For someone like me, approaching a role-playing game with the size and complexity of Baldur’s Gate 3 is a real challenge. Despite watching two of the movies and joining a Curse of Strahd campaign, I know next to nothing about Dungeons & Dragons itself. Before this little project began, my D&D knowledge could be boiled down to “You can cast magic missile, there are owlbears and vampires, and the company that owns this system are Pinkerton-loving assholes!”
I’m also laughably bad at CRPG combat: I once tried playing Arcanum alongside Six, and kept finding new, embarrassing ways to screw up until it became unplayable. Given enough time, I can wrap my head around most JRPGs, and I’ve never had much difficulty with anything BioWare put out in their Mass Effect era. But unless we’re talking about the combat-free nirvana that is Disco Elysium, CRPGs and I are like oil and water: toss us into the same container, and we’re going to have a bad time.
Still, Baldur’s Gate 3 caught my attention shortly before it left Early Access. It’d been a while since I devoted myself to a role-playing game of this size, and a stubborn part of me wasn’t ready to let the whole CRPG genre chase me away with a stick. I’d challenge myself, leave it on the default difficulty, and cut my own path through a field that previously left me tearing my own hair out!
So…here’s Ashwynn. She’s a high elf sorcerer with fiery orange hair, a rose tattoo on her neck, and a deep scar running along one side of her face. Unlike her soon-to-be companions, she’s dealing with so much more than a parasitic tadpole threatening to turn her into a mind flayer, but we’ll get to that soon enough.
I’m put through the rudest of awakenings, tumbling my way out of a containment cell in the depths of a mind flayer’s ship. I can’t tell if it’s the parasite swimming around in my head or something else, but I can’t remember a thing, save for the smell of blood and a name: Ashwynn. It’s not like I have enough time to piece together anything else, as I’m suddenly beckoned by a brain trying to escape a fresh corpse’s head!
I begrudgingly help it out and pry it from the corpse’s skull, but a voice in my head tosses out a morbid thought: “What if you poked a few holes in this brain and showed it who’s in charge?” My thumbs try to fulfill this intrusive idea, but the little bastard hops from my hands, scurrying away before I can do any real damage. I’ll come to regret this later when several of them decide to gang up on me, but in the moment, I can only laugh as it sprints out the door. After all, it’s not every day that you see a brain sprout legs and run for the hills.
For now, I do my best to look for other captives and start my long trek to the helm of the ship. I run into Lae’zel, a stab-happy Githyanki warrior who decides I’m better off left alive (for now). She throws a fit when I free a half-elf cleric named Shadowheart from her own pod, but I tersely remind her that if we’re going to rush the helm, we’ll need all the help we can get!
It’s here where my general inexperience with D&D and CRPGs comes back to bite me: as it turns out, Level 1 Sorcerers are like glass cannons before the cannon is even ready to fire! I have a handful of low-powered spells at my disposal, but miss that most of them even exist, due to the UI’s tab-based categorization. Thus, I end up spending most of my opening fights tossing a weak-ass fireball at my opponents, fail to use most of my companions’ abilities, and restart each skirmish three or four times before I finally crawl out victorious, battered and bruised. I learn the ropes eventually, but for now? Welcome to the world of D&D. Enjoy your broken bones.
The three of us end up bounding into an ongoing skirmish, one that the betentacled mind flayer captain is in the process of losing. He shouts at us to make a beeline for the controls before we all crash: we’re on a time limit of 15 turns, and we really want to put as much distance between us and the captain. Hovering over the opponent he’s fighting reveals a terrifying amount of hit points, and I’m almost certain he could wipe us out with a single breath if his attention turns to us instead. As red, horned beasts descend on us, I make it to the fleshy reins with just an inch of life left and spirit us away.
One ugly crash later, I wake up on the beach with Shadowheart, and still can’t remember a thing. But we’ve both been through a lot in a relatively short span of time, and despite the ticking clock of a parasite in our heads, we both agree that we need to call it a night. Maybe a memory or two will return while I’m resting up?
To my horror, memories do resurface, and they’re all centered around the corpses I’ve left in my wake. Pretty corpses. Oh gods. I’m a monster, aren’t I? I’m gazing into the stars, smirking at the memory of “my first” before I catch myself, and this can’t just be the tadpole talking. This is me. Sleep eventually takes hold, but it’s far from pleasant, grappling with these ugly thoughts I just can’t dismiss.
I find something of a kindred spirit the next day. A princely, vampiric elf named Astarion shoves me to the ground and holds a knife to my throat, insistent that I was the one who put the parasite in his head. It takes some convincing, but after he puts his blade away, he apologizes, lamenting that he almost got a look at my insides. I instinctively retort with “I was looking forward to seeing yours,” and oh no, he smiled at that one! My dark passenger has an enabler now. This will go well.
I catch him at camp the next evening, and the very first question he asks me is how I’d prefer to die at his hands. I request a knife: he applauds me for my good taste in “the classics.” The more time I spend around Astarion, the more convinced I become that our uneasy alliance will either end in death or love. Hell, with the two of us, maybe both are possible! We’ll see if he still finds me charming as our journey continues.
Astarion, Shadowheart and I encounter a strange, disembodied arm sticking out of a rune. Maybe it’s Astarion’s influence colliding with my own urges, but a voice in my head wonders what would happen if I took out a knife and cut off its hand. After all, it’s only a disembodied arm…right? But I’m around two individuals who are staring at this arm intently. I can’t just cut off any old, unthreatening hand I see, especially when there are witnesses…I rapidly shake my head to banish the thought, tug on the hand, then watch in amusement as a whole human tumbles out from the rock.
That amusement turns into annoyance as the human brushes himself off and breaks into a far-too-lengthy introduction. He’s Gale, and he goes out of his way to insist that unlike me, he’s a true sorcerer. Like I’m carrying around this quarterstaff for shits and giggles, and only learned Magic Missile for party tricks. As we make our way to the only building within eyesight, I can’t help wishing that I chopped the fucker’s hand off after all.
The building turns out to be an abandoned church, and as we approach the entrance, we discover that we’re accidentally crashing someone else’s party: two bandits, arguing about something or other, treat us like we’re “competition” for whatever lays inside. I tell them that I’d be perfectly happy to turn them into a pin cushion for my knife, and they both flee for their lives. Maybe my predilection for violence has its advantages after all?
Sadly, the church itself is filled with well-armed bandits who aren’t as eager to turn tail as the chumps outside. After a few volleys, I realize that the limitations of magic prevent me from casting Magic Missile whenever I please. Boo. Thankfully, my travelling companions are plenty adept at fighting, though they have the bad habit of grouping up together and getting hit with a fiery inferno all at once! I bash my head against a quartet of tough bastards again and again, reloading as death repeatedly rolls out the red carpet for me. It’s time to abandon the brute force approach. Victory comes only when I try spreading everyone out, greasing the floor and stabbing a bandit as he slips and falls, then use Gale’s blue lightning to hold the others still as Astarion and Shadowheart bash them to bits.
Now that the bandits are gone, I thank myself for the restraint I showed earlier by not lopping Gale’s hand off, and get to work looking for whatever intrigued these unfortunate thieves in the first place.
After finding a secret switch and lockpicking a sturdy, wooden door (Astarion’s great at this whole tomb raiding thing), we find ourselves wandering through a massive crypt, the floor littered with corpses. Of course, I happily loot each and every one of them, taking whatever they were carrying for myself. A morbid instinct, to be sure, but one that pays off after we activate yet another hidden mechanism and awaken these hostile, undead sorcerers! I wave their own swords and staffs at them, which only makes them angrier, but we clear house yet again, pry open a fancy sarcophagus…and an intelligent, undead mummy adorned with a golden headdress steps out.
This mummy, Withers, asks me to quantify “the worth of a single mortal life,” and after I say whatever I think he wants to hear (an undead sage takes his riddles seriously, after all), he seems pleased. He claims we’ll meet again during some predetermined, pivotal moment, but when I press him for details, he impatiently insists that I should just go and let fate do its thing. Whatever. He sounds perfectly capable of finding me at the most dramatic moment possible, so I leave him be and head back to the surface.
My journey to the next patch of civilization was rather uneventful. I found Lae’zel again and freed her from a cage. I could see that she and Shadowheart would bicker with one another at every possible opportunity, so I did the mature thing and purposefully grouped the two of them together. After all, a road trip without passive-aggressive energy could scarcely be called a road trip!
We made it to a settlement, fought off some goblins (note to self: give Astarion a bow and a high ledge whenever possible. For a stab-happy rogue, he’s just as capable with a bow), and added yet another person to our dysfunctional band of travelers. Wyll’s a handsome, capable swordfighter to be sure, but I don’t know much about him yet: I immediately sent him to our camp, all so I could enable Lae’zel’s “unique” method of interrogation as she ordered some poor tiefling to bow in her presence. The disgusted look on Shadowheart’s face was priceless, and as we scoured the camp for a healer that could remove our parasite, I kept daydreaming about other ways I could pit the two against each other.
With just four hours of playtime, I was already feeling at home with Baldur’s Gate 3. Yes, I was still stuck as one of the worst classes imaginable for a beginner, but my glass cannon was starting to bulk up! Better yet, I started thinking on my feet: even if combat was unavoidable, there were plenty of tools at my disposal to make life hell for goblins, thieves and anything else the Forgotten Realms threw at me! Better yet, my flirtations with my dark yearnings were giving me stat bonuses. If I were careful enough, I could even get away with giving into my urges when my party was none the wiser!
For once, I was role-playing in a role-playing video game. I’d consider what Ashwynn would do and carry it out as if her desires were my own, even if it meant throwing myself into a royal fucking mess. I’d long heard other RPG fans glowingly talk about tapping into the mindset of their own avatar and seeing where it led them, but I never managed to put myself in my character’s shoes until now. Finally, I could be bad in a video game without overloading myself with real-life guilt. If anything, it felt good.
What came after that, though…if I’m being honest with myself, I did something truly terrible. Our group walked into a precarious scenario: a young child had a venomous snake sicced on her by the furious leader of the village, and this snake was poised to leap at her throat if she so much as moved, all because she stole an idol that was important to the village. I looked the girl right in the eyes, glanced over to the exit, then returned to her gaze. It was all the motivation she needed to run. And once she took off, the snake lunged, killing her in a matter of seconds.
Technically, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say a word, or even move a muscle: I just looked in two different locations! The child did everything! And it’s not like anyone noticed. Still, I can’t lie to myself. I killed that child out of mere curiosity, I killed that child because I could, and that dark passenger inside of me grinned like she’d just heard a wonderful joke.
Maybe we’ll all get these parasitic tadpoles out of our brain. Maybe I’ll even do some good along the way! But there’s no use denying it any longer: I am a terrible person. Only time will tell just how terrible I can be.
