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.