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If you’ve been following my Baldur’s Gate 3 series of posts, at this point my nomenclature may be confusing.

When I say “playthrough 3” or “playthrough 12”, that’s clear enough: It refers to my (Bill’s) 3rd or 12th playthroughs of the game, respectively.

The business with the slashes may not be obvious. The number before the slash is the number of the playthrough of the host of the game. So we have this:

• Playthrough 1/14 was Real Angela’s first playthrough, and my 14th.

  

• Playthrough 2/14.5 was Real Angela’s second playthrough. However, I only accompanied her occasionally during the playthrough, when she felt like company. Hence “playthrough 2/14.5” means Real Angela’s 2nd playthrough, Bill’s partial playthrough after his 14th.

  

• Playthrough 8’/2.5 (pronounced “eight-prime slash two-point-five”) is based on my 8th playthrough of the game, forked off at a certain point. I’m the host of that game, so “my” number comes first. Real Angela’s participation in that playthrough is only partial, so we designate that with “2.5”. I may write more about that one eventually.

  

• Real Angela’s partner Michael is also playing BG3. Real Angela accompanied him for a bit, but he doesn’t want guidance (or Guidance) from Real Angela, at least not the way I helped Real Angela in 1/14. She doesn’t feel her brief participation in his game worthy of a special designation. It’s Michael’s “playthrough 1”.

  

• 1/15 or 1/16 will be the first playthrough I’ll have with my friend Sabrina. It’s not clear when that will start.

  

• 1/2.5 is Real Angela occasionally playing as a guest with her friend Otter, who started her own BG3 playthrough. Perhaps this should be called 1/1.5/2.5 since Otter’s partner (who played BG3 once before) is also sometimes involved.

  

• 3/14 is Pi Day.



• 22/7 is Pi Day in the UK, where they express dates in DD/MM format.

  

When I shared this with Real Angela, her response was:

Lol these are getting complicated. Now I finally understand why organic chemistry naming conventions were so difficult.

This is my essay on playthrough 2/14.5, my partial playthrough experience within Real Angela’s second BG3 playthrough.

I went over most of this in a previous blog post. Let’s took at the same points with fresher eyes.

I am not Real Angela

This may seem unnecessary, but one of my nicknames is Captain Obvious:

In much of what I write below, I effectively put words into Real Angela’s mouth. Sometimes it’s because I’m exaggerating for comic effect. Other times it’s because I wasn’t paying enough attention to something she said.

Do not take anything I say about her reactions or opinions as verified truth. It’s my hope that Real Angela will write her own thoughts about this playthrough. Those are words you can trust.

Gameplay

We played playthrough 1/14 in the easiest difficulty level, Explorer. For 2/14.5, she started the game in Balanced difficulty. She quickly discovered the benefits of multi-classing. I’d shared them during our first playthrough, but she had not understood how much more it brought to the game until she tried it herself.

As she continued with the mods she’d chosen (more on that below), the game began to seem too easy for her. So she switched to the next higher difficulty level: Tactician.

This is something I have yet to do in my own playthroughs. But let us not forget: Real Angela is a better gamer than I am.

One of the things I discovered in this playthrough with her is how the game’s encounters become trickier at higher difficulty levels. I may try Tactician in a future playthrough, now that I know what it’s like. But it’s more about the story than the gameplay for me. I’ll see how I feel about it when I start my next playthrough without multiplayer.

Characters

Real Angela played Raelia, a Tiefling Paladin who’d sworn an Oath of Vengeance. However, Real Angela discovered that it’s not easy to keep a Paladin Oath. She found she wanted Raelia to do something seemed good and just, only to discover that it violated her Oath. She finished the game as an Oathbreaker Paladin, having become impatient with the game’s definitions of its Paladin Oaths.

I should add that Real Angela is far from the first person to discover this. I think the majority of the players who choose the Paladin class deliberately become Oathbreakers as soon as they can, because they don’t want to worry about keeping the Oath, or because an Oathbreaker’s powers are quite useful.

I played Tavelle, a Dragonborn Bard. I started as a Swords Bard, the most combat-effective Bard in the game.

I changed her to a Glamour Bard because, with all the mods that Real Angela chose to use (more on this below), Tavelle wasn’t doing anything useful for the group. As a Glamour Bard, she could essentially “freeze” the enemies with Hold Person and the like, preventing them from attacking and making them sitting ducks for Real Angela’s pool of characters.

Here’s a short performance from Tavelle. She’s entertaining folks while Raelia is off negotiating with vendors. It’s no Barding It, but it got reasonable attention for a solo performance.

Playing Tavelle in 2/14.5 reminded me of the value of a good support character. Not everyone has to attack everything every turn.

The Protectors

In my playthrough 8, I named my Protector Hirelings after her: Angela, Karma, and Wings. That led to the evolution of Arctic Druid Angela from a background character to the True Hero of playthrough 8.

In playthrough 2/14.5, Real Angela returned the compliment. She summoned three Protector Hirelings and named them William, Winston, and Waterston. (Winston Waterston is the name of a character I’ve played in LARPs and at the NY Ren Faire.)

None of them emerged from the background in any significant way. There was no need. For one thing, I was already there as Tavelle.

One thing that both Real Angela I observed: The three tall female hirelings that I employ in my playthroughs have voices that are not very distinctive. The voice actors do their jobs, but there’s nothing about their performances that stands out. The three tall male hirelings, as shown by William, Winston, and Waterston, have very distinctive voices that fit their visual appearance.

To be fair to the actors and directors associated with the game, there are 12 hirelings that needed to be voiced. I constantly pick the same three tall females for my sexist male gaze. Perhaps if I listened to other hirelings, I would be surprised at the vocal talent.

Relationships

If discussing BG3 relationships seems confusing to you, recall that the game has been described as a dating sim with a lot of sidequests.

Of course you can play the game without having your character making a physical or emotional connection with one of the non-player characters (NPCs). But what fun is that?

In playthrough 1/14, Real Angela’s character Fey had romantic relationships with Karlach and Halsin, made possible because Halsin is polyamorous and Karlach accepted it.

After that experience, Real Angela naturally became curious about what it was like to romance the other characters. I myself had been after my first playthrough. If you’ve kept up with my BG3 series, you know that I found out over the course of twelve playthroughs.

Real Angela did not want to wait that long. She installed the PolyamoryFixes mod in order to potentially romance many of the characters at once in a single playthrough. But there was someone who interfered with that plan, namely me.

I’ll get into this when I discuss our difficulty with mods below. Basically Real Angela had to turn PolyamoryFixes off-and-on in order for me to play with her. This made the characters’ relationship states uncertain within the program’s database.

After her disappointment with Astarion in playthrough 1/14, Real Angela decided to directly pursue a relationship with him in 2/14.5. She’d read about Astarion’s popularity on the web and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Her perspective on the character changed considerably once she saw how his attitude evolved as his approval of her increased.

Part-way through the relationship, Real Angela made Raelia respond to remarks by Astarion to cause him to “friend-zone” her. There were still kissing sequences,though. At the end of the game, his attitude towards her was “generic” with no hint of their earlier romance.

That was certainly not my experience with Astarion in my playthrough 9. But I had my avatar Laurelin go along a very different path with him. Perhaps Real Angela will follow that same path in a future playthrough.

Or perhaps not. There’s a difference in how Real Angela and I approach the game. I have some minor background in assuming alternate roles that aren’t me, from LARPs and tabletop RPGs and working at the Ren Faire. I can “play Evil” or “play Wicked” or “play clueless”. Real Angela prefers to play variations of herself. It’s not as easy for her to play the “bad guy” as it is for me. Perhaps, one day, she’ll change her mind.

For now, she’ll play as she plays.

As in playthrough 1/14, Real Angela had her character form a relationship with Halsin. In a game without PolyamoryFixes, a player’s character can be romantically involved with him and with Astarion, Shadowheart, or Karlach; the other characters will reject the idea. Raelia could have had both Astarion and Halsin without the mod.

Due to circumstances with PolyamoryFixes and making the right dialog choices, Raelia also found herself in a relationship with Wyll.

I knew from my playthrough 10 that a Wyll connection was Capital-R Romantic, though not necessarily sexy. Real Angela found the same to be true for her. By the end of the game, she essentially found herself in deep relationship discussions with all three: Astarion, Halsin, and Wyll.

As for my character, Tavelle, I didn’t anticipate she’d find a relationship with anyone. I thought that with only my occasional presence, Raelia’s high approval rating among all the companions, and the PolyamoryFixes would lock Tavelle out of any romance scenes.

I was wrong.

Even though Gale’s approval rating of Raelia was higher than his approval of Tavelle, somehow Tavelle chose the right responses in his dialogs. She and Gale became an item.

Real Angela had no problem with this. She isn’t impressed with Gale as a character. If you’ll recall the 1/14 write-up, she doesn’t like it when characters keep important secrets from her; Astarion, Gale, and Shadowheart definitely fall into that category at the start of the game. Besides, she has specific plans with her Gale romance (the same as I had in my playthrough 7) that didn’t fit here.

What this taught me is that I’d never again play a Dragonborn character and have that character romance anyone else. The physical sequences were just strange.

It’s not that I object to the beauty of the love between a hairless ape and a giant lizard. It’s that I don’t think that kissing is the way it would be expressed.

In the end, the relationship progressed to its ultimate climax (pun intended). It’s more than I might have expected under the circumstances.

An overall comment: PolyamoryFixes may seem like a nice idea. However, the game’s dialogs are not designed for it. The mod just flips some state bits around. This means that some of the things the characters say don’t make sense in context of what the player has experienced.

That’s why I’d never use PolyamoryFixes myself. I have no problems with poly; in fact I identify as polyamorous. But I prefer to see a coherent game story, Jank Halversen’s initial goals notwithstanding.

Mods

In playthrough 1/14, we didn’t use mods. I wanted Real Angela to experience the “vanilla” game before she went on to modify it. We made one exception, and that proved to be problematic.

For her second playthrough, Real Angela decided she wanted to use quite a few mods. I didn’t make an exact count, but I think it was over a couple of dozen.

Real Angela knew that for her second playthrough she wanted to invite me once in a while. She was kind enough to restrict herself to using mods that were Mac/console compatible. We went over the available mods together. I shared with her the mods I’d grown fond of, and she chose to incorporate many of them.

She went further than I do with mods. Roughly speaking, the categories of mods she chose for playthrough 2/14.5 were:

• Mods that simplified the game. For example:

  • Weightless Consumables so she wouldn’t have to worry about that aspect of inventory management.
  • Infinite Elixirs so she wouldn’t have to worry about stocking piles of Elixirs of Hill Giant Strength and the like.
  • Spell Enhanced – Guidance, which takes the Guidance cantrip, removes the Concentration requirement, and applies it to all allies within a 9-meter radius.

• Mods that modify the game’s visuals for more variety. Among those were:

  • FearTaylor’s Camp Clothes to add more clothing options for characters as they adventured.
  • FaerunColors for many additional dye colors; it turns out that Real Angela enjoys playing Barbie dress-up with her characters as much as I do.

• Mods that affected the way the game is played.

  • I’ve already mentioned PolyarmoryFixes.
  • UnlockLevelCurve, which allows characters to go above the game’s limit of Level 12 up to Level 20.
  • DoubleXP so the characters can actually reach Level 20 before the end of the game.
  • Adjustable Party Limit to allow more than four characters in a party. This made it much easier for me to visit occasionally. Real Angela found that she liked a six-character party; more than that and they became difficult to manage. Her primary motive for having extra characters was to listen to their banter; I’d had the same goal in my playthrough 12.
  • The above three mods made the game seem too easy for Real Angela’s taste. So she added the Extra Encounters and Minibosses mod. These don’t add to the game’s story in any appreciable way, but they add more variety to the gameplay. I’d like to try this mod someday, but as we’ll see in a bit, I couldn’t in this playthrough.

Taken as a whole, I found that Real Angela had used far more mods than I would have chosen. I had to remind myself (again!) that these were Real Angela’s playthroughs, not mine. It was all about her enjoying the game.

However, as I reported before, there were problems when I joined the game.

For one thing, if I played in another BG3 playthrough, I had to adjust my list of active mods to match Real Angela’s list:

We also discovered that there was a version mis-match between some of the mods on the PC versus the same mods on Mac/console.

Real Angela was a good sport about this. Once we identified the problem, when I joined playthrough 2/14.5 she’d turn off the incompatible mods.

It still left us with problems. Once you incorporate a mod into a BG3 playthrough, it leaves signatures in the game’s save file. The game may not be able to correctly handle the data for a mod that’s no longer enabled. For example, Real Angela had to turn off FearTaylors Camp Clothes, which meant that when she restarted the game without that mod, all her characters would be naked.

That’s amusing, but not all the problems were as easy to overlook or overcome.

We reached the end of the game together. However, it was sometimes a rocky road.

What’s next?

As I said in the playthrough 1/14 write-up, there’s a reality when incorporating mods into a cross-play playthrough:

According to Larian, and our own experience bears this out, in a cross-platform multiplayer BG3 game, if the host is to use any mods at all, the console player should be the host. If there is no console player, the Mac player should host.

Larian is good at verifying that no single mod available on their servers will crash the game. However, they don’t make sure that mod versions are synchronized between platforms; it’s the mod authors who do that.

Also, they can’t validate what happens when different mods are mixed together. And even with individual mods, there are no guarantees. Larian just runs the mod and sees that the game doesn’t immediately crash. They don’t do quality-assurance testing on them.

The bottom line: When you use mods, with or without crossplay, expect problems.

We experienced more problems than the ones I’ve described. Based on those, it’s clear: playthrough 2/14.5 was the last one in which Real Angela and I will play together, for which Real Angela is the host and she chooses to use any mods at all.

It’s not as if we won’t ever play together again. I’m the host for playthrough 8’/2.5, which doesn’t use any mods. Real Angela has joined me for that. As I said, I may write that one up after we complete it.

Real Angela has moved on to her playthrough 3. She’s playing Oleandra, the Dark Urge. In my view she’s hardly murdered at all; what kind of Dark Urge is that? But she’ll learn eventually, I’m sure.

Apart from that, and while I’m waiting for Sabrina to have time for playthrough 1/15 or 1/16, I’ve dabbled in other games: Expedition 33 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (both of which were disappointments) and No Man’s Sky. I may write a mini-review of that one.

And so…