Bear necessities.
Dungeons & Dragons is rife with horrors—shapeshifting doppelgangers, mind flayers, Shadowheart’s sub-optimised starting ability scores, the list goes on. You’d think, at this point, that any denizen of the Sword Coast would be used to them. As it stands, however, NPCs in Baldur’s Gate 3 can be startled by something as pedestrian as a ranger’s bear.
For those pet-free adventurers who are unaware, having any kind of summon out—a ranger pet, a conjured elemental, a zombie, even a druid wildshape—can cause NPCs to lose all sense of composure and self-preservation. In a recent Reddit thread, user Dadecum even had a key quest NPC bolt into an unsafe area of Act 2 and die.
I’m currently in Act 3 myself, and I can’t even fathom the mayhem that’d ensue on the streets of Baldur’s Gate were I playing a necromancer or conjuration wizard. Luckily, modders are already on the case—a mod created by Nexus user pwybman removes this unintentional game of lemmings from an otherwise stellar RPG.
“After hours of poring over data files,” pwybman writes, “I finally figured out what was causing NPCs to run from animal companions and wild shaped druids. Turns out it was completely intentional behaviour, but it just makes for annoying gameplay.”
The mod does come with one caveat—NPCs will sometimes stand and sit down rapidly, thanks to how the fear response is programmed: “this mod works by changing the NPC response to summons from ‘run for your life’ or ‘follow around suspiciously’ to ‘do nothing’ … however, the ‘do nothing’ response seems to make NPCs revert to their default ‘doing nothing’ state, rather than actually being unaffected.”
Turns out, sitting is “doing something”, occasionally locking NPCs into a game of musical chairs until you move your summon elsewhere. Still, this is a low price to pay to avoid your favourite NPCs scaring themselves to death.
The mod comes with two variants. One keeps NPC’s reactions and comments, so they’re not entirely nonplussed by your magic zoo, while the other has them not respond at all, keeping their heads down and carrying on with their day. If you’ve lived in a major city like London or New York, you’ll know that this is a pretty realistic response for the masses of Baldur’s Gate—they probably see necromancers and magic bears all the time.
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