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Baldur’s Gate 3 – Playthrough 12 – Mods – Party of 14

If you’re not familiar with the concept of mods, I have a detailed explanation I wrote for playthrough 11. This post discusses the mods I used in playthrough 12 that had the most effect on my gameplay.

The key mods I activated for playthrough 12 were:

  • Adjustable Party Limit, which allows an adventuring party to have up to 16 members. Since this paythrough was a banter run, I needed to this have all the characters with speaking roles in the party at once.
  • UnlockLevelCurve, which allows characters to go up to level 20.
  • DoubleXP, which doubles the amount of experience received. This or a similar mod is necessary to actually reach level 20 in the game without a lot of grinding. When I didn’t use a this mod, the best I could do is level 19.
  • Mystic Class and Mystic Expansion, which add a powerful new class to the game.
  • FearTaylor’s Camp Clothes, which offers many options for dressing up your characters
  • Underwear of Rituals, which contains dozens of underwear designs that add minor utility spells to a character who wears them.
  • FaerunColors, which adds loads of new dyes that can be applied to armor and other wearable items.

The party

Not that kind of party, Barcus. An adventuring party!

I originally planned to have a party of 11 characters: the ten “speaking-role” characters capable of being added to your party (Astarion, Gale, Halsin, Jahiera, Karlach, Lae’zel, Minsc, Minthara, Shadowheart, Wyll) plus the protagonist Amaranth.

Here’s the party near the start of the game. The five characters you see with Amaranth are the easiest to add. In most playthroughs I add them in the first “day” of the game.

Typically one meets Karlach a short while later in the game. I rushed to add her, in order not to miss any opportunities for banter. In the back you can see an Imp that Wyll summoned; I made him a Chain Warlock to see what it was like.

The Adjustable Party Limit mod has an issue that’s imposed by the internal code of the game: While your party can have more than four characters most of the time, it must be trimmed down to four (or less) before a Long Rest; otherwise the game would crash. This adds some overhead to the “set up” each morning, as I had to go to each of the characters I dismissed before the Long Rest and invite them back.

It’s the dawn of a new day. Amaranth had to go around and wake up all these people. By the time she’s done, she’s so tired that she wants to go back to bed.

To reduce the overhead, I wanted to increase the number of Short Rests I had each day. A Bard can perform the Song of Rest, which has the same effect.

I summoned three hirelings, and named them Moana, Larrana, and Curly Joanna (after Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe of the Three Stooges). At first I only added to Moana to the party as a Swords Bard.

Here’s Moana, our Swords Bard. She’s a hireling, so her speech is limited and servile.

I added Moana not long after I added Karlach, for a party of eight (plus one Imp). By the way, Amaranth is wearing a Deva outfit from FearTaylor’s Camp Clothes.

Much later in the game, we are at 12 with the addition of Minthara, Halsin, Jaheira, and Minsc. Halsin is a bit shy, and has his back to the camera. (Translation: positioning characters for group shots like this is tedious; I just said “Good enough!” and took the darned picture.)

As I got caught up in a quest for rolling a high Ability Check, I added Larrana as a Lore Bard and Curly Joanna as a Valour Bard to the party. They provided additional casts of Bardic Inspiration and (through Larrana) Peerless Skill.

Larrana, a Bard of Lore.

Curly Joanna, a Valour Bard. Contrary to expectations, she did not slap her head and go “Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo.!”

Thus I had a party of 14.

The group near the end of the game. As I’ve described in previous posts, Amaranth and Jaheira are in Colossus form, and Astarion has Shapeshifted into a Masc Gnome.

If you included companions like Scratch and Boo, that came up to 17 units to pose for pictures.

A posed shot with Boo, the Party Leader, in the foreground. (Scratch is not visible, but don’t worry. He’ll have his day in the next BG3 blog post.)

One of the advantages of having everyone in the party is that you have a chance to see them make remarks within cutscenes or about each other that you otherwise might have missed. Some examples:

You may have noticed that, in some of the images, that there’s a notification that a character may approve or disapprove of something Amaranth did. For example:

Some folks didn’t like it when I donated money to a beggar. Most approved, though.

That was a mere eight-way shift in approval rating. However, I managed to achieve the maximum:

Was it something I said? (Yes, it was!) Every character in the party who was capable of an approval shift disliked my choice.

With this maximal use of Adjustable Party Limit (the only way to get more than 14 characters in a party is with multiplayer) and the UnlockLevelCurve mod, towards the end of the game I had a huge party of 20th-level characters. This made most encounters trivial. It was rare for a combat to last more than two rounds.

One of the party’s many easy victories. By this point in the game, everyone was 20th level, and didn’t need the excess xp (Experience Points). But it’s the thought that counts.

There are ways to adjust the difficulty level to give more of a challenge, even with such a large high-level party. However, I’ve never been interested in challenging gameplay in BG3, only interesting gameplay: seeing how the story evolves given different choices; perhaps fiddling with interesting character classes like Mystic.

For example, can a Miniature Giant Space Hamster and a cat ever be friends?

Working with a huge party is not all pleasant, easy victories. There’s the problem of dealing with a mass of characters moving around the landscape. Consider this photo:

Let’s focus on the minimap in the upper right-hand corner. The blue dots are members of the party; the white dot is the active character (Amaranth in this case):

We’ve got a lot of characters in a narrow alley. It took time for each of them to move and keep up, shuffling their positions to fit in the available space.

Astarion is usually a patient fellow, but even he became sarcastic when the delays got long.

I didn’t make a video of this, but movement of the party was often: Go a short distance; wait for the party to catch up; go another short distance; wait for the party to catch up. If I didn’t do this, party members could be left behind. It was particularly tedious if the party had to climb a ladder or something like that, since only one character could use the ladder at a time.

Of course, there was always room in the party for Boo.

A huge party was fun overall, but it’s not something I plan to do again.

Clothes and underwear

In my first BG3 post, I went over the outfit and dye options that are available to alter a character’s appearance.

A reminder: When displaying your character, you can choose between showing the character in full armor, wearing their “casual” camp outfit, and wearing their underwear. You can also choose to show them nude, but I’m going to save that for the next BG3 post.

When Hope speaks to you, it’s best to listen.

As the last major expedition before going to the big end-game combat, Amaranth visited the home of the person in the above picture. In general, she wants to protect adventurers from some interlopers. She does it by disguising the adventurers in common garb.

I neglected to take a photo of Amaranth dressed in the drab outfit. Here’s a photo of Sorcerer Sabrina from playthrough 9. She’s listening to Haarlep, whom we’ll see in a couple of photos.

As long as you keep wearing that clothing, the interlopers won’t attack you.

Again from playthrough 9, here we see one of the residents of Hope’s home accepting Sorceror Sabrina’s presence, thanks to the tattered clothes from Hope.

Here is that “remarkable individual” I mentioned in my previous BG3 post.

This image is once again from playthrough 9. I had looked forward to introducing Amaranth to her. It might have added to Amaranth’s body count, in more ways than one.

Alas, this tryst was not to be.

Hope supplied the drab clothing only to the first four members of the large adventuring party. These four included Shadowheart. The remaining members of the party were still dressed in full armor. It was an issue because of an incompatibility between the game’s normal function and how Adjustable Party Limit works.

I didn’t notice this, until:

There was no fooling the longtime residents of Hope’s home.

As soon as the party in normal armor were seen, the alarm went out. The drab outfits vanished. Every resident turned hostile, including Haarlep. There was no tryst, only combat.

Again from playthrough 9, this illustrates what Amaranth’s battle might have looked like. However, in playthrough 9, Sorcerer Sabrina engaged in close personal contact with Haarlep before it turned into close personal combat. That’s why Sorcerer Sabrina is wearing just her underwear… and she’s lucky to be wearing even that.

That answers one of the questions I posed at the end of my previous BG3 post: Haarlep never seduced Amaranth (or would it have been the other way around?) because a game glitch prevented that scene.

The resemblance of Shadowheart’s underwear to Haarlep’s outfit is not a coincidence. Shadowheart is wearing a duplicate of that model from the Underwear of Rituals mod.

Another question was: Why so many photos of Shadowheart in her underwear?

When a party is recognized as intruders, Hope’s outfits vanish. Apparently, so do all the outfits from FearTaylor’s Camp Clothes; they weren’t even in the characters’ inventories.

If I’d noticed this before the end of the game, I might have selected new clothes for them.

From earlier in the game: I still had Shadowheart’s original outfit in storage somewhere.

However, the playthrough was wrapping up, and I just didn’t think about it. I didn’t realize that would leave Shadowheart only in her underwear for the remaining cutscenes in the game.

The last question, of what happened with Naoise Nallinto, I’ll leave until my next BG3 post.

Dyes and dress-up

It’s not enough to cast Speak with Dead. You have to look good doing it.

FaerunColors and FearTaylor’s Camp Clothes, taken together, provide thousands of combinations of costumes and colors. Here’s a brief example.

Take a look a Minthara’s clothing. These are her normal camp clothes, in their natural color.

In this photo you can see Amaranth wearing a duplicate of the outfit, courtesy of FearTaylor’s Camp Clothes. I used FaerunColors’ Wonderbringer dye to make it look more interesting.

Late in the game, I re-dyed the outfit to FaerunColors’ Tempus. I don’t remember why. Perhaps I was trying for a high contrast against Amaranth’s purple hair and skin.

Here Shadowheart is wearing an outfit labeled “Nymph” in FearTaylor’s Camp Clothes. In this photo it’s dyed in the colors of Shar.

Later in the game, after Shadowheart has her hair done, I gave her clothing a dye job as well.

Another Shadowheart example. The armor she’s wearing in these two pictures is the same (Luminous Armour), but colored with two different dyes.

As I was preparing this blog post, Amaranth told me that she wanted you to know the lengths she goes to in order to look good for you. It’s either that or a plathetic effort to justify my playing “Barbie dress-up.” Anyway, here are some comparisons:

Amaranth is wearing Shadowheart’s camp clothes, dyed in Wonderbringer. This is the same color palette that you see in the middle photo of the three above that show Minthara’s camp outfit.

The same outfit, dyed in FaerunColors’ Selune.

Again, the same outfit, dyed in FaerunColors’ Kelemvor. Comparing these three photos may give you some idea of how dyes interact with the different material textures assigned to design elements in clothes and armor.

None of this has any effect on gameplay. It’s just another way to add to the visual enjoyment of the game.

Photo Gallery

I’m not going to do a “system analysis” for this playthrough. But I want to do my usual boasting. So I’ll just show their pictures, with a few brief notes after each image.

Feel free to just quickly scroll through the images, go “ooh” and “aah” at the dye jobs, and be ready for my next BG3 blog post: bits and pieces.

Amaranth was a Mystic of the Order of the Ascetic. Essentially she was like an Open-Hand Monk. It was an effective build, but there are more exciting things to do with a Mystic. I’d pick something else in a future playthrough for variety.

As I’ve discussed before, Astarion was optimized for Sleight-of-Hand skills. Combined with a few levels of Gloom Stalker Ranger, this made for another successful combination.

Curly Joanna’s Initiative was lower than that of the other characters, so she rarely got a chance to fight before the combat was over. Here she’s wearing the Mutilated Carapace with a golden dye.

Gale was a typical Evocation / Magic Missile build. At level 20 his Magic Missiles were almost like an area-of-effect spell.

For Halsin, it was Moonbeam, Call Lightning, or bashing with Shillelagh. In a party of this size, there wasn’t weren’t many “Druidish” things for him to do, especially since I didn’t want him in animal form because I wanted to listen to his banter.

With Jaheira I fiddled with the Mystic’s weapon skills. Another effective build. But as with Amaranth, I’d try something else with a Mystic in the future for variety.

Karlach was a typical Throwzerker. Since I had the extra levels, I gave her enough Eldritch Knight levels so she could cast Weapon Bond on any blade, throw it, and have it return to her. But the the classic thrown weapons like Nyrulna still proved to be best.

Lae’zel was a typical Battle Master. By the end of the game, she was so effective that I could have thrown her into the battles solo.

As I discussed before, Larrana was in the party to cast Lore Bard spells to assist Astarion. In combat, she did OK but not great.

I had my usual difficulty with Minsc as a pure Ranger: OK, but not great.

Minthara was a powerful Lockadin. Another character that I could have probably tossed into battle solo, though she might have needed a Long Rest or Potion of Angelic Reprieve after every battle.

College of Swords Bards are usually powerful on the battlefield, and Moana was no exception. She was impressive for a character that I originally added for support.

With Shadowheart, I experimented with a Radiant Flame build. It worked well, but Shadowheart’s lower initiative meant that I didn’t get to try it as often as I would have liked.

Wyll stuck with Eldritch Blast. In such a large group, that was good enough.
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