My honour mode playthrough continues to crawl through act one at a snail’s pace, but players and speedrunners who’ve repeatedly sprinted through the mahoosive RPG are still finding new ways to replay Baldur’s Gate 3. You may have seen the sex% speedrun category, but have you seen the BG3 body count run? And no, before you ask, it’s not that kind of body count.
Streamer and speedrunner delphara (who currently holds the #3 record for a BG3 sex% run) did the hard work of going through Baldur’s Gate 3 to figure out just how many people you can have sex with in a single playthrough. Bad news for Gale and Wyll enjoyers, as both boys are slow to romance and monogamous, making them bad picks for delphara’s randy run.
Instead, polyamorous companions like Halsin and characters who will jump in the sack in act one or two are preferred, which still leaves quite a few romance options on the table (or the bench or bedroll or whatever surface is available and not currently on fire).
It seems like the maximum possible body count is 12, if you count “experiencing rapture” with Naoise the wood elf courtesan you meet in the Nymph’s Grotto room of Sharess’ Caress. Doing so nets you a +1d6 bonus to d20 rolls until the next long rest, which sure sounds like sex to me.
Not everyone is into the horniness of Baldur’s Gate 3—our own Robin Valentine called it “a bit much”—but I’d argue it’s a natural evolution for the series. One of the first western RPGs to feature rudimentary romance options was a Forgotten Realms game called Treasures of the Savage Frontier released in 1992, and Baldur’s Gate 2 was the first BioWare game to let you date companions, which became a trademark part of the studio’s subsequent RPGs. This setting and this series were both early adopters of romance in RPGs, and Baldur’s Gate 3 pushing at the boundary of acceptability is simply continuing that good work.