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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26870 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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Even going from BG2 to the critically-acclaimed Baldur's Gate III, it's hard to avoid the feeling that setting detail and plausibility, immersion, character depth, appealing dialogue, etc., have all taken a step for the worse.

I think that's mostly because Baldur's Gate III is a Larian game, not D&D game. If you've played their Divinity: Original Sin games, you'll immediately recognise the style. It's a Larian game (with their specific tropes) with the D&D mechanics just layered on.

I have not played any of them, actually. To be honest I haven't played BG3 either, so I'm relying on osmosis here, but certainly the impression I have received has not been flattering, in terms of worldbuilding.

You do get to run around and explore a bit, but it pretty much does lead you along the line straight to the finish. Replay value is in spinning up different characters and choosing "am I going to be good or evil this time round?" I had fun, but I'm a filthy casual and not a hardcore gamer or a D&D player, so I imagine the experience is different there.

How would you say it compares to BG1 or BG2? Do you think it would appeal to the kind of person who enjoyed those games in the 90s?

This may hinge on two things.

  1. Are you a devotee of RTWP? Then BG3 is an abomination (I personally prefer turn-based).

  2. Do you like or tolerate DnD post-Critical Role, or do you find the sensibilities it has developed to be subtly but omnipresently obnoxious? I'm not well-versed in the franchise, but it doesn't look like BG3 matches the tone of the original games based on some writing samples.

I'm a semi-fan of RPGs, although I'm not good at them. Given their lengths and complexities, I really only have the appetite for one RPG on occasion every few years. And if I'm going to spend multiple hours and nights with one, I need an interesting world to retain me. I don't know where people stand on POE these days, but that managed to hold my interest even after the combat started getting sloggy and boring. FO1 is still my gold standard.

But every piece of media I see for BG3 seems to trigger a reflexive disinterest. There's something so self-consciously table-toppy about it that feels LARPy, for lack of a better word. Clearly some people love it for those reasons, but I must have read a dozen pieces about how 'amazing' BG3's narrator is ("Because it's just like having a DM, guys!"), and to me it just seems irritating and pointless. They understand that cRPGs don't need 'DMs', right? You're playing the game, why would you need it described to you?

I'm in group two. I'm all right with real-time - I didn't mind the later Dragon Age games - but I really don't like the tone and aesthetic of 5e D&D. It's hard to find an actual word for this, but there's the snarky tone, there's a kind of millennial/Gen-Z atmosphere of taking nothing too seriously, and the prominent presence of things like tieflings. (Yes, Haer'Dalis was a tiefling in BG2, but I mean the very standard sexy red-skin-and-tail-and-horns tiefling design that's everywhere now.) I can't define it all that well, but anything pre-3e wasn't afraid to be sincere or even corny, and I find that tone is missing.

BG1 and BG2 contained jokes. I can't deny that. But there's a sensibility that I struggle to put into words. Maybe this sensibility is related to streamers like Critical Role. I don't know, because I've never watched an RPG stream, and frankly think the idea sounds awful and unpleasant. But maybe they were a contributor to a shift like that?

But certainly the reason I steered away from BG3 is because I thought it looked like 2020s-WotC-D&D, rather than 1990s-TSR-D&D. It didn't look like Baldur's Gate.

Then I think your nose will serve you right here. I know here in TheMotte we've had people praising the writing and also those unimpressed by it, and the latter consistently brings up zaniness and the 'it's a fun romp' vibe as criticisms. And regardless of writing quality, everybody pretty much agrees this is a Larian game with a BG skin, not a proper continuation. The horniness of the companions alone makes it feel juvenile to me.

Outside of a dabble or two, I don't table-top. But my understanding is that Critical Role played a big part in reviving DnD in the age of streaming and Let's Plays. I went to a DnD birthday party years ago for a girl who had no awareness of any of the rules or anything, but wanted a game held because the show looked so fun. She was very confused when we explained to her that she had already wasted all her spells in the first combat encounter, when all she really wanted to do was girlboss a mage.

That night was fun, don't get me wrong. But I felt like I got a decent insight into the kind of person CR was appealing to: people who like the drama, the self-expression, and the costumes of table-top, but are quickly in over their heads when they have to roll for crit or w/e. So they just watch others do it.

Yes, that makes sense to me - there's an audience of people who like the idea of D&D more than they like D&D itself, and by 'idea of D&D' what I mean is a bunch of colourful zany characters quipping and having lighthearted adventures in a fantasy world.

One of the things I find most striking about D&D fans today is the level of, well, historical amnesia many of them seem to have? In theory one of the selling points of D&D 5e was the idea of legacy. The thing that makes D&D different and special, compared to competitor fantasy RPGs, is its history. D&D has been going since the 70s and it has a tremendous history to draw on. 5e core was definitely trying to evoke a lot of that history.

But if I look at talk around D&D today, I am regularly shocked by ignorance of that history. I don't even mean things like the way that Gygax-era D&D was closer to a wargame, had very little characterisation, and would have four GMs and twenty players around the same table all playing in real time, but even quite broad things in living memory. I recently watched Noah Gervais' take on Diablo and something that shocked me, in the section on the first game, is the way he blandly asserts, "Today the focus of something like D&D is much more about the imaginative aspects, the performative aspects. 90s D&D, AD&D, hewed closer to its name - dungeon-crawling, monster-hunting, complicated rules to facilitate each."

And that's not only incorrect, it's the exact opposite of correct. AD&D2e is the edition that games like Baldur's Gate were trying to evoke. It was the era when story was absolute king, when the game was played via these extremely story-heavy railroaded modules, where every campaign setting under the sun was getting incredibly detailed write-ups, and recurring characters were at their most popular. It's the era of the Drizzt craze, when approximately a million Dragonlance novels were published (based on published adventure modules from the 80s!), and every player had their own good-hearted rebel drow or half-elf archer with a troubled past. The story and setting and continuity got so elaborate that when 3rd edition came around in the early 2000s, it was marketed as a back-to-basics game, dropping all the increasingly-inaccessible storytelling in favour of a return to just kicking down doors and killing monsters. Late 80s and 90s AD&D is the most story-obsessed D&D has ever been.

But this is something that you only know, it seems, if you were around and played D&D in the 90s. I feel like now we have a crop of players who believe that story only started with 5e or with those streamed gameplay sessions, and who mentally write off everything before it as a dark age of decontextualised dungeon-crawling.

But every piece of media I see for BG3 seems to trigger a reflexive disinterest. There's something so self-consciously table-toppy about it that feels LARPy, for lack of a better word.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I like BG3 well enough, but it feels like it's trying to very consciously emphasize its D&D heritage. For example, the way every skill check brings up a big dramatic die roll animation. It also annoys me that they lean into popular concepts of what D&D is like (but which are actually false), such as natural 1/20 rolls having an effect on skill checks.

I wish that they would spend less energy on the "it's D&D!!!" schtick, and just be ok with the fact that it's a computer game. But maybe people love that stuff, IDK.

Never played them, so I have no idea. Reading discussion about it, it's allegedly very different from the preceding games in that series.

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