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

Kreme actually never joined the Qun. He was part of Iron Bull's mercenary crew but that's where the connection ended.

Rly?
My bad.

Actually, @Ragnarok, based on what you said earlier about Czech, is it the case that if there were the possibility of our PCs being misgendered by NPCs, that might mean different dialogue options for different localisations?

For example, in English most NPCs could make incorrect assumptions about our gender and we’d never know, so not have a reason to correct them. But if what I understand about Finnish, for example, is right, even in some cases where in English it would be clear from the pronouns used the NPC had your gender wrong so you might want to correct them, that option wouldn’t be required or appropriate as the pronouns would be the same. But from what you said about Czech, it might be obvious much more often or earlier that the NPC was in error, and therefore there would need to be more dialogue options for correcting them. Is that right? If so, I can see that would create more localisation challenges, and might be another driver for just having NPCs use the gender the player specifies rather than trying to do anything more complex.

Or there could be a dialog option when a PC is referred to by their apparent gender that the player can select such as

"I'm not a SHE"
"I'm not a HE"
etc.

and then the NPC could reply

"Oh yeah, really? Sorry about that. Well anyway, let's get back to our conversation about saving the colony of Tieflings from certain death by the goblin horde..."
or
"Oh...well that's not really my concern, but I DO think we should get these tadpoles out of our heads before they turn us into MindFlayers! Shall we carry on?"

Alright, guys. I've made up my mind.



Game setting with "none" nice things. Everyone attracts comments

Well ... yes and no.
If you mean dialogue options from wich player pick ... then no.
If you mean responces, hells yeah. :-/

In very short: When someone created Czech localisation for KotOR II. they had to coppy all texts 4 times ...
One in case Revan was a male and now you play as a male ...
One in case Revan was a female and now you play as a male ...
One in case Revan was a male and now you play as a female ...
One in case Revan was a female and now you play as a female ...
And every time you started a game, you had to pick ... and all texts was replaced acordingly.

---

Player would easily go with same sentences as in english:
You are wrong im a male. > Mýlíte se, já jsem muž.
You are wrong im a female. > Mýlíte se, já jsem žena.
Please, dont call me either. > Prosím, nenazývejte mě ani jedním.

---

But npcs ... oh boy. :-/
We use rule that is called agreement of the predicate with the subject (according to google).

- If you have group of people where is at least one male, you use "i" ... if they are all females you use "y" ...

Fro example:
When Damais tells you: We heared an explosion, so we went to explore.
In czech it would be: Slyšeli jsme explozi, tak jsme to šli prozkoumat. Bcs Damais is a male.
But if Damais would also be a Female, the sentence would be: Slyšely jsme explozi, tak jsme to šly prozkoumat.

> This can cause major problem, in case Larian wouldnt want to have their teoretical Czech localisation full of misstakes for wich even 10y old child would be ashamed.
Bcs every time someone would talk about our group as a whole, they would need to take under concideration genders of all people there. :-/

"Ah, our heroes finaly arived!"
Would be problem.

On the other hand tho ...
"And here are our guests of honor."
Would be perfectly fine no matter our group.

-

But even if you would go solo, every time the game would talk about you, it would need to adjust I/Y acordingly ... and there are even special cases, when group of females uses "A" or "É", instead of "Y" ...

And even more special cases, wich was most likely made just to mess up with our language rules ...
As ... there is one musical group, made purely of Males ... its called "3 sisters" ... so even tho they are males, every time you talk about them you have to use female rules. :-/

Thanks for taking the time to explain!

So if I’m understanding you right, in Czech if an NPC talks or asks about something I am doing, I might be able to tell from their grammar what gender they think I am? Or at least whether they think there are any males in our party if they’re talking about us as a group, based on them not using the all-female rules? The examples you give use the first person singular and plural, but from what you say they also affect second person (which in English with you/you is ambiguous of course as to whether we’re talking about one or more people, let alone what their gender(s) might be).

(With apologies to everyone that this is only tangentially related to the subject at hand!)

Well ... not allways, some sentence can be constructed so you dance around it ... but it often dont feel natural.
So in general, most likely. Yes.

And yes, it also apply to second person ...
But that it more matter of verbs.

"You" translates to "ty" when you talk to single person ... "vy" when you talk to group ... but we also have word "Vy" when you talk to single person, who you wish (or have to) to express your respect.
The difference between "Vy" and "vy" is only written, phonetic its the same.

Problem is that predicate and subject ties together again ...

So even if you wish to use second person, you can run ito trap ... especialy in past time:
What were you doing?
> Co jsi dělal? (Male)
> Co jsi dělala? (Female)
> Co jsi dělalo? (Kid)
> Co jste dělaly? (Group of Kids)
> Co jste dělali? (Group, no matter the gender composition)
> Co jste dělal? (Male + respect)
> Co jste dělala? (Female + respect)
Kids are not shown respect in Czech language. And for groups it sounds and its written the same no matter if you are respectfull or not.

And i imediately see i didnt pick good example, since in present time its "Co děláš?" for any ...
Except group where its "Co děláte?", wich is same for respected person.

Future time is also fine, since that is "Co budeš dělat?" for person ...
And "Co budete dělat?" for either group, or respected person.

But dont get an impression that present and future time are safe tho, i may just picked wrong example.
I was never too good in czech ... my grades were usualy 4 / 5 only rarely 3, better almost never (except for writing ... dunno how to translate it, google say its either style, or language, or pen ... neiher of those seems corect it's when you get a topic and then they leave you for an hour or two to write anything related to the topic in the assigned form... that probably saved me from repeating the year ... my favourite form was a story, or deliberation).
I would say my skills are ... well, not much better than in my english, so you can imagine. :-/

Interesting! Thanks. And that’s the sort of question NPCs could easily ask too. It does help illustrate for those of us who just play and read in English, where we are only very infrequently reminded what gender the game takes our character to be, that it could make a lot more difference in other languages.

But I guess it might come back to what language we assume our characters are “really” speaking in. If it’s Common or a Sword Coast language that is not particularly gendered like English, or even one that doesn’t have gendered pronouns at all so the only time gender is referred to is when it’s being talked about specifically, then the only reason the gender would be so evident to us as players is because we’re experiencing it due to translation into our own, possibly more gendered language. In that case it would make some kind of sense that the game simply translated the non-gendered assumed language of the NPC into our own gendered language in a way that fits with the identity we’ve chosen for the PC, given that they wouldn’t actually know what gender the NPC thought they were, so would have no reason to challenge it. But that’s all academic given I have no idea how gendered or not the languages of Faerun actually are, or even if that’s defined anywhere.

The formal stance on Common - while it has some in-universe roots and references throughout the editions, is that it is the native language of the players/publication... so if you play in France and you buy the books from a French game store, and you play with other French-speaking players, then common is 'functionally' French, or a French-like common language... and in so being, in your game spaces, it comes with all the linguistic features that that language carries (French doesn't have a neuter form at all; all nouns and their surrounding forms are either masculine or feminine. In recent years, users of the language have begun to experiment with ways to express the neuter, but the language itself is not equipped to do so. I think, and please correct me if I'm mistaken, the most common form used right now is to express gender neutrality for a person by way of a contraction of both forms of the appropriate word (so, -il for masculine and -elle for feminine, becomes -iel for neutral), but it's still evolving and experimental without agreed upon hard language rules right now).

This means that for players whose language carries a natural engendering throughout their entire sentence formation, based on the subject of that sentence, if that language is not already pre-equiped with a neutral case, the very idea of an appropriate translation becomes a nightmare with, potentially, no right answer... because the necessity to make an assumption one way or the other in order to talk at all is built into the language. It also means that in realistic play scenarios, for speakers of such languages, the fact that people will make an assumption is a natural, normal and quite literally unavoidable part of daily interaction, and nothing to get upset over beyond a quick correction of preference.

It can get pretty messy, all told.

Thanks for that clarification, Niara. Useful to know.

That probably does mean my suggested fudge really won’t work. Ah well!

Realistically, Common would probably be, as stated by some people previously, closer to American English most of all (on account of WotC being based in US), so any localization attempts will be secondary in their interpretations based on that very aspect. Therefore, what it lingustically supports is implied to be, for the most part, whatever English allows. Meanwhile something like Das Schwarze Auge is German by default, with most explored/"default" cultures rooted in the medieval Central/Western Europe and the use of the language is meant to reflect that.

Whereas with the state of the FR I agree with Sozz in that it is meant to be marketable and "modern", what with WotC being a big name company and all, so alterations are made to "keep up with the times", as it were. The current idea of how the setting works and what it supports, despite the fact that culturally it essentially got a rewind after the Second Sundering (5e was specifically meant as practically a "never mind, let's go back to how things were" after 4e's fiasco). I touched on those (the cultural aspects) in the opening post, and yes - despite it being almost a good century and a half between the pre-Spellplague and the modern days, most communities still function and think with the same mindsets as back then, which could be seen as a way of coping with the world finally returning to its pre-cataclysmic state. If anything, there are even cases of reduced acceptance and tolerance, reflected in the game (the Elturel tieflings post-Descent). If anything, Larian are pushing the envelope as to what WotC would probably consider "safe" with their writing and content.

Basically, the modern presentation of the FR is as much a product of its time as the attempts to market it to teens and young adults operating upon the trends of the early 2000's and the turn of the decade - take the M:tG artwork from those eras to see what they were considering marketable (cleavages, anime-ish artstyles, attempts to appeal to the MMO crowd... seeking mostly the "standard" male audience). The mindset and the mission behind the marketing has changed, but it's still, at the end of the day, marketing - appealing to some and turning others off, just like before. For better or worse.

I just remembered that i completely forgot to mention that lately, many non-official localisation creators translate only "as if PC and his group were all males" ... to mitigate amount of work a little.

So maybe we would handle such siplified version aswell.

But there are different standards for fan-made translation and official one. :-/

No.
The topic reminds me of the queer stuff which is a bit alien to me since I'm lucky enough not live in a surrounding that full of that kind of vanguard culture overly manipulative on populist movement. A decoy, a distraction, focused, and incited by whoever they are in some societies to overshadow the actual crisis they have. What's ironic, all those gender identity chaos supported by their authority was for some petty votes in the end. And even more ironic, their people are actually buying it. Then comes the ultimate ironic, since the actual crisis was ignored by the most, from elites to commoners, the actual crisis is still quietly snowballing along with the far-right ideas sharing the same shadow, by the time the overshadowed crisis broke the veil, the hound of hatred will also break the chain. Who will suffer the most then? Those minority folks. All that, is the real hypocritical.
And then I look at my good old Wyll, the Blade of Frontier, from as innocent as those tiefling kids to as wicked as Kagha, they all know his title rather positively, but at least Wyll did trying hard to protect the people and help the people. And what he is overshadowing using such title was merely his own misery which won't backfire those he once protected or helped at least.

So, no, it was not directed at any of you as long as you don't happen to be a manipulative politician who plays gender/sex orientation/gender identity/ethnicity/skin color/minority cards to win position.

As for the whole identity thing, I just don't get it. A trans is a trans, and this is a game! A trans who wants to be a women can simply pick an in-game gender called "female", as simple as that, no surgery, no pain, no bleeding, no life risking. A trans who wants to be a dude can simply pick an in-game gender called "male", as simple as that, also no surgery, no pain, no bleeding, no life risking. Magic, jobs done in one single mouse click! It's not like the game has full nude option that displays what's under the underwear. But no, the game has to use the term "identity". I understand it's business, no point to mess up with some pc crusaders who could throw a crusade on you making you lose sells, so I kept my mouth shut for as long as I could because I wish this game to success as long as it provides decent gameplay.

Speaking of which, it reminds of Gale, a sacrifice of such compromise-ish business decision. Why can't the developer leave him alone, letting him to have a more consistent character? Why can't he be Mystra's loyal simp puppy virgin? Why has he to seek nighttime companionship from Tav? In Cyberpunk 2077, that punk girl who only interested in girls, I tried romance her once and got rebuffed, which is great! You don't need to make every key NPC to be romance-able for just everyone. A good RPG storytelling need to have vivid NPCs. Making them mechanically accept having sex with every player character with no condition at all will only make these key companions become closer to some lifeless sex toys which is the quite opposite of "vivid". And then Wyll, the try hard playboy, why would he want to share that night with a dude Tav? If a dude Tav wish to even start a conversation which may directs towards intimacy beyond friendship with Wyll, this Tav should need to roll 3 d20 in a chain to win it! And if Wyll didn't share that night with Tav, then he should wake up with SH or LZ or that tiefling bard couple, or that parrot whispering druid girl. That's more like his character. That's something the player would say, hey, that's my Wyll, that's the Wyll I know, he is so good at it!

And there is the race/class problem, another example of how "compromise-ish business decision" ruins the gameplay. Letting every race to pick just every class is just bluntly ruining the roleplay experience. If you look back at the previous BG, playing a half-orc means I am unable to pick paladin, how wonderful is that! But now if I play a githyanki, in a blink I got qualified to be a paladin of Faerun!? If stereotype was so bad even in harmless fantasy such as DnD, then why don't just ditch tieflings, drows, elves, dwarfs, gith, halflings, gnomes, orcs, goblins as well? Let everyone play Human only, and fight only human?

Okay. You know I said we should try to avoid insulting people with views other than our own, keep it relevant to the game and avoid wandering off into more general theorising in the very quote of mine you replied to? Your post failed on that so badly that I’m tempted to think it was deliberate trolling but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and one more chance.

If you actually don’t understand why what you have posted is not appropriate here, then please PM me and I can explain in more detail.

Out of curiosity... what leads you to suppose that Wyll is purely heterosexual? We know that he is open to having attraction to people with gyno-centric physiology, but what leads you to suppose that means he's not equally open to people with andro-centric physiology? Bisexual people exist, after all - please trust that I would know!


It's not about stereotypes, so much as it's about individuals' capacity to be exceptional and different. To answer your question - it's not wonderful, and it wasn't then, because it supposed that your exceptional hero could not possibly be anything other than the 'norm' for their species, when by definition our heroes and adventurers are supposed to be exceptional and unusual.

So your Githyanki character is a Paladin - not of Valaakith, as one might expect, but of Llira, and they do indeed dance joyously at any opportunity to so express themselves, and have a fondness for wearing yellow dresses when they are not making ready for combat and strife. How remarkable; how unusual; how positively Strange... what a Story must be behind this quite honestly incredible situation and the development of this person that led them to this place. And isn't the discovery of that remarkable story not a wonderful adventure, and a unique person to come out of it and adventure forward?

The removal of restrictions like that wasn't purely a removal or harmful stereotypes - it was the extension of an invitation of freedom, for players to make ever more creative, strange and wonderful stories to lead to unusual combinations and peculiar situations. Allowing halfings to be barbarians isn't necessarily saying anything at all about any large scale changes or ramifications to halfling cultures globally... it's just saying "well, it could happen; tell us how it came about!"

'one might expect' is an interesting way of putting a tyrannical theocracy with elements of mind-control. The harmful stereotypes work both ways.
I think if you want to be the exception to the rule, it has to come from somewhere more than your backstory. Otherwise, why involve the canon at all, or other players for that matter.

For me, as an inexperienced D&D-er, I find the canon extremely important when trying to develop my character concepts, either to lean into or play against. My characters would probably seem bland and cliche to more experienced players who have been there, done that, and want to try something different. My own view is that, if roleplay and creating a realistic character is important to you, then you’re probably better off sticking off closer to the lore and race or class norms if you don’t know the world well, but that it doesn’t follow that the game rules should therefore outright forbid someone with more imagination and/or experience than me from developing a more unusual but still realistic character, or someone who doesn’t care about realism (and is in a like-minded group where they’re not playing a single player game) creating a wacky character for shits and giggles.

And when it comes to the lore, I do find the changes and events in the world help inspire some of my characters’ stories, even though I agree with your earlier point that much also stays the same. For example, a few of the characters I’ve either played EA with or am toying with for the full release are as follows:

• A drow Oath of Ancients paladin of Eilistraee, who was inspired to swear their oath on seeing her dance after her return from death during the Second Sundering.
• A Lolth-sworn drow ranger whose lover defected to Vhaerun after his Second Sundering return and was painfully executed as a result, whose experience has left him with an unconscious but burning contempt for women and especially Lolth’s priestesses, and a new relish for hunting down those his matriarch sets him after … which recently has included those who have left for a secretive new cult.
• A shield dwarf barbarian who is resentful and resistant to what she sees as increasing acceptance and integration of at least some goblins, for whom she still harbours an abiding ancestral hatred.
• A tiefling Oath of Devotion paladin who is increasingly concerned that what his order sees as duty is actually propping up an unjust status quo in which those like him are suffering greater and greater prejudice.
• A deep gnome rogue whose curiosity, dreams of glory, and fascination with ruins and exploration was inspired by tales her grandmother told her of Blingdenstone, destroyed by drow a hundred years before.
• An elven cleric of Bhaal who was young in the Time of Troubles and sees his recent return, even as a quasi-deity, as an opportunity for power and bloodshed.

I wouldn’t have been able to come up with these characters that I, at least, feel connect to the world without access to the lore. But
I’m sure that those who know the lore better can and will come up with better stories that both use and subvert that lore in interesting ways. But even if those characters are way more unusual than anything I could reasonably come up with, they still need that lore to provide context and, I’d argue, actually a much deeper understanding of that lore to make work.

Maybe if Niara hadn't chosen Paladin in her example I wouldn't have found it so discordant.
Playing to, and against, type are equally cliché. Putting seeds into your backstory for the purpose of developing your character in their adventure is one thing. Deciding to do with the world, what you will, on your own, is a type of attitude that could become irksome. If Larian, Wizards of the Coast, or any DM, were too afraid of losing players to tell them they can't do something, then it's become a disingenuous relationship.
I like to view us as guests at their table, so whenever I see this kind of attitude taken with someone else's world, and then the trustees of that world, decades of work, just shrug and say nothing really matters, it's all made up anyway; it can call into question a lot of things.

I like all your character ideas, I bet it also helped having played the game beforehand writing in some points of potential conflict, but, and not to make this about generic Tav again, I've complained enough about how the world can't recognize certain contradictions people can make in their characters. The further into the lore you get the worse it becomes, see the recent Githyanki thread, and a number of Drow threads before that. Allowing people to toy with these things doesn't strike me as great if the game can't account for them.

If the game does eventually, more power to it, otherwise, I'll remain skeptical.

I had never heard of the Forgotten Realms until BG3 but I have found the lore fascinating (and I've only been skimming stuff from the FR Wiki so just the tip I'd wager). It is the main reason I keep coming back to BG3 from Solasta.