
1. The dating app for cis women. Only, it kept clocking cis women as male :P (bonus racism points for big nose = male!)
2. Restricting appearance choices by gender leads to "female hair" and other interesting inventions

Personally, the threat of someone, somewhere, making a non passing trans woman is not particularly threatening?

Who knows. Maybe she has a magic necklace. Or that shape shifting helmet every player of early access is rewarded with.

That's interesting. Cultural nuance of the language will unfortunately change the game. German has no true they/them. Consequently, nonbinary German people usually expect people to choose er or sie.

Nonbinary people are far less accepted in German speaking countries. I suspect that is because there /is/ a third option. One that is seen as dehumanizing, animal. It/its (es) pronouns are the direct English equivalent.

I don't know about Russian, but a game involving LGBT people is liable to being banned. Larian may need to Sailor Moon through pronouns. No, sir, that is not a lesbian couple! It's a manly man and his wife...

Those two men over there? Cousins. You don't sleep in the same bed as your cousin? Sounds like a "you" problem to me, pal!

Seems legit ...
After all, Gimli himself (yes, i know Lots is different setting ... im also quite aware that Rings of Power redconed this) claimed that many people cant see any difference between male and female Dwarves ...

But in such cases, there are neutral pronouns right?

Question is, if Larian would be capable to tune it well enough to not "cross the line" ... then again, looking at oathbreaking conditions, maybe it will be better to leave this Padora's box closed. :-/

I allways presumed common = english.
Probably american english, since thats where WotC are from, right?

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Quite honesstly i dont think person have to be trans themselves to have opinion about this ...
Im not either ... and it catched my atention.
(Even tho its true that most of my characters are Females ... but i usualy just like their models more. )

Well, that can easily be avoided by making it optional setting.

Sure, that would raise a question if such mechanic is even necesary, and how many people would actually apreciate it ... but i would dare to say: That is as usualy not in our power to figure out here.

Also ... let be brutally honest for a second, the same question could be raised to whole indentity picking. :-/

I was referring mostly to the cultures of the Forgotten Realms, but if you're referring to the in-universe edition reboots, I don't see how they've really changed the world a great deal, maybe it was more pronounced in 4th edition, the edition I paid the least attention to. Looking at any corner of the world I don't think a great deal has changed in the cultures involved, all the cities and their people have the same characteristics. Apart from moving some deities around or hand waving some of the mechanical aspects of magic, the setting still exits with the same medieval-ish fantasy technology and culture, with certain regions taking on aspects of different time periods depending on which genre the game wants to veer into.
Despite its catastrophic influence on the setting, I've learned more about the Spellplague and the Dark Weave from these forums than I ever did reading about the setting directly from the source.

Of course I could be wrong, but I still haven't seen a lot of evidence to the contrary.

I haven't read any of the books, so I have to assume their influence on the setting is minimal apart from the occasional cameo in adventure modules.

As for working backwards from a publishing initiative to its in-universe justification. I read comic books where this sort of thing happens regularly, if you have a good writer it can be satisfying, if not, well the term retro-active continuity was coined there for a reason. I'm afraid I don't think the stable of writers working for D&D right now are capable or care enough to work these changes into the narrative. As was mentioned in maybe another thread, its coming in flavor text, blurbs, and errata.

Well, according to the FR wiki “Common was little more than a trade language; that is, it was not useful for complicated topics. It was simple and not very expressive as a language”. I’m not going to comment on whether that means it could or couldn’t be English, or a cut down version thereof.


The same question could be raised of many, many things in the game (and in fact I have seen it raised on these very forums about many things, from explicit sex scenes to murdering tiefling children to voiced protagonists). As you say, that’s not really in our power to answer here and all we can do is say what we would like to see, if we in fact have a preference.

Personally, I do have a preference for being able to represent PCs as trans or non-binary in the game, and am already planning to use that functionality for at least a couple of my expected BG3 playthroughs. I would very definitely be disappointed if we had less than what Larian has already shown us.

It's definitely not English. There is no language like common in real life. Technically, everyone speaks their native language, even humans, who have regional languages like Alzhedo (which is spoken in Calimshan, Amn, Chult, and many other places) and Illuski (which is spoken in the Luskan region and the Moonshae Isles). Common's linguistical parent is Thorass, which is a Human language that was spoken in western Faerun in ancient times.

But this isn't good for streamlining gameplay, so mechanically, everyone speaks Commonspeech. It's like currency. Technically most city states and regions have their own currency, complete with different naming conventions, but this isn't good for streamlining gameplay, so mechanically everyone just has gold, silver, copper, etc.

I'm curious if it's possible to tune this at all? By my very minor knowledge of programming, I would imagine that it would require assigning some kind of masculine-feminine value to every character creation trait that the game would have to add-up to determine when characters will or won't misgender you. That feels like it's opening a pretty massive can of worms on pretty much every level. Firstly, the subjectivity present in the real world regarding what is and isn't masculine alone makes that a fraught task. Then there's what is and isn't masculine within the setting, which in a setting full of varying races is even more complex. What's masculine for an elf and for a dwarf already are hugely divergent so you have to account for not only the appearance of the player themselves, but also the character in question from a racial and cultural perspective - a half-elf raised among elves will probably have a different perspective than a half-elf raised among humans. If you apply a universal standard to every NPC then that introduces a different sort of problem in that you're basically imposing a set gender binary that everybody recognises and accepts. It is a lot of work for a result that is more likely than not to just cause more problems. This is one of those things where I don't think it's worth doing if you're not basing the game around it. Plus as you alluded to, I really don't trust Larian's writers to do this well even if doing it was viable in the first place.


Oh I definitely have an opinion, I'm just providing context since my opinion is fundamentally an outsider's view and should be understood as such. Context is King.


Where you and I differ on this subject is that I think this kind of inclusion should be the baseline, and that leaving it out is the thing that needs to be justified, not the other way around. I think in any game that features character creation, you should be able to play as any (real world) race, any gender and have flexibility in a character's gender presentation. I believe games should be getting toa point where not being able to choose gender identity seperate from gender presentation would be as unusual as not being able to choose to be a woman. There are certainly games where choosing your gender is purely an aesthetic choice that barely gets brought up in the game, I see Larian's choice here as an unpolished version of that for including trans characters. A rough start, but still a step in the right direction. But that's a philosophical opinion.

As for making misgendering an optional setting, I've encountered games that provide the option to turn off references to certain triggering topics like sexual assault, but they're rare, and I've never encountered a game that provides the option to turn them ON. My feeling on the matter is that if the game's recognition of a character being specifically trans ends at misgendering, then it's better off not including the misgendering. If recognition of being trans went farther than that, with NPCs actually commiserating with you because of it, maybe getting to share feelings about your experience with it, etc, then go ahead. Being trans involves more than just the possibility of being misgendered, and from a writing standpoint having that be the only time a character's transness is recognized would just be disappointing. I would go so far as to call it a genuine failure on the part of the writers if the only way they could find to make a character's transgender identity matter or be acknowledged within the game world is through something so tedious and negative. To me it betrays a serious lack of imagination, going for the most obvious, low-effort thing and not digging any deeper or putting real effort in.

Masculine body > presuming male
Feminime body > presuming female
Beard - overwrites body > presuming male (maybe except Dwarves)

What other traits would you concider?

I cant honestly imagine anything else ...

But question:
If you would find that disapointing, you surely find curent state, when your character gender identity is stated outside of the world ... and whole world knows, accepts, and calls you acordingly ... at best equaly disapointing, right?

Good point, I think I started fantasising about a more in-deoth character creator like DA:I or Skyrim, that we're certainly not going to get. I got a bit ahead of myself there.


I fo not, and here is why. There are plenty of games where your gender is pretty much purely cosmetic. Characters don't really acknowledge it beyond calling you he or she, sir or madame, etc. It's the bare minimum of female inclusion and I genuinely think that's fine. Being a woman shouldn't automatically require sweeping, intricate changes. People don't complain that your gender doesn't suitably impact reactions in pokemon, for instance. I don't recall Skyrim having especially complex reactions to female vs male players either. I see Larian's current implementation as an admittedly crude version of that. Like I said, I think this sort of inclusion should be the default and exclusion is what should need justification. So while I of course want the current implementation to be polished, I don't find the aesthetic transness anymore disappointing than the aesthetic gender in pokemon or animal crossing.

Now in contrast, imagine if BG3 let you play as a woman and everything else was the same, but the only difference was that every once in a while, some character would sexually harass you, or make a secret comment. Even if you could opt out via options, isn't that dumb? And it says that the only "interesting" difference the writers could come up with between the genders is harassment and demeaning interactions. Or imagine when we play as gnomes or halflings, if the only difference were occasionally being insulted for our heights and that's all. And I stress 'only' here. No extra NPC interactions beyond that, no story reactions beyond that. If npcs misgendering a trans character were a feature alongside other, deeper reactions and character beats, then I'm all for it. And we do get minor little differences for gender that are more in depth than that anyway, like female drow getting to basically pull rank with that petrified drow wizard to get him to give us his crystal thing. That's a thoughtful interaction that shows they considered the setting and the more complex ways our character might interact with it. But trying to represent the trans experience and just reducing it to being misgendered borders on being insulting in my opinion.

I think the best way I can define the difference is: with the current implementation, Larian isn't trying to tell a trans story, they're trying to tell a fantasy story and give trans people more explicit inclusion in that story. With your suggestion, Larian would be trying to tell a trans story and telling a boring, tedious, low-effort one that reduces being trans to one sort of interaction, as opposed to the myriad story possibilities that could emerge.

Well said, @Gray Ghost. As I’ve mentioned, I do think there are interesting stories about gender identity that can be told in the FR, but ones about having to correct or live with misperceptions of one’s gender don’t jump out to me as being amongst them. If there are folk who (a) really want to play trans characters who they’d consider non-passing and (b) for whom not having that sort of mechanic would be immersion breaking, then that’s something I, and hopefully Larian, would take seriously. But as far as I’m able to tell, the people here who have commented on it here aren’t in that category, though they should of course please correct me if I’m wrong.

I think we’d also have to consider hairstyles (for all that many hairstyles can be worn by all genders in FR there do seem to some that are more gender-specific), clothing (some clothing - eg barbarian starting gear - will reveal the body shape, whereas other - eg scale male - might disguise it) and face (some faces look to me more masculine and feminine and others more ambiguous).

And if the game is going to introduce the concept of misgendering or passing at all, then I think it’d have to let us create passing trans characters as well as ones that would be more likely be misgendered. The fact that that’s actually tricky to do, partly because of the way clothing is reskinned depending on the body type of the person who dons it, would be one thing that would need to be addressed. But if I think about how I’d try to create a passing elven trans man, for example, in the game now, I’d choose one of the more androgynous elven “female” faces (face 5 for example), select a hairstyle that wasn’t too obviously girly (probably a short one, though I think that’s more to to with my own gender coding than Faerun’s), and put him in one of the armours that hid curves as best as possible given the options we have (scale mail, say). Having done my best given the tools available to create a passing trans man, I’d be annoyed if he was consistently misgendered just because the base body type I’d picked for him happened to have boobs. But if the game somehow was sophisticated enough to recognise this character as passing and have NPCs see him as male or at least non-binary, we then have to consider that someone could create a character who looks exactly the same but as a cis woman. Would or should the game then have her being misgendered?

Plus there’s the complexity of how different NPCs might read gender differently when it’s more ambiguous. It would seem unrealistic to me if they all took the same view, particularly when they were of races that were physically quite different from the PC’s so would probably be less alive to gender cues. In fact, if we are really going to try to be realistic, I’m sure there are some characters and races that would get the genders of our non-trans characters wrong (or wouldn’t bother trying to get the gender right or think about it at all) even if our characters would be very obviously a specific gender to anyone of their own race and culture.


That’s my feeling, yes. In fact, the only way I can see this working is not to have the game try to work out what gender our character looks like, but to let the player decide with yet another option what gender NPCs would consider the PC to be. Or perhaps just use the exact option it seems we will have, which is the “identity” selector.

True, the options we have now don’t let us create a non-passing trans character (or at least don’t show us the effects such a character would in actuality likely have on the way NPCs spoke and acted), and perhaps this is something that could be added. This would require the addition, as we’ve alluded to, of a fair amount of content to represent the gender coding of all NPCs for whom it was relevant (as mentioned, I don’t think it would be reasonable to have this as a blanket option for all), and dialogue options in a variety of places to allow the PC to correct NPCs who misgender them, plus those NPC’s responses. It feels like it would take a lot of thought and work to do really well. And the question we keep coming back to is, does anyone really want such functionality? It doesn’t sound to me necessarily bad (and actually, depending on how it were implemented, I might actually want the opportunity to have it affect my cis characters too) but it’s not something that would make it high up my personal priority list. Unlike the option to create a trans or non-binary character at all, which I agree with Gray Ghost should be the default in this day and age in a game that purports to give players flexibility in character creation.

Actually, now I’ve thought about it more, the place I’d actually start if I were going to try to create a more “realistic” experience for trans characters would first be creating a world in which NPCs more obviously judge gender by appearance, which is not something that I’ve really seen reflected in games I’ve played before, which have tended just to go by the sex/gender the player picks at character creation and not worry about it further. In this sort of setting, suddenly having NPCs become sensitive to gender cues just for trans characters would seem weird and wrong. I feel that a world in which it would make sense to have NPCs respond differently to trans characters would need to be built from the ground up and would need to be one that cis characters would also experience differently.

For example, I’d start by considering how different races, species and cultures would perceive gender of races, species and cultures other than their own. I might, for example, have certain NPCs that would reliably judge the gender of individuals of their own race by appearance but would be more likely to get it wrong for some or all other species. There might be NPCs who for one reason or another, assume any elven PC they meet is female, or male, or just call everyone “they” and don’t try to identify a gender at all or randomly pick or even swap around, and some NPCs might ask if they’re unsure. I might even chuck some more randomness into it, and give each NPC who might try to establish a gender for a PC a DC, which might differ depending on the PC’s race and other factors, and let them roll to see if they got it right. I might then ask the player to specify how typical an example of their gender their character was for their race (regardless of whether that character were trans), perhaps as some sort of slider, and use this information to affect the probability of at least some NPCs of calling it right (most likely those NPCs whose gender norms were most like those of the PC’s race). I’d then create appropriate interactions for when NPCs got the gender of the PC wrong. None of this of course requires an actual trans PC at all, but once this world was created then it would seem less difficult to add them and have NPCs react differently to them because of their appearance without this feeling forced and strange. The player would just do exactly the same as for any cis character, and specify their gender at CC, choose the body type and other aspects of their appearance however they wished, and as for any cis character specify how accurate assessments of their gender by their peers was likely to be (or how accurate they wanted them to be, if they preferred their character to be misgendered less often).

I imagine ideally that there would be further options that we’d want to choose, but again these don’t feel as though they should be specific to trans characters. For example, pose and gait, as suggested by Blackheifer above, and how different armours/clothing would look on our characters (for example whether we wanted it to emphasise or create curves, or disguise them).

I’m sure there are some problematic aspects of the above that I’m blind to (in which case my apologies) and I think it would be a lot of work. So again it comes down to prioritisation and how much benefit players would get from it. But I do think that unless more fundamental enhancements to the game setting along these lines are made, any quick fixes to have NPCs respond to trans characters differently are probably going to feel unsatisfactory and uncomfortable, and the current approach of just using the identity specified by the player might be best.

And I thought Wyll was hypocritical.

Is that directed at me? If so, please feel free to explain (either here or by PM if you’d prefer) where I’ve crossed the lines I’ve set for others. I know I’m not infallible and have my own blind spots due to my own views, as anyone else does.

But in case anyone has taken it that way, I am definitively not saying we can’t discuss this topic, but that in so doing we should do our best to be constructive, avoiding insulting those with views other than our own and keeping it relevant to the game rather than wandering off into more general theorising about gender or politics. I don’t think I’ve crossed those boundaries but if I have, then please do point out where and I’ll try to do better in future.

I like you described example ...
But just as you, im probably also blind to some aspects that may be problematic. :-/

So far the only character i know in games, that was trans and it had significance for story, was Krem from Dragon Age: Inquisition:
- Born as a female
> wanted to be a Warrior, and was good at it
> joined Qun (not sure if before or after)
> in Qun only males can be warriors
> so by their definition Krem was a male
And was happy that way.