Baldur’s Gate III: On Evil Making Things Less Fun
A handful of years ago, before the pandemic, we were starting a new D&D game and kicking around the various characters we would be interested in playing. People picked the various rangers and clerics and fighters and whathaveyou and I realized that I’d never played an assassin. I realized that I kinda wanted to. Most of the upsides of being a Rogue plus a handful of skills that nobody else had access to. So I told the DM that I wanted to play a Lawful Evil Assassin.
The DM pulled me aside a bit later and told me “Jaybird, I don’t really like the idea of evil characters in the party. I don’t want you stealing from other people at the table, I don’t want you backstabbing them… I don’t want you making drama.” I laughed and assured him that I had *NO* intention of stealing or backstabbing my friends (to whom I would be loyal). I was more of a “shortcut” kinda guy. The basic idea I had for the character came from a line from a trailer from back in the 90s. I saw the trailer a dozen times. I never got around to seeing the movie.
I’ve taken the liberty of queueing up the trailer to the line that I had as the kernel of my character’s philosophy:
“If you could cure cancer by killing one person, wouldn’t you have to do that?”
And I explained my character’s philosophy of dealing with problems. If you could end a fight a couple of rounds early by using poison, wouldn’t you have to do that? If you could short-circuit a fight by hiding in shadows and backstabbing the ringleader instead of bothering with underlings, wouldn’t you have to do that? If you could avoid a conflict entirely by sliding a knife through the ribs of a watchman, wouldn’t you have to do that?
Anyway.
I have a complaint about Baldur’s Gate III.
The complaint involves spoilers to some degree (mild, though they are) so please be forewarned.
Still here? Okay. In the first two hours of Baldur’s Gate III, you are likely to pick up two or three companions who are all different flavors of Evil.
The first is Shadowheart. A beautiful Cleric devoted to Shar, the goddess of Death and Trickery.
The second is Astarion. A beautiful Rogue whose affectation is that of someone lifted out of bad Oscar Wilde fanfic. Like, if you wanted to make fun of Oscar Wilde’s characters and you wrote this guy, the response would be some variant of “Dude, harsh”. He has other issues but that’s the big one.
The third is Lae’zel. A single-minded Githyanki Warrior who has a goal and intends to meet it and stuff that doesn’t help her get it is immaterial. She has attitudes towards non-Githyanki that do not translate well if you imagine a human saying them about non-humans.
Interactions with Shadowheart are mostly pleasant (if you want them to be, of course) but interactions with Astarion and Lae’zel get off on the wrong foot and it’s fairly easy to keep them there.
But the main thing about all three of them is that it’s quite possible that two of these three (if not all three of these three) become your main guys in your main party (I mean, sure, maybe you’ll swap one of them out for Gale but you’ve still got the other two).
And interacting with two out of the three characters, the *EVIL* characters, is downright unpleasant until you get several hours into the game. (Granted, you have the option of killing the two unpleasant characters but, I dunno about you, killing party members is one of those things that I shy away from).
The problem is that, for most of the game, you’re just expected to work with Evil party members and they’re all exceptionally useful. Clerics are band-aid boxes and now under the new rules, they have an attack cantrip to give them a ranged attack better than any normal sling. Fighters can do massive damage and soak up a bunch while they stand between you and the baddies. Rogues have the ability to attack at advantage if you know anything about battlefield tactics and you get bonus damage dice on top of that.
The deontology of working with evil is muddled at best but the *UTILITY* of working with evil is off the charts. They heal great! They soak great! They kill even better!
On top of that, the game keeps putting you in situations where you have to pick “do I want this awful person to win or do I want this other awful person to win?” as part of its major storyline.
“I don’t like *ANY* of these people!” is something you’ll say again and again. (Indeed, one of my buds who is playing fairly Lawful Good, ended up in a fight where both of the awful sides ended up losing.)
And as the game progresses, sure, you can make the interactions somewhat less unpleasant by dating one of them and they turn their unpleasantness elsewhere. If you are (more or less) Good and date them, you can talk them down from some of the more extreme versions of unpleasantness. Maybe not make them Good but… Lawful Neutral? Chaotic Neutral? It’s certainly a step in the right direction.
The game goes out of its way to give you an amazing amount of freedom… and then plopping you in the middle of a group of awful people that you won’t want to spend time with.
Which means that this is the most amazing game that I have found myself having zero desire to play because instead of fighting against evil, the game has you fight with it.
And that sucks.
Anyway, my DM for the tabletop game pointed out that my assassin’s use of poison wasn’t *NECESSARILY* evil and I disagreed and mentioned the Poisons section in the infamous Book of Vile Darkness and he shrugged and said “okay, go for it. Just don’t poison your teammates.”
I tried to work asking the question “wouldn’t you have to do that?” into each session at least once.
I’m pleased to say that other people at the table started made “wouldn’t you have to do that?” into a running joke in not only that campaign but that joke has creeped into other campaigns and even the one that we look forward to playing on Saturdays.
So first of all, Astarian is delightfully camp!Report
He reads to me like he was written by someone who had a roommate who *LOVED* Oscar Wilde and would given drunken speeches praising him.
The writer wanted to make fun of his former roommate and wrote Astarion without ever bothering to read anything from the man himself. “Isn’t he the Portrait guy? Whatever.”Report
My favorite Astarion bits are when I don’t do what he wants me to do and he gets snippy and threatens me. He’s a fantastically written and acted character, as are all of the potential companions.Report
In the playthrough with my wife and me, I have Astarion and she had Shadowheart until we got the Tiefling barbarian whose name I cannot remember. I didn’t get the intereactions with Shadowheart, other than what I overheard from her Steam Deck. I didn’t recall Astarion being particularly unpleasant, other than being a bit snobby. We missed rescuing Lae’zel, so I don’t know about her.
It is weird how many DnD players seem to think evil characters are compelled to do evil all the time, including stabbing their teammates in the back. I prefer intelligent evil. Your companions are useful, so you take care of them. If you play your cards right, maybe you can corrupt them. Get them to see the advantage of taking short cuts that aren’t that bad. If it comes down to “them or me,” it’s obviously them getting sacrificed, but there is no advantage to making bad things happen to the people who work with me.
As far as my own gaming, my wife and I started playing Super Mario Wonder. We found it quite enjoyable, and I appreciate the return to 2D. I also got Armored Core VI last night. I only played through the first mission, and it took me way too many tries to kill the first boss. It just throughs you in with no tutorial other than a few tool tips. Actual tutorials unlock after that. At first I thought “I suck at this game if it takes me this many times to beat the first boss,” but I looked online, and it seems to be a common issue. Some people have refunded the game over it.
I have also been playing through Diablo IV’s Season 2, which has been a lot of fun. It feels less grindy than before, and the vampire powers are fun to experiment with.Report
We had a teammate who did stuff like lift from the gold we’d win in a fight.
Guy: I search the bodies.
DM: You find 25 gold and 4 small gems.
Guy: “Hey guys! I found 20 gold!”
Created drama.Report
In typical Marchmaine fashion, I ignored all the dialogue and made custom NPC’s for my party. Then all I had to do was deal with the occasional Camp/Rest pre-programmed interruption — which I didn’t really read. As far as I can tell, everybody wants a piece of me in every possible way, and nobody in the party is getting what they want. I dunno, something something about Gale maybe exploding or something.
Of course, I never ‘finished’ the game; and one time I ignored Lae’zel’s fake goddess so hard she killed the entire party from afar, ending the game. Which was something I didn’t think could happen in today’s bumper-car games. I mean, I just went back to the previous save (had to fight the long fight again, sigh) and picked a different dialogue choice… so not dead, dead. But still.Report
I have two friends and both have told me that the Shadowheart story is *AMAZING* and this or that character’s story arc is pretty good (Gale, Lae’zel) and I should give it another chance.
And then I have a conversation with Astarion.Report
Heh, I broke my first paladin in the beginner area and 1) Didn’t know you could break your paladin, 2) have no idea what dialogue choice I picked to break him … then I found out that apparently the cool way to play a paladin is to break him.
As you know, I just can’t even with the whole idea of game/fantasy ‘stories’ … my defense mechanism is to ignore the bad story telling and chase the loot; forcing me to pick a team is usually when I quit.
I suppose it is ‘possible’ that a story in BG3 is AMAZING, but from my particular perspective? I doubt it very much. These folks aren’t writing stories for me and my folk… so I’m just here for the game breaking loot.Report
I just finished a playthrough as a paladin and I really don’t like how they implemented oaths (also, they should be called vows, not oaths, but I’ll leave that rant for another time). The game gives you essentially no guidance on how to avoid breaking your oath. The book they give you just gives the potted summary out of the Player’s Handbook, which tells you nothing of substance. Which is ridiculous since even if I don’t know how an oath works, my character should.
There should be a warning that pops up if you’re going to do something that would violate your oath, but the game treats it as a surprise, even your character acts they they don’t understand what’s happening when they lose their powers, which makes about as much sense as a wizard being surprised when a bolt of fire shoots out of their fingertips.Report
Exactly. If they were really doing an ethics/alignment Sim choosing that would come with a warning… and ideally a new set of options as you attempt to thread the terrible options you were given that made you think Breaking Your Oath was probably a good idea.Report
Dude. We need an ethics/alignment sim.Report
I have a couple of tips that may help with your character problems, I’ll try to keep to light spoilers:
1) Shadowheart worships an evil god, but is not evil herself. This is an important part of her character arc.
2) You can find some non-evil characters in Act One fairly quickly. One is a good replacement for La’Zael, and the other is more of a light caster with some melee support.
3) Finally, a guy named Withers will show up in your camp fairly early into the game. One of the thing he offers you is access to generic characters that have no dialogue or character quests. If you want a Rogue (and in 5E there are ways to do without one), but don’t like Asterion, you should be able to get a zero-personality rogue from him.Report
Shadowheart worships an evil god, but is not evil herself.
This is one of those things that likely deserves its own essay.
I am 100% down with this particular distinction. Remember back when we had arguments over “What is The Punisher’s Alignment?” and people got into food fights over Lawful Evil vs. Chaotic Good?
My solution was that he was an Evil man doing his best to serve a Good deity.
If you could make the city safer by putting a claymore in the stairwell of a hotel that the mafia use for meetings… wouldn’t you have to do that?
But the whole concept of Evil that the D&D universe has is awfully… oh, let’s call it “muddled”. There’s a double scoop of “what if Lawful Good is actually *EVIL*” mixed in with “what if Evil is actually misunderstood?” without ever even contemplating “what if Lawful Good is misunderstood?”
Friggin Chaotic Good types.Report
The big problem with alignment is that it used to mean one thing, but came to mean another. Originally, alignment was rooted in the cosmic conflict between Law and Chaos in the vein of Michael Moorcock’s books (The good-evil axis of alignment wasn’t added until later). Alignment wasn’t about who you were, it was about which side you were on, which makes sense considering the wargame origins of D&D.
The idea that your alignment was first and foremost about your personality is a more recent concept, and over time seems to have become the dominant paradigm for alignments, which to me is a much weaker concept. Because people are complicated and can’t be easily fit into nine boxes, but sides in a war are more straightforward.
My TTRPG of choice these days is Pathfinder, and they’re doing something interesting with alignments at the moment. In order to separate their system from D&D more they’re removing alignment and replacing some of its mechanical implications with the Holy and Unholy traits. Basically, undead, devils and other capital “E” Evil creatures are Unholy whole angels, unicorns and the like are Holy. Clerics and Paladins may be sanctified Holy or Unholy depending on the god they serve, which make some of their magic more effective against the opposite side. This gets us back more to the idea of cosmic forces instead of personality traits and helps diffuse a few ethical conundrums. Is the local or c tribe good or evil? Mechanically, neither (unless they worship demons or something) and the rest is left to the philosophers.Report
Pay close attention to subtext when it comes to Shadowheart is the real important bit of advice.
Or for the game for that matter, I’m difficulty with what you’ve written is you’ve taken a real shallow read to everything. If anything the game rewards choosing good moral choices way more than evil ones which are often dead ends. However, it does require you to make choices, often ones that are good for some, bad for others and live with the consequences (or be a disreputable save scummer).
All the “evil” characters you’re talking about have clear points of view as well as levels of performativity in their actions that are easy to pick up on if you’re paying attention. Why is Astarion conspicuously extra and self-serving, why does Shadowheart’s working ethics and what dogma she cites match what you can find out about her religion, how much of what’s going on does Lae’zal actually understand despite her obnoxious confidence etc.Report
I sorta feel that applies to all the characters, and I think it’s very odd that Jaybird, who has completed the game, thinks you have to work with evil characters almost the entire game.
Which, in addition to being a bit wrong (Karlach, Wyll, and Gale are a perfectly functional team.), rather implies either the characters didn’t evolve for him (Which is weird if he was playing good) or that he missed it.
Lae’zel’s crisis of faith happens before act 1 ends, and Shadowheart is increasingly dubious going into act 2 if you’ve pushed back on Shar at all. (And have her approval up, but if you’re playing in a way she disapproves of, you aren’t playing a good person.)
Asterion is harder to crack early (He will eventually spill regardless), but it’s pretty easy to get his approval up just by sometimes being snarky (without being evil) so he admits his situation to you, and how you respond to that will get him thinking.
I would just suggest that he didn’t have them in his team, so they don’t change, but…he also implied he thinks he _has_ to have them in his team.
Not dead-ends as much as ‘much less interesting’. I’m wrapping up my first Dark Urge playthrough, my third total, and I’m going to finish at…60 hours, which is less than half my first playthough and about 3/4ths my second playthough.
Part of that is just that I’m faster cause I know stuff, but a good chunk of that is…doing good stuff was often long and complicated, whereas the evil choice is just…right there, you do it, you maybe do a fight, it’s over. And yes, you can often still sorta do a bunch of complicated good quests before flipping and doing the bad stuff right at the end, but that’s weird metagaming and doesn’t make sense if you are trying to have any sort of consistent character…no, I’m not going to help people here, I don’t actually care about any of you, and literally my only excuse for wandering around here is seeing what you have for sale.
And it doesn’t help that evil play-through lock out companions. (Although hilariously I ended up with Jahiera, because I am a _really_ good liar. Which meant I could do the funniest evil thing ever in act 3.)Report
I haven’t completed the game. I ran out of gas somewhere around the tail end of Act 1 when we had the party for destroying the bad guys in the Goblin Dungeon and freeing the druid.
Note: This was before the Horny Fix patch was applied.
I walked around and talked to everybody, everybody wanted to get into my pants and was weird about it, it was nice to make out with Shadowheart, Starfield came out and I was in a much better mood.Report
The Horny Fix patch wasn’t targeted at the party. The party is a one-shot opportunity for you to “dungeon crawl” with whichever NPC you want to, regardless your status with them or your romantic pursuits otherwise. The party is actually designed this way, unless I’m mistaken.Report
I ran a Paladin through most of Act 2 and decided to start over. I wanted a different character which would allow me to pick up either Lae’zel or Karlach (the Tiefling barbarian). Hilariously, I failed the “persuade” roll to convince the Tieflings to release Lae’zel to me, so…Karlach it is. I love Karlach’s ironically happy-go-lucky attitude and the fact that she dances if you leave the party standing still for too long.
I played with Lae’zel in my Paladin’s party for a short while before I decided I needed “less swords and more magic” and replaced her with Gale. I enjoyed her sharp tongue and her ability to turn any situation into an opportunity for her to explain how were were all weak and inadequate.
Astarion is less “evil” and more “incredibly selfish.” Aside from his (as noted above) frequent threats when I don’t act the way he thinks I should, I find him to be an excellent rogue and the one party member I can typically count on to land a hit when I really need one.
If I have a complaint, it’d be that the game mostly seems to force me into “picking fights” to clear out enemies rather than getting attacked by the bad guys and kicking their butts. On the other hand…it’s funny as hell to push a goblin off the edge of a cliff to start a fight, and the way the game is written provides for lots more ways to resolve situations without fighting. I suppose I can appreciate that.Report
The interesting thing is that all the evil characters in BG3 have been _taught_ evil, but have not actually had the chance to do ever _do_ evil by their own free will. And…some character spoilers, but it’s all background information that should come out pretty quickly in talking to them about anything, and it’s really hard to talk about this without.
Lae’zel is perhaps the most ‘organically’ evil, in that her personality is a normal result result of the culture she grew up in. And she is _a child_. I mean, she’s an adult, and has seen combat, but she has never been in the another dimension before, had no interactions to even challenge her society’s teaching about other people are. She grew up in the Astral Plane, on her first mission she got sent to deal with the mind flayer rampage that starts the game, got captured, start story. You can encourage her to keep operating as if power at the point of a sword is the most important thing in the universe, or not…and weirdly, either way, she ends up respecting other races. Like, the bigoted part of her education can’t stick around regardless. But you can either affirm her society’s philosophy that might makes right or not.
Shadowheart is barely functional as a person, because she keeps getting constantly mindwiped as her non-evil personality keeps trying to come out. Not even her _memories_, those are gone, but she still _keeps being nice_. She has a fricking wound on her hand that Shar uses to correct her behavior. Nothing she has ever done is of her own free will. And the cult she has been brainwashed into is…also the perfect fit for that, because they really enjoy talking about loss, so even when she realizes how much she has lost, she thinks that is _good_. And people often misuse ‘cult’, but Shar worship is literally, 100%, textbook cult behavior, except they add magic mind manipulation on top of it. But you can keep poking at her memories, until she realizes what’s going on.
And Asterion, who overtly presents as the most evil person in the game, has, in a moral sense, not done a single immoral thing before you met him, because he has literally been a slave since being turned for 200 years and completely unable to escape or choose any actions at all without being painfully tortured by his sire. His entire universe is manipulating victims back to his master and then getting beaten for his ‘mistakes’, in what is the most disturbing depiction of an abusive relationship I’ve seen in a video game.
So…it’s interesting that all three evil characters are evil because, respectively, 1) a really sheltered upbringing that taught them stupid stuff that they go out into the world with, but can quickly learn otherwise, 2) a literal cult that brainwashed them, 3) an _extremely_ abusive long-term relationship that made them very angry at the world for allowing it, and hide anger well, and delighting in cruelty when it’s happening to others.
I.e., it’s extremely real world evil.
—
Weirdly, the most actual morally ambiguous companion in the game actually is Gale, because when he learns what is going on, he is like ‘Hey, I could take that power for myself’, despite that being incredibly stupid and dangerous, WHICH HE KNOWS due to having an equally stupid plan blow up as the premise of his character, and not really having any excuse of ‘violence culture xenophobic society’ or ‘literal cult’ or ‘hundreds of years of abuse’…he’s just some normal wizard (aka, magic nerd) from Waterdeep. But he sees ultimate magical power and is like ‘Hey, it’s sane for me to try to have that.’Report