Picture this: I am a Half-Orc Sorcerer, explorin🌸g the area around a Druid grove. I’ve conned my way into a mini stronghold and killed the mercenary that let me in before he could kill me. I decide to walk around 𒁃and see if there’s anything worth looting, because I could use the gold – I’m still early in Act 1, and buying better equipment means I need money and things to barter with. I walk over to a long dining table and see plenty of food and cutlery. Great, I could use the food for long rests.
Then I stop and think about the cutlery. It’s all silver plates… could be worth something. I pick it all up. Then I pick up every book in the room, then every item I can see. I can just sell it all later, so it’s fine. I pick up one last thing, a candle because that’s the kind of thing I need on my adventꩵure, and I get a notification: my sorcerer is over-encumbered. Shit. I pass it off to Karlach, and find that now she’s dragging her feet as she follows behind me. I pass it off to Lae’zel, and wouldn’t you guess it, it’s too heavy for her, too. I coveted everything, and now I have to pay the price. I start sending things to camp, knowing damn well I’ve already got too much in there that I likely will never interact with again. Why would I? There’s always more stuff to pick up.
In real life, I’m a bit of a minimalist. I don&rs💝quo;t really buy things, because I have a pervasive and serious anxiety about things I want being made unethically. I don’t decorate my living space, and all my walls are bare. I don’t like clutter on my shelves, so I don’t buy keepsakes or enjoy getting gifts that take up space. I don’t pick up cool roc🉐ks, I don’t put up the prints that I buy, and I don’t feel a need to have a lot of stuff.
That’s why it’s so weird to me that I simply cannot fight the compulsion to pick up every item in sight in Baldur’s Gꦚate 3. I’ve found myself looting every single enemy I kill and relishing the feeling of having 20 axes in my inventory. They’re all identical! I will sell them all for so much profit! Except I keep piling so many things into my character’s pockets that I have to then shunt them back into my camp chest.
This shouldn’t be a problem – after all, the ability to send heavy items to your chest is made precisely to stop being encumbered from being a huge problem. Butꦛ I’m abusing my powers. I’ve sent too much to my infinitely capacious camp chest. It’s full of stuff and I’m afraid to open it and see immense amounts of stuff I’ve taken on a whim. There are hundreds of items in there – selling it all would take me several trips from my camp to a trader, especially considering my inventory is already full of stuff I will probably, eventually sell when I get around to it. I don’t have the patience to deal with the consequences of my own actions.
I want to say that eventually, yes, I’ll start selling all the bullshit I’ve pi𒈔cked up. I’ll clean house, empty out that massive chest, and swap out all those plates and bottles for gold. But I know even if I do that, I’m just going to fill it with more stuff, and I’ll have to do it all over again. Somebody send Marie Kondo – I can’t deal with my Baldur’s Gate 3 hoarding on my own.