Baldur's Gate 3 speedrunner asks the important question: How many people can you bang in a single playthrough?

What is the highest body count achievable in Baldur's Gate 3? - YouTube What is the highest body count achievable in Baldur's Gate 3? - YouTube
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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.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.