Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Friends, Thaumaturgy and Dialogue

To start off, I'd like to say that I love the game so far. The gameplay mechanics are great and inspired heavily by D&D 5e, the music and graphics are wonderful and the story is intriguing and promising and I can't wait to see the full game.

That being said, I have one gripe with some of the spells/cantrips which aren't combat focused such as "Friends" and "Thaumaturgy". I picked a Warlock as my class and chose "Friends" as my cantrip thinking it would give me some advantages during pivotal conversation scenes only to find out that many of the scenes were triggered and I could not cast my cantrip at all. There was this one moment with the githyanki patrol on the bridge and Lae'zhel had to deceive the kith'rak into not attacking us. I loaded that scene quite a few times just trying to cast my "Friends" cantrip on the guy before triggering the cutscene because he was so far away and even then, I'm not sure whether or not it had an effect (though I succeeded the DC) because the UI didn't tell me if I rolled with an advantage or not. The same goes for Thaumaturgy since that one also requires a target to be cast.

My first suggestion would be to let the player know if he's rolling with an Advantage or Disadvantage. It's always good to see the game respond to your actions, so if I'm doing something to impact the DC, I'd like to know about it.

My second suggestion is to make these cantrips actually useful during dialogue. A couple of solutions I thought of, are:

- Reduce the size of the trigger box for the cutscenes so I can actually get in range of the target before the conversation takes place. I know this won't be the case for every cutscene since there are a few NPCs which surprise the PC (like the Zhentarim in the cave).
- Add dialogue options during conversation through which I can use my cantrips.
- Allow me to briefly pause the conversation (similarly to how you exit the dialogue scene when switching to other party members, but this would involve the PC) so I can cast my cantrips.

Casting "Friends" could have some consequences afterwards. The NPC could be rude to me, he could decide not to speak to me anymore or he could flat out attack me.

I know they'd involve quite a bit of work, but I think they could introduce a whole new dynamic to how conversations take place in the game and make the player balance out Risk vs Reward.