Fourth playthrough of BG3, and I'm finally starting to understand the rules:
It's designed after a D&D campaign, not a video game. It PLAYS like a video game, but the game is designed around "what if I did this?" and then having a full game follow-up to that choice, even if that choice is poking your nose in places. If you try to get everything, YOU WILL NOT HAVE FUN. It's a game, have fun. Whatever that means for you. You can save the helpless. You can rob the helpless. You can install the Polyamory mod and fuck everyone. Note: Even without it, there's a celebration that lets you stack multiple romantic encounters, and many of the companions are NOT averse to a Menage à trois. They are averse to a menage à trois, with THEM. THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID. Except Halsin, because everyone likes him.
None of the magic items are that good. This seems like a deliberate attempt by D&D to minimize the power of magic weapons, because magic weapons were a crucial part of power scaling. Even Legendary weapons are not that powerful. This is good in the sense that you don't need to constantly upgrade your weapons, but bad in the sense that it was one of the only ways to customize your character. The other, feats, were also fucked over. Don't worry about getting OP items. This is also an RPG, which means you can make it as hard as you want. Not with difficulty settings, but by simply doing harder battles without leveling up for them.
The game - heavily - wants you to think outside the box. Walking up to a powerful enemy is usually the absolute WORST answer. There is no penalty for assassinating everyone, unless you are a Paladin. That said, Paladins are specced to just walk up to the major battles, have a good chance of persuading their way through, and if not, are healing tanks.
When sneaking, if one character attacks, battle starts, with THEM AND ONLY THEM IN COMBAT. Everyone else is waiting around for their turn to jump in. This is really fucking annoying, as they don't join the turn-based schedule. This does, however, allow Astarion to stealth on the catwalk and snipe everyone. If your plan was to carefully enter combat, then you can do it. If your plan was to just spring an ambush and then fight, i.e. what happens in ACTUAL combat, then you are SOL. If you wanted to start the fight, then go to everyone else and have them join the fight. This also applies if they are slightly too far away. TL;DR when starting combat, check the timeline and make sure all of your characters are in combat. Because if not, one character will take all of the attacks. This does allow your rogues to sneak attack in combat, which no one has done since Fallout: Tactics.
Mods are your friend, and so is the Custom Campaign option. There's Balance, which is the way the game was - er - balanced. Then there is a campaign that makes battle easier, and a campaign that makes role playing easier. There are a lot of really annoying things whereby only a character with his Wis and his Cha can really play the game. Custom lets you pick how complex the enemies are, increase or decrease their stats, increase or decrease allied stats, pretty simple, standard stuff. But it also lets you pick exactly what bonus or penalty you get to RPG rolls. My personal favourite? Fixing the dogshit economy, whereby merchants sell you things at over 100% markup. Yes, that is normal for games, but it's still ridiculously stupid, especially considering you can't commission magic items, which would be the primary way you could make yourself too OP for the campaign. However, as I said, earlier, even legendary items won't make you OP, because of how the balance is skewed.
Most of your allies are - not - good. Karlach is good, but she was sold as a slave to literally fight in a war between Hell and the Abyss. Wyll WANTS to be a roving folk-hero, righting wrongs and saving people. The problem is that he made a deal with a devil, and didn't read the fine print. Lae'zel is Chaotic, literally worshipping the Dragon God of Chaos. Gale is a good person in temperament, but committed a sin of Olympian hubris that threatens to destroy reality. Shadowheart, which is largely hinted at by all of her spells being those of a thief or assassin, and, you know, her name, worships the Goddess of Darkness, Torture, Absence, and Whispers. Astarion was abused as a low-level vampire, and did horrible things, but... he fails "the true test of a man's character" test. Minthara is Lawful Evil, and the only reason she's on your side is a common enemy. Because of the California morality, they don't understand good and evil, and so many of her opinions are on - practical statecraft, rather than the insane urbanite hubris, which is represented by Baldur's Gate. To the point they will let disparate cults not just quarrel, but massacre each other in the streets. Anyway, the only thing that would make your party good is you, and if you are not, then they will carry you as they gleefully jump down the slippery slope.
If you want to keep your allies, it's a struggle. To the point that they will murder each other, (or you), if you don't persuade them to stop.
There are hirelings, literally called hirelings. They are strangely deep and shallow, and strangely variable and restricted at the same time. You can't create a hireling, but you can change everything other than their body type and base race. Which means you can change the voice, genitals, and pronouns of them, but not your bodytype. So, you can trans your hirelings. But not customize them. Unfortunately, they don't have basic dialogue, but have ridiculously complicated dialogue that is infinitely worse. It's interesting for the first 5 minutes. And then the rest of the playthrough is incredibly boring with them. 1 is fine. You can't even take Leadership and create a customizable Cohort.
Multiclassing is incredibly versatile, as the game puts no limits on it, (unless you turn it off in the Custom Campaign options). There's even a trophy for taking EVERY class in one playthrough, (the game caps at level 12).
There is a mod to increase scaling to level 20. Which I highly recommend.
Most of the cool, sexy clothing mods, only work on body type 1, i.e. default Medium female. The reason this is a problem is there is only two or three "armour" types for unarmoured characters, despite how many options they have for armourless AC. Three of my four main playable characters have been armourless tanks. I also hate most of the armour outfits, as you can't layer anything. So, you have like 2 choices for each armour level, (none/light/med/heavy), with the only reason difference between colours. Which you can dye. They don't even let you say wear a tabard over your armour, so you can change your armour, but still have the few only cool designs. Note: There is a mod that lets you select from pretty much every base-level armour for each armour level when creating a character, and I HIGHLY recommend it.
