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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2380 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 4, 2023

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So this post should be higher effort, but that'd take away from important Baldur's Gate 3 time, so all I'm going to say is: Hot damn did Larian deliver, at least so far. I've got a few minor nitpicks, but I can't recall the last time I enjoyed a game this much. Was up until 5 AM playing it last night.

I'm also trying to figure out when exactly I got hyped for it. I ignored it all the way through early access, then a week before launch, I suddenly was all-in, and I don't remember seeing any news or reviews or anything other than "Oh hey, it's about to come out."

My husband started up Baldur's Gate 3 with my five year old on the chair next to him, and now no one in my house has slept in 48 hours. She keeps running in and out of our bedroom screaming about monsters and worms going into eyes. The baby wakes up and starts crying. I can't safely have both her and the baby in the bed at the same time. I hate this game with a burning fire and I haven't even played it yet.

Yeah, this is on your husband. Mindflayers are not suitable for five year olds.

I mean, you have my condolences, but that was really an own goal by your husband. I'm honestly not sure how he expected that to go.

Did your husband not know it would contain disturbing imagery before he began playing? I’d even avoid the new Zelda with children that young.

He says he just wanted to stay on the character creation screen and have her make a character. Turns out it's not a Barbie dress up game!

Kids these days. I watched Predator with my dad when I was super young, and never thought anything of it. I was so young I didn't even understand what I was seeing when it shows the guy skinned and hanging.

The only thing that ever gave me nightmares was the squirrel/mouse/rat living in my closet, making noise I knew I could hear, which my parents never believed me about. They always assumed I was making it up, had a bad dream, was misinterpreting the sounds of the house settling at night, etc. But I fucking knew there was something in my closet.

Wasn't until I cleaned it out as a teenager that I found an old abandoned rodents nest, and suddenly I felt vindicated for all my childhood night time protests.

Is it Woke?

Ok, part 2 of my response.

This post over at Blues News spoke to my curmudgeonly soul.

Eh, I'm kind of frustrated with the game. There are so many little annoying things that I'm finding that are adding to to my frustration.

The UI need work. The "mini" map is way too big, and FFS get rid of the fucking version number always visible. I wish they had an option to turn off quest markers. The descriptions on some abilities and spells are missing important information, which is driving me insane. This is especially frustrating during character creation. I had to re-do my character a couple of times because of this.

I'm somewhat familiar with D&D 5e rules, and they've made so many questionable changes to the rules that they might as well not even be allowed to call it D&D.

They've made all races the same by giving them all a selectable +2 and +1 attribute bonus instead of each race being unique.

They've removed detect magic and identify. Part of what I like about D&D that's missing from other home brew RPG systems is picking up magical items that can be enchanted or cursed, but you don't know until you identify them, either with a mage in your party or by paying a vendor. You can take your chances and equip them without identification, but if they're cursed, you have to get someone to remove the curse before you can remove the item. Remember the cursed ring in the original Baldur's Gate that you can find pretty early that changes your character's gender? I figured Larian of all developers would have had had fund with stuff like this.

Spell casters that have to prepare spells don't have to rest to prepare them, they can switch them any time outside of combat.

Spells don't have verbal, somatic or material requirements.

Apparently the game does have ritual casting for classes and spells that support it, but the spell description doesn't indicate if it can be ritual cast until you take it.

It seems like anyone can cast spells from scrolls regardless of class, without any requirements or restrictions.

I'm sure there are more that I haven't found or can't think of right now. Most of these are clearly done to appeal to casual players because they're ruining the role playing experience for me. I can't believe WotC approved of some of these changes.

I'm fine if Larian wants to use a modified home brew rule set, but at least put in the option to play with the authentic rules. Solasta handled this perfectly. It had several presets for difficulty from super easy, to the default Solasta rules, the authentic rules, up to a super brutal rules, or you can tweak every option of the rules to your liking.

So many people and reviewers are jizzing their pants over this game claiming it to be the best RPG ever. The game good and has the potential to be one of greatest RPGs, but currently it doesn't deserve that title. People need to take their blinders off, give it proper constructive criticism, so hopefully Larian can turn it into something great.

I don't think BG3 has any overtly woke current year nonsense. However, I am getting the impression BG3 has a very progressive design aesthetic towards excessive accessibility, blank slatism, and against conventionally attractive women/"male gaze".

There are verbal components. Almost no spells can be cast if silenced unless you have a special perk iirc only available to sorcerers and even to them it's more taxing.

and against conventionally attractive women/"male gaze".

Imo untrue.

25% of the reason I enjoy this game is that you have story-related reasons for using basic spells to mask the homelier party members as inhumanly beautiful dark elves.

Those rule change points are all autistic nitpicks. Spell don't have verbal, somatic, or material components? Those barely come up in actual tabletop unless a spellcaster is tied up or something. This reads like someone who's only RPG is D&D 5e, the rules of which are holy writ. I played Neverwinter Nights, and that played fast-and-loose with the tabletop rules too, and I didn't have a shitfit over the "parry" skill.

And the game is full of conventionally attractive women. Unless you mean that the female dwarf faces are way hotter than the human ones.

Those rule change points are all autistic nitpicks.

I mean... maybe. But when I bought Baldur's Gate 1, it basically had an abridged version of the D&D rules as it's game manual. It prided itself on how autistically it adhered to the AD&D 2e ruleset. They made some technical concessions, but they weren't "streamlining" things willy nilly.

This Baldur's Gate 3, I'm just not seeing it as the sort of spiritual successor in the same vein that Doom 2016 was. I don't intend to invest $60 and 200 hours into it so I can definitively make that claim. But what I'm seeing says this is not a game for the sort of grognard who liked the first two Baldur's Gates. It's for a modern, more laid back, more casual audience. They seem to be doing very well with their new audience. Good for them I guess.

Compared to other modern RPGs, BG3 is very UNforgiving. You can easily get in over your head and wind up having to re-load an earlier save. The game plays for keeps, there's no take-back-sies apart from save-scumming. I wouldn't call it dumbed down to appeal to casuals, that sounds like boilerplate criticism of all modern games, because all modern games are beset by the scourges of feminism, anti-westernism, anti-whiteness, and appealing to filthy casuals. Or something.

BG3 ADDED weapon-intrinsic short-rest maneuvers, too, shit that isn't in 5e at all, and even the 5.5 playtest has those as always-on, not limited resources. And it has new conditions that don't work the way 5e conditions work, and there's no grappling. 2/10, elbows too pointy.

You can almost always go back to camp and for 500 gold re-roll and re-spec your entire party for the current encounter.

That's not unforgiving.

Underrail is. 15 hours in you're forced to go into a garbage dump full of landmines, acid-spitting mutant pitbulls, traps, sentry turrets and more traps and more acid pibbles and people who try to have a jack-of-all trades character suffer impressively.

Compare Owlcat’s implementation of Pathfinder. The rules customization for that game is incredible. Tooltips are pretty damn good, too, as far as I recall.

I can defend a few of the changes. Streamlining is a dangerous line to walk. Cutting material components, probably good, definitely in line with the house rules for most tables. Verbal and somatic, eh, were they going to have any mechanical impact outside of Silence? On the other hand, spell swapping is a pretty silly way to fight the fifteen-minute adventuring day.

Others make more sense as part of an ongoing debate within D&D. Racial bonuses, for example, work like this in the next playtest. They’re not just a nod to blank-slatism, but a point of conflict between the Gamists and the Narrativists. Between the kind of people who pick Dwarf to optimize their saves and those who pick it because they read The Hobbit too recently. It’s a conflict as old as roleplaying, and flattening it out is yet another attempt at synchronizing the experience between players. Even though it means a bit of dumbing down.

Racial bonuses, for example, work like this in the next playtest.

They actually work like this currently in 5E, at least for any playable races published in or after The Wild Beyond The Witchlight; Monsters Of The Multiverse reprinted (and rebalanced) a bunch of racial options as well, and all of them use the floating modifiers method rather than set race-specific ASI bonuses. Your larger point stands, I just wanted to point out that on this particular point, BG3 is actually in-line with the state of the current edition.

If every race gives the same stat modifiers, why not just give everyone more points for ability scores during character creation? Apart from killing another sacred cow, except that at this point all the sacred cows are animated undead skeletons with skin draped over them.

For all intents and purposes, that is what has been done. The “racial stat bonus” has been replaced entirely by a pool of a +2 and a +1 which can be freely assigned to any two stats after the initial array of ability scores has been determined by rolling or by using the point buy or standard array method. You end up with numerically the same total available scores as before, you just have more flexibility in how you distribute them.

Last I saw, there isn't a single conventionally attractive woman you can romance. But you can have a bear go to town on your bussy. A significant portion of the media around the game is about how horny it is. But it's clearly not horny in any way that appeals to me.

Shadowheart isn't conventionally attractive? Or am I just a weirdo who likes gawky art hoes? Is conventionally attractive now code for Blonde Aryan Woman Standing in a Wheat Field?

Regardless, the hottest female faces in the character creator are dwarves. Half of them look like Sco-Jo.

Shadowheart

I don't know what's worse, being named Shadowheart by your parents or changing your name to Shadowheart yourself.

I was christened Dirk Steel and then I changed it to Phoenix...

Is conventionally attractive now code for Blonde Aryan Woman Standing in a Wheat Field?

Near as I've seen BG3 has two body types for women. Russian power lifter and 13 year old boy. It's rather on the androgynous side.

I'm just saying, I doubt Rule34 Baldur's Gate content is going to sweep Pornhub off it's feet the way Overwatch did.

The Belgians just aren’t a very attractive people, I have to say. Something about Dutch Catholics.

So far, the only "woke" thing I've encountered is that character creation lets you do whatever the hell you want regarding genitals/build/voice, but it's a pretty high magic setting, so whatever. I certainly haven't seen any "current day" topic stuff, and I'm not expecting anything as unsubtle as "Tiefling Lives Matter" to be a dialogue option, if that's what you're asking about.

character creation lets you do whatever the hell you want regarding genitals/build/voice

As long as what you want fits one of two body types for each sex, because that's all you get. You can choose from one of four patterns of public hair, but no option for breast size. Also all the hair options fucking suck absolute dick. I'm enjoying the game so far, but this is the first dnd crpg I have ever played where I didn't spend at least half an hour on character creation, because it was too demoralising. I just picked the first options I didn't hate and moved on - I put more effort into my goldbox characters lol.

I'm assuming the body types were for animation purposes, but I personally was very happy with the hair options. It's nice to actually have a few basic ponytails to pick from.

Hmm, seems like a torrent is out, with the overwhelming praise I can't help but want to try it, even if I find a typical DND setting rather boring.

I loved Divinity Original Sin 1, especially since the humor was laugh out loud good, and while I certainly could see that 2 was a big step up in scope, it took itself too seriously for my taste.

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