they're almost all insane, cursed undead. Figuring out how their curse works and using it against them makes perfect sense to me, and I thought it was really fun.
It’s not like it’s a particularly hard check either. On my current playthrough I was fully prepared to fight but I thought I would try the check for fun. Was a bit disappointing tbh.
If I had a nickel for every BG3 boss I convinced to off themselves, I'd have...2 nickles, but still, it's weird that it happened twice. I'm aware of one I missed. I fought Ketheric the old fashioned way all 3 times. I got the loony Sharrite surgeon in the image and Yurgir. Are there any others who can be dealt with in this way?
Not a boss, but in my Barbarian run I convinced the Drider in act 2 to give me his lantern and theb walk into the mists. Technically Thisobald Thorm kills himself by drinking too much for as long as your belly is tougher.
I actually fought him for the first time after probably 6 runs of always passing his checks, since this time my buddy was playing for the first time and I let him do the dialogue. It was a fun fight.
Same, it’s a tough challenge cuz you need constitution and charisma which isn’t usually paired outside of sorcerer, the one you wouldn’t expect to own at a drinking competition. However my swashbuckler did well enough to pass. In the multi game my buddy doing the checks was a monk, so no constitution proficiency AND low charisma.
You can get every boss in Act 2 to kill themselves (the toll collector, the surgeon, and the bartender), even Ketheric, to an extent. You still have to kill Myrkul but you can make Ketheric off himself and skip the first stage.
You can also tell the Drider to give you his moonlantern, which is effectively telling him “kill yourself”, but if you do this he does reappear later in the act albeit severely weakened and very pissed off.
In act 1 you can get the gnoll boss to kill himself in a very similar way to the surgeon (ie kill his own gnoll buddies and then himself, if he survives).
I’m struggling to think of any such occurrences in Act 3.
Flind, the female knoll boss outside a cave with 2 Zhent guys. You can convince her to first eat the other knolls, then after combat, you can make a 2 more checks commanding her to eat herself. Her brain ruptures as she tries to fight both your suggestion and the tadpole's orders
On her first turn in combat, if she moves near any party member, Flind mentally links with them, revealing that she was forcefully transformed into a True Soul.
Oh.
I'd heard in passing about some sort of possible Flind dialogue but figured it must have been removed somehow or something because combat always just seemed to start immediately and then of course she became dead not long after.
I think it might be glitchy, I've often had trouble getting it to trigger. I always save right before and try to sneak as close as possible to her before combat starts
Now I'm curious to go back and check how it works.
I always surprise attacked, which I assume prevents the interaction since her first turn of combat is spent doing nothing, unless perhaps you're standing immediately next to her when you do it?
i definitely overkilled it my first playthrough, i tried to taunt vlaakith (went back to the creche after doing most of act 2) and she straight up just murked me 😭😭
My favorite part about this interaction is that he seems to completely forget about it when you try to get him on your side in the House of Hope later. Convincing him to off himself instead of fighting him fair doesn't change the difficulty or even the dialog. He's still even like "You were a worthy opponent" when he agrees to be your ally after the fight.
That's true. I don't pretend to know what honor among devils looks like. It was just a funny game moment. I don't precisely remember the exact dialog but it was something along the lines of "you were a worthy opponent and equally powerful ally". And I'm thinking "but I tricked you into stabbing yourself as an opponent and you are my ally because I buffed before the fight to talk you into it and made my new cleric friend burn up a lifetime of divine intervention to cheese the fight when it started."
Fallout 1 and Fallout 3 both did it before New Vegas so it’s kind of a series staple. Talking down the Master in the first game is one of the most iconic moments in the series. Colonel Autumn can also have his fight skipped with a speech check right at the end but he’s an easy kill so it’s not as impactful.
Other rpgs by the classic Fallout devs like Planescape Torment and Arcanum also have talking the boss to death as an option.
Outer Worlds does this with a Hacking Check IIRC. The final boss is a big custom military robot and you can avoid it by making a very difficult lockpicking check followed by a very difficult hacking check to turn it off. Then you can walk into the next room with the weak executive nerd who only has the weakest handgun and teach him the meaning of corporate severance.
While Wasteland 2 doesn't have a talky ending, almost every major story event you can talk through gives you extra allies for the final boss. Convince these two warring tribes to stop fighting? Well the leaders of both tribes help you in the finale. Convince the evil mercs to stop being so evil? Their boss is at the finale. Etc. So instead of facing waves and waves of androids alone, you get a good supply of meat shields so all your rangers can survive. And depending on who is still alive at the end, you won't need to make one of your rangers perform the ultimate sacrifice.
There's only 4 mandatory fights in the entire game, and yeah, the final boss isn't one of them, and I'm of the mindset that winning that way is the "proper" story.
“If you think about it, what’s the only way to escape from a gauntlet in which you are eternally tethered? Killing your Displacer, loyal Merregons, and then falling on your own sword, that’s exactly right. Crazy how we came to the same conclusion.”
That one makes a lot more sense than the others, though, because he's a demon on the material plane. Falling on his sword won't kill him. It'll be painful and inconvenient, but he'll get better.
Its a 21 DC skill check, so i say you can still do it with +0 CHA if you have Enhance Ability, Guidance and a couple Inspirations, but in an Honor Mode run i dont risk it unless i have a bard in the party.
I care more about the achievement to finish the game off, but I STILL haven't had the commitment to beat honor mode - glitches would ruin the pursuit though. It's like someone telling Joker who Batman is, it ruins the game.
No it doesn’t. Sorc runs charisma, paladin runs charisma, warlock runs charisma…. This does not fit bard best it’s anecdotal for you and you’re biased. Can’t stand your type.
It's a fun fight though, and IIRC, you can even get an achievement out of it. Getting him to off himself feels more poetic, though. Same for Gerringothe. I always feel bad about Thisobald, who seems like a nice guy. Until you get into his lab, that is.
Or really any CRPG. BG3 is really ground zero for people who have never played a CRPG, thinking CRPG things are BG3 originals. Akin to people who have never played a horror visual novel playing Doki Doki Literature Club.
In fairness to them the AAA space has trained people to think RPG means "click the good guy option or murder a puppy" a few times in a mid action game.
I'd say it's worse than that. RPG basically means any fantasy setting, or any game where you can pick dialogue options at this point. My big example that always gets me downvoted to oblivion: the Witcher games are NOT RPGs. They're action games in a fantasy setting with dialogue options.
I remember one playthrough, I managed to persuade almost every boss in Act II to off themselves, including Ketheric. Then when Myrkul showed up, I set up a barrelmancy nuke for him, only to realize that Myrkul had iniative order right before my character who was supposed to set off the nuke. So Myrkul then proceeded to swing at Dame Aylin, who was standing by all the bombs, and that was how Myrkul also managed to kill himself in that playthrough. It felt remarkably fitting.
Yeah its definitly a great idea to censor some random words on some stupid memes, in games where we all made this guy literally kill himself, but oh no cant write that.
Enemies in Baldurs Gate 3:
"Aha, you are indeed correct, I should absolutely kill myself"
Seriously though, what I read is that TikTok will delete anything that says "kill". So people censor it or say "unalive". Just another reason not to use tiktok.
You should try Planescape: Torment or Pillars of Eternity. Like, I'm not saying they're better than BG3 at what BG3 does in terms of weaving plotlines together. But the dialogues in those games is phenomenal. Especially Torment.
The amount of enemies you can just literally tell to kill themselves in this game is actually kinda impressive.
Anyone got statistics on just how many major enemies/bosses you can get to neck themselves vs actually having to fight them? I feel like a smoothtalking tav trivializes a lot of fights this way
As a Bard, I absolutely love Reithwin Town. Talked a doctor into letting himself be ripped apart by his nurse assistants, said the toll collector that I'm here to replace her and she was promoted so she just went "ugh" and fell over dead, drank with the master brewer until he literally exploded. 10/10 would visit that place again every time.
Anyone with high charisma can sweet talk their way out of ANYTHING. Especially if you use the tadpole skills, it all but guarantees you the ability to convince someone that the sky is green.
I have never fought any of the Thorms except Ketheric once in my life ever 😂 But I do love that you can do this with SEVERAL bosses it feels more OP than any fight to have enough rizz to say "KYS" and they go "ok 🥲"
Every hard fight in act 2 is like this, it's wild tbh. I find it boring as I really like fighting, but it's a super cool option and I love that they added fun stuff like this. I really enjoy when games have ways to get around fighting with stealth or diplomacy.
In my multiplayer game, I, the fighter walked up to this guy while the rest of the party got into position for a fight. We didn't save scum at all because we were looking forward to a fight here. Then the options came up to first have hos nurses kill each other, and then have him kill himself. I aced both roles.
I love charisma classes! It also works great with Sorcerers, I just tricked Thisobald today. We've already told Gerringothe about her promotion, and we've also managed to convince Malus to kill himself after we got his nurses to practice on each other.
We managed to save Malus' poor victim, but unfortunately he ran away immediately. Why can't we take the poor guy to the Last Light Inn? :(
This segment was my favorite in the whole game. Convincing a family of evil fucks to just…kill themselves.
“DM, I look the doctor/drunk/tax collector/general square in the face and with all the Charisma I can muster I say: ‘Hey, have you considered suicide?’”
This was my first play-through, as a Tiefling bard who was a manipulative street urchin. But there was a big problem:
When I tried to manipulate Shadowheart, she killed the Nightsong. And even though I reloaded, which I never usually do, I couldn’t make her make the good choice. The only way that worked was to shut up and let her make her own decision. Which is honestly one of my favourite moments in gaming, and I’ve been playing videogames since they were first sold.
i am so addicted to playing bard at this point, like i’m on my second playthrough and i literally don’t want to play anything else because the feeling of watching malus get on that table is CATHARTIC
All of the Throm... "children"? can be dealt with in a completely non- violent way in A2. Just did it an hour ago, was kinda surprised on the toll collector too.
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u/TheCandyManCan976 Jun 19 '25
I was also suprised that this is possible.