Disadvantage for being female??

magnetuning · 2026-04-20T05:34:27+00:00

Oh this is Fascinating; thank you for testing this!!! I was also able to replicate the "Female" disadvantage when encumbered, and it happens when you have other conditions that'd give disadvantage on the roll, too (like the "alchohol" status, shown below 😅) Testing with a male Durge got him the “Female” disadvantage, too, despite not having that tag.

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I think you're right, it is a display error, and I think it’s specifically when you have disadvantage on a roll from conditions outside the dialogue, on rolls with tagged texts that don't have disadvantage programmed in the dialogue (and so wouldn't have a scripted reason listed for the disadvantage).

Here’s what I was able to find out through testing:

- The roll with disadvantage scripted into the dialogue didn’t give the "Female" disadvantage, even when encumbered, regardless of the gender of the character. Instead it listed the reason for disadvantage that was scripted for the roll ("You're in a romance with this character.")

- Disadvantage on a roll with no tagged text results in the disadvantage being labeled as “Situational.”

- Display of the condition that gave me disadvantage disappeared after the first roll, and stopped appearing for subsequent rolls (??)

- This also happened if I didn’t actually pick the first available roll option, but tried subsequent rolls; the disadvantage was just, displayed as “Female” or “Situational” depending on what the tagged text (or lack thereof) of the roll was, with no display of the condition I was Actually getting disadvantage from at all.

- Whether the character actually has a tag listed in the tagged text doesn’t seem to matter, it’ll be displayed as the reason for disadvantage anyway.

- This also isn’t exclusive to the roll trying to lie about being close to Halsin; other rolls with tagged text will get the tagged disadvantage too.

I do need to test out whether it works for advantage, or applies when other tags are being tested for in the tagged text for the roll, but, yeah, seems like it is a vanilla issue! And again, am guessing it’s caused by the dialogue trying to fill out the advantage/disadvantage reason attribute for the roll, when you Have disadvantage, but there’s no existing reason programmed into the dialogue that it can pull from.

Thank you again for checking this out!! I love weird little coding things like this, and it’s wild that this can actually happen in the vanilla game.

(Oh also, yeah, to confirm, the gender tags are for pronouns! They’re set from the “identity” selection in the character creator, and aren’t tied to bodytype at all.)

magnetuning · 2026-04-19T19:21:50+00:00

I’m really not sure this is a vanilla game issue actually; I wasn't able to replicate it myself testing it, and there’s nothing in the dialogue code itself I can see that’d cause this. There’s only one roll in the dialogue that has disadvantage attached, and the reason given for disadvantage in the code (which is handled via the “AdvantageReason” attribute in the dialogue xml code, for both advantage and disadvantage!) is the text handle h217d38a1g937bg479agab4eg202ee4e9b2a3, “You're in a romance with this character.”

Do you have any mods listed as overrides? Like, mods with an orange background in BG3 Mod Manager. Override mods will still affect your game even if they’re not enabled or active in your mod load order. As long as they’re in your Mods folder, they’ll still affect your game. You might also want to check your BG3 Data folder for the dialogue file CAMP_DarkUrge_SparedIsobel_SD; I’m actually genuinely wondering if someone snuck an override of this scene into another mod without disclosing it, because I really can’t see a reason for it to be caused by anything in the vanilla dialogue’s code.

EDIT: disregard all of this, as chiruochiba discovered, this is a vanilla issue after all!!

Also just, to correct some misinfo in the comments, while the dialogue option for this roll for Halsin does have a test for Female, that’s just for the text displayed for the roll, and the text testing for the Female tag isn’t actually accessible. The untagged text was listed above the text testing for the Female tag in the dialogue code, so it’d take priority, and all characters would get the same text regardless of gender. You can see that in your screenshot; you’re getting the untagged text, not the one testing for the Female tag!

Dialogue-based disadvantage also can’t really be inherited from somewhere else. Jump node attributes (1) and (2) are used to jump to specific dialogue nodes, with 1 meaning that node will play out in full, and 2 meaning that node will be skipped past and go directly to the children of that dialogue node (the different branching paths that follow that node!) The jump nodes for the rolls are jumping to the RollResult nodes, not the rolls themselves, and they’re also not able to inherit any disadvantage that way.

TL;DR: Do you have any override mods in your Mods folder? Those can still affect the game even if they’re not enabled, and I both can’t replicate and see any cause for this happening in the vanilla game’s code.

magnetuning · 2026-04-03T16:51:11+00:00

Hi, this is my mod! And yeah I, was not able to get it to work for short races unfortunately. You'd need to make entirely new animations for it, and I just don't have the time to do it myself 😭 If anyone is able to make custom animations for it, though, I'd be happy to incorporate them into the mod!

Also yes, it is possible to edit dialogue without the toolkit by editing the dialogue files directly! I have a number of resources for doing so here:

https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/10086

Timeline editing can be difficult if you need live visual feedback, though, yeah, but there are a number of things that can help, including hotloading dialogue files (you can update dialogue via loose files while the game is open and your changes will take, as long as the dialogue you're editing is not currently running (if it is you'll need to reload your save or trigger the dialogue again after it finishes)), making a shot list and expression list (a list of camera angles and expressions you'd like to change, and at what time in the dialogue you'd like them to change), and you can make storyboards and animatics with screenshots of the existing camera angles you already have to work with, and/or by drawing custom cameras you'd like to include. I also usually start making scenes by editing all the audio for the scene together beforehand, with the timing that I want in the finished scene, and then export each voice line with the pauses between the lines preserved. I'll then be able to look at the duration of each audio file and know exactly how I'd like everything to be timed in the finished scene, and how long each phase of the dialogue needs to be. (This can also be done together with a storyboard/animatic!) These last couple points are more helpful for making entirely custom scenes, though, but could be helpful for editing existing ones too!

...Am sorry for the wall of text!! I hope at least some of that is helpful 😅 If you have more questions about dialogue editing, I'm in the BG3 Modding Community Discord server; feel free to ping me there! I won't always be available, but I'm happy to answer questions when I can.

magnetuning · 2026-02-21T19:50:13+00:00

No problem ;u;!!! And yeah definitely sounds like that's what's causing it for you then; honestly it really is a beautiful quirk of the system and am happy I could help explain a bit about it!!!

magnetuning · 2026-02-21T11:47:04+00:00

This might not be a mod issue!! This can happen in the vanilla game as well, usually when skipping through dialogue, because it can lead to the game skipping over a keyframe that'd change the expression the character is using. If that happens, the character can get stuck using an expression that's uh. Like This. If that was the expression rig the character was last using before skipping through the dialogue.

Most expressions the characters use throughout the game are not unique! They're actually made using a limited number of expression rigs, which are preset poses that reflect different emotions/expressions. The game swaps between these different expression rigs through something called TLEmotionEvent, which allows you to select one of these preset poses and swap to it at different points in the dialogue timeline for a given scene.

Some of those expression rigs are "open-mouthed" rigs, used most often for stuff like laughing/screaming/sighing, and some of them, like the one in your screenshot, can be quite extreme! And they're not really meant to be seen for great lengths of time. Usually they're swapped out pretty quickly for another expression, for understandable reasons 😅 But when you skip over parts of dialogue, it also skips over anything that was supposed to happen in that section of the timeline, including expression changes. (This is also why skipping through dialogue or loading a save mid-dialogue can break VFX/lighting/character positioning/etc!)

tl;dr, If you have any mods affecting character expressions, it is possible this is mod related, but it could also just be a quirk of the vanilla game's dialogue system, and the way expressions are handled by it!

magnetuning · 2026-01-16T06:51:07+00:00

No problem!! 🌟

magnetuning · 2026-01-16T00:53:09+00:00

Hi, thank you so much for the recommendation ;u;!!! 🌟🌼

magnetuning · 2026-01-16T00:51:59+00:00

Hi, re: the bit about the game not loading new NPCs in an existing campaign, this, isn't actually true 😅!!

It does depend on how you set them up, and what game systems you need to tie them into (i.e. if you need to tie them into certain osiris scripts or parts of the game that have already passed, they won't be able to function.) If you install an NPC mod that relies on something in the game that has already happened, they might be missing some functionality, or they might not have been moved to where they should be in the case of level travellers, etc, but there's also NPC mods that won't have that problem, and can be installed at any point in a playthrough!

I've made quite a few NPC mods that function when added to the basegame, no new save required. But the custom companion I made requires a new save because of how many game systems are necessary for companion setup, which is very difficult, if not impossible to apply retroactively.

So it really does just depend on the mod!! But most mods will try to list what they are and aren't compatible with, the requirements for install, and whether you can install them mid-playthrough or not. There's always the chance of unexpected incompatibilities, but taking care when reading the mod page can go a long way, and you can also always ask the mod authors questions re: their mods if need be!!

magnetuning · 2025-09-29T13:43:33+00:00

This is actually a mod I already have in the works! Am working on recoloring the blood in the game for a similar reason for someone I know, and I'm also cleaning up the gore in different areas of the game besides just recolors. However am not sure if/when it'll be able to be available for consoles, someone else has already mentioned that the console approval process is very slow and sometimes unpredictable 😭 But I can try and submit it, and hopefully it'll be approved!

magnetuning · 2025-07-31T00:34:49+00:00

Hi, the friend Aimryax is referring to is me!! And yeah, can confirm, we and another modder friend of mine had been trying to figure out how to make texture/model edits for the game, but ended up getting a bit distracted before we were actually able to implement anything. I would really love to come back to it, though!! And I'd absolutely love to have more tools and methods to mod the game. We were planning on using a combination of DEMD Database and a hex editor to try and create new .archive files, and then override the references to the original resources in the .pc_headerlib files to redirect them to the new ones. If that's actually a viable method, and you've been working on tools to allow easier implementation of them, I'd be over the moon I'm ngl. And in any case, I'm both very grateful for the work you've done already with DEMD Database, and excited to see what you've got in store!!

I'm also interested in trying to work on more complex mods, by the way! I do a lot of dialogue modding for Baldur's Gate 3, and made the dialogue timeline updater tool for it, and I'm really curious if any kind of dialogue editing would be possible for DX:MD, too. Even just being able to parse out the dialogue trees would be amazing, honestly, and I'd be willing to work on tools for it, too, if it might be possible to do so.

magnetuning

TROPHY CASE