A few things are certain with Baldur's Gate 3 - there will always be a natural 1 at the worst possible time, the druid spends most of his play time casting longstrider on minions, and Harper is a wimp.

Not Jaheira, but she's not a problem. However, when it comes to the Absolute Order they are facing, they are very badly outmatched. If you've ever done the Moonrise Tower siege, you know that the smite-happy paladin chews up his NPC friends like a holy knife into a red shirt.

Now, Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit user NCBlizzard has dived deep into the game's code and revealed a sobering revelation.

"We're not even sure if this is a genuine bug and oversight, or if it's a confusing and completely bizarre and insane workaround that was added intentionally but in a really weird and particularly inconsistent way.

The bug in question'Not all, but many of the harpers are tagged "extra_attack_blocked". This disables the use of extra attacks that most classes get at level 5 (except for the College of Swords bard, which gets it at level 6).

As someone who initially spent a considerable amount of time DMing D&D 5th edition (aka 5e, the system that Baldur's Gate 3 is based on) and thinking about the agony of action economy in balancing encounters (translation: how group size affects how difficult things are), I went into this expecting that there would be an easy answer.

See, in 5e, the amount of "action" one side has is much more important than the raw numerical power of that side. The more creatures you have, the less punishment by whiffs and the more likely you are to roll a 20 and deal additional damage. In Harper's case, I figured that the "Rock Lee weights" constraint was due to their sheer numbers, and that if you were fighting with (or against) something like 10 of them (or if they were bad to the bone), each would take two attacks, which is a little too many.

But NCBlizzard peeled back enough layers of this glass onion. Here's the data they presented:

I don't find some of their arguments very convincing. For example, the idea that Harper losing head-to-head (even with haste) in a fight with an Absolute cultist is evidence of a bug. We are so importantly involved in this brawl, and the average BG3 party is so excited about powerful magic items, that the Harpers are practically cheating by having you on their side. Had they been even remotely equal, the siege of Moonrise would have been a rehash.

But the other points are more compelling. Harper Callow is just one man, but he is excluded. Conversely, characters like druids and wizards, who do not have wildshape and cannot use additional attacks, are limited by code to functions they never gained in the first place. Backup harpers, i.e., NPCs who replace dead NPCs, are exempt from the nerf. Why.

NCBlizzard's current theory is that these NPCs were given these tags to test as Shadow-Cursed Undead because they should only be able to attack once when zombified, but (check my notes) in almost 7 patches to date I forgot to turn that off.

I asked Larian for comment on this and was told he had no comment. This is obviously a huge technical quagmire that is ostensibly coming to an end soon.

My personal theory is that this "bug" is not intentional, but what is consistently included is intentional. Like the BG3 battle, the attack on the moonrise tower feels chaotic but reasonably hard, and the fact that Harper is a little vulnerable helps him feel like a general leading an impregnable march.

I choose not to dwell on why reserves can still attack twice. It is certainly not the most puzzling part of the game. The destruction of the fourth wall of Carrach deserves that title.