Nire Bryce

@NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

she/they (pl)
breadthcharge.net/

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

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email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

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Nire Bryce @NireBryce12/24/2023, 5:19 AM

don't get me wrong, Baldur's Gate 3 is a great visual novel broken up by combat puzzles built with the D&D 5e engine

but the story is so detached from the combat that it feels like I'm playing two very different games, completely and utterly detached from the pace of the other.

I think of most of the games I've played I can 100% say that Baldur's Gate 3 is a game that wasn't designed for, but has the gameplay for, the Steam Deck. Combat rounds last 15m? great pick up, play, put down opportunity. Avoiding fights and just exploring? Yeah I can do 5-15m of that. Only have 5m? Camp management time.

But for like, a game you sit down and play more than 30m of? baffling.

I know I'm using the example a lot, but they're about to kill the slaves immediately, so it's time to take a long rest so the wizard has enough to save them. ONE FULL DAY LATER it's time to fight them and somehow they've made no progress on learning how to shoot a crossbow execution style for a FULL DAY, right until combat starts and suddenly they're a headshot savant

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Iro @Iro12/24/2023, 5:37 AM

i guess the thing with these kinds of games is that you're not meant to rest after every individual encounter but also there's usually not anything stopping you from doing so (like, say, a human DM adjudicating the rules), so why not just fight every battle at full power and spell charges

from what I recall Pillars 1 limits you to a certain amount of camping supplies but there weren't very many restrictions on when you could or couldn't rest. Pillars 2 switches almost every power to per-encounter to get around the narrative dissonance (because its main quest is meant to be on a timer, but it's not actually on a timer unless you flip a challenge setting on) which means you can still kinda alpha-strike everything, but the encounters can sorta account for it and be more puzzle-y instead of the game throwing 1000 trash mobs at you to attrit out your resources

Nire Bryce @NireBryce12/24/2023, 5:39 AM

But even on normal difficulty the setup of the encounters is such that I'm either using spell slots or might as well be a rogue. well into the leveling curve cantrips are only dealing 1d8 or, in melee range, whatever poison spit does. like, 18 damage max or something.

when the off-spec cleric is using a crossbow for 30 consistently, and dealing with less punishing save rolls <_<

but yeah per-encounter is better for a looot of things, as mentioned elsewhere my biggest gripe is that there's basically no sources of out of combat healing that match the damage curve-to-gold-or-alchemy-supplies-you-possibly-have ratio

Iro @Iro12/24/2023, 5:49 AM

This is why 5e isn't really "fun" until you're level 5+ and actually have resources to work with. The min-maxers out there actively advocate for spellcasters to use crossbows and whatnot (or, power-creeped cantrips from supplements) for the first couple levels, because they're mathematically more consistent than non-scaled cantrips.

A human DM can balance the Ideal Adventuring Day to account for a Wizard being able to cast Web twice a day and magic missile three times and also write the plot so that it isn't screaming at you to get a move on every two seconds. Always been a problem with the CRPGs honestly, but then reviewers complain when actual timers are introduced, alas

Nire Bryce @NireBryce12/24/2023, 6:01 AM

D&D also just has more things you can do to fill the gap. But yeah idk. If rest wasn't Canonically An Entire Day, But Also Not and instead just Taking a Nap I'd be more cool with it somehow. It's just. the tonal dissonance is so laughable and the game set me up for thinking it all was that when it killed Lae'zel while I was taking too long to figure out how to let her down having no indication before that I could shoot the cage >_>.

like don't get me wrong I think it's a good game and even good value if I treat it as different games. I'm just baffled by. the decisions.

Iro @Iro12/24/2023, 6:13 AM

yeah the other important thing about a human DM is that they let you just do things that aren't directly written in the rules while the computerized version must be a very literal and prescriptive interpretation. You can say "we let her out of the cage" and it works, but in a game you can only do that A Specific Way and they for whatever fucking reason made that way "shoot the bottom of the cage with a ranged attack"

IMO part of why larian's games got so big is that because of those immersive-sim-like, less-context-sensitive interaction type things (stacking crates, exploding gas clouds), it feels more free and emergent in the moment to moment compared to something like Pillars, but I think (in the context of a CRPG) I personally would just prefer to (proverbially) click on the cage and select the scripted "open the cage" option

Nire Bryce @NireBryce12/24/2023, 7:14 AM

right, but if you go looking for other solutions, you come back to her dead.

what I mean is... if the pace of the game was actually set by that (events have hidden timers, sidequests are a luxury, your delay matters) it'd be... more interesting.

it just... doesn't anywhere else in the first act.

Iro @Iro12/24/2023, 3:32 PM

I can think of like three or four times it happens across the course of the entire game and they are all just far enough apart that you forget the game might suddenly spring a time limit on you

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