the first thing you do in Baldur’s Gate 3 is make an Action Figure. there are a host of stock body options you can choose from the card shop shelf, the infinite freedom of teenage creativity turned into black card stock and clam shell packaging on slates of wood with merchandising hooks down every aisle. occasionally they say things like Wood Elf Ranger or Halfling Rogue Hybrid or Mindflayer Sorceror these are all words that in some way mean something to the people that buy them but all of my previous attempts to buy into the merchandising and marketing of Wizards of The Coast have been met with cobwebs andd forgotten plastic miniatures. my friend Steve could just 3D print whatever fucking character he wanted. anyway your options for Baldur’s Gate 3 are Would You Like To Be One of the Good Ones or I’m Sorry, Segregation

theres the complicity of the game designers in exactly why they decided to make sure some of the races of the world are still Evil For Evil’s Sake, because they hate all of the good things the good and fair white-skinned or normal looking and presenting people of the world do. very little of my Baldur’s Gate 3 experience has been interested in looking into those reasons or questions. I am more interested in looking at who the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 think I am in this world of plasticine women-figures and short hunk men with impressively chiseled jaw lines. this is the most handsome fantasy world ever depicted in fiction. I am not going to say the words, because lots of the people in this fantasy world are both beautiful and Primed To Fuck. who does Baldur’s Gate 3 think I am? there is a non zero chance i’m a skinny middle-class white woman who’s last dungeon’s and dragons table with their husband didn’t end in sadomasochism or vore, so my best fantasy is fucking a guy who’s mouth fetish means he can’t get it up unless he fucking bites me. astarion will tell you it’s going to be one way, and then he’s on top of you in the middle of the night. I said non zero. there’s a chance I am a 6’3” green half-drow half-orc who loves the taste of blood second to the way she loves the smell of other women after they get that blood on her.

who am I baldur’s gate 3? with this endless parade of hunks, twinks, rude-girls and doe eyed cultists who begin and end every night with a rigorous facial programme. there is no space for me to be ugly or weird or misshapen, I need to be handsome I need to be hot and most of all I need to be ready to fuck or kill at a moments notice. that’s really what we’re getting at when we talk about what it means to be an adventurer in one of these broadly colonialist fantasies where everything is solved at the tip of a sword except for statecraft, politics, the shape of the world or anything we want to change. there’s scarce room for changing the world, but lots of room for saving it. exactly as it is, forever. save-scumming is built right into the fabric of faerun. if I fuck up or die I roll back to the last save. whenever I am done with faerun it is still faerun for all of the R.A. Salvatore’s of the world to fuck around in. their tools, my playset, just as cardboard backedd and clam-shelled as it needs to be for the price tag.

so what? fuck it all, the druids at the beginning of the game called me made up racial slurs in what I can only fucking imagine as a writers room I would drag the corpse of gary gygax out of whatever unfortunate pine box is currently wrapping him up nestled in the gentle soil of the earth and turn whatever’s left of it into a jackson pollock on the inside of whoever’s house created the rpg.net forums. just to see what that writer roundtable was like. someone swivels in an office depot chair and throws a piece of paper at a board with fast-food franchise sounding names for the word Drow to an audience that is completely silent.

anyway, here’s the real fantasy of Dungeon’s And Dragon’s: it’s the fantasy of being hot. so much of tabletop discourse might be curtailed if we just admit that half the players want to fuck a woman with a sword and fake tits, and half of the players want to be her with no room for the first half. am I rolling persuasion or am I rolling am I hot / sweaty enough to convince someone else to back off? am I rolling charistmatic or violent enough to pull this off. an animation that i can only describe as the fantasy of a person who has a D20 on their sweater imagines before important life decisions plays. a mechanical gesture emboldened by thirty years of shorthand jokes about tabletop roleplaying that plays every time i have to do anything. the conversation afterwards is always the most interesting part, but here the DM is only interested in telling the story of the grub in my head.

lae’zel, the Githyanki (slightly more fucked up elf) woman tells me the way I smell makes her want to kill someone over how horny she is. I go half brain dead trying to figure out how the fuck you respond to something like that in the middle of a dungeon, and am hit with Conversational Joss Whedon Quips like we have to teams of writers coming at eachothers throats. I am back at a dungeons and dragon’s table, and the fantasy the non-interested and monotone feminine sounding dungeon master has planned for me is still one where I get laughed at for getting too involved in the fiction.

who am, Baldur’s Gate 3? what do I want from the epic fantasy world you have laid out before me? the game curtails neatly before my player can reach over level 12, the part of the game where the setting becomes sandbox on every forgotten realm’s table I played in middle and highschool. we cannot touch the hallowed tapestry where wizard names are carved in stone without walking away with something a little too personal, and I might be standing around a campfire surrounded by men who don’t wear underwear and women who only wear hand-made leather lingerie under the stink and sweat of the battlefield, where emotions get poured and and fucking is a promise that happens under the blade of a knife with a weirdo’s grace, but I shouldn’t take any of it too seriously. it’s just Epic fantasy.

Baldur’s Gate I already killed a woman so I could look better in her underwear, I read between the lines and saw the clumsy way racism was not only codified into the seams of the world but told to me, the player, hoping I would elucidate that yes all of the drow and goblins and races that don’t have half-human in them are indescribably evil in ways that can’t be reconciled with the rest of the world but if someone’s using slurs it’s a them thing, and not an us thing. in every cutscene my character looks frightened or uninterested, a blank slate I want to fill with bared teeth and blood, always getting a slapped wrist that I shouldn’t be taking any of this so seriously. i can see a fire in her eyes that runs with blood and sweat and the buried knives of the party around me, the most interesting parts of the world kept for another table somewhere. don’t ask too many questions and just like what the camera shows you, it’ll all work out in one save file or another.