Gaming @beehaw.org ono @lemmy.ca 2y ago

Larian CEO's advice about origin characters has thrown my Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough plans into disarray

www.pcgamer.com Larian CEO's advice about origin characters has thrown my Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough plans into disarray

Damn you, Swen.

18 comments

So the story and choices are different with origin characters?
- At least to some degree, yeah. Each origin character has more to their background, different choices, etc that you can’t get through a play through where they are your companion
- I don't know how it is in this game, but in their previous game, each of the origin characters brought unique goals and quests into play, on top of the usual backstories.
  
  Yeah in divinity the origin characters were great, and their storylines fun. I kinda hoped BG3 would have the same because I really wanted to play an origin character with some cool sub-plot that we uncover while playing the main story.
Seems like a decent system to me. Have a recommendation, but leave players the choice.
Yo, who plays a DnD game and doesn't make their own character? C'mon now.
- Counterpoint: All the origin characters have bespoke side stories and dialogue, and one of them is a chaotic neutral rogue who is also a bisexual vampire twink.
  
  (Given Sven's advice here I'm probably just going to go with a drow or tiefling warlock, but Astarion is absolutely on the table for the second playthrough.)
  
  Look, you do you, but it's DnD.
- There are quite a few reasons. New to DnD or RPGs, want to just get into the game, want to experience the cool backstory for each origin character are a few I can think of off the top of my head.
That they are trying to create a robust custom character experience AND a robust pregenerated character experience is pretty damn ambitious. They must be pretty happy about the results if they're talking it up this close to the release date.
- The pregenerated characters are just companions that you would have encountered, but won't if you play as them. Not that ambitious IMO
Just spend hours making my first character today and honestly at the end just go with some instinct choice.(not familiar with the 5e rules, haven't played turned based RPG for a long time. I picked a High Elf/Dragonblood(Blue) Sorcerer focused on lightning spells. The last bit where you can allocate stat points I am at lost so I just go with recommended values. (ie. to go from 14->15 requires 2 points, that really throw me off and your main stat is at 16 "maxed"?? I thought 18 is the highest. Don't have time to waste on creating a EA character. )

I want to quickly go around, get familiar with the system so when the game released in a week to start over.
- I haven't touched the game since basically early access started since I decided to spare myself until full release, but that sounds like it's just being faithful to DnD character creation which IMO is a bit of a mess because of legacy systems that are hard to give up. I think just getting rid of ability scores entirely and using only the modifiers would be a lot clearer. Larian isn't really to blame for that if they wanted to use 5E for their game. I suppose it's possible they could be more clear about the way character generation works in 5E.
  
  yeah, putting some description on the side or in a "?" button would be nice.
- 5e offers three ways to generate ability scores: dice rolls, the standard array, and point buy. Sounds like you're using the point buy variant in this game.
  
  https://media.wizards.com/2018/dnd/downloads/DnD_BasicRules_2018.pdf#page=9
  
  It also gives bonuses to certain ability scores based on the race you choose (or maybe some other criteria in whatever changes they've made for One D&D) so 16 isn't really the max even at level 1.
  
  That's the only way when I did the character creation. But I am glad that we don't have to do the dice roll one(which is a cheat engine magnet), so I guess it means in order to gain from 16->17 I would need to subtract more points from other stats just to level up 1 point.(cause that + button didn't light up when I reduced 2 or 3 points from Wisdom) but it seems that's very costly trade. A point to point seems more fair and let you create some crazy biased char out of gate.
I'm so excited for BG3! I'm already over-planning my first character's backstory.
I was going to do an origin character as a solo play-through and a custom character for a group play-through with my mates, but now I might do it the other way around... which means hours in the character creator! Ha.

18 comments