No a simple miss. If I rolled a one I’d understand but the 100% chance made me laughe because there is none in D&D and the miss gave me the rest for three minutes.
I would gladly pay 1000$ towards a kick starter to update FO2. I was on medical leave from work for 3 months when it came out, and played it non-stop, every single day. Unfortunately, the archaic UI and sluggish animations make it virtually unplayable now days.
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Directely responding to a post with the following in it.
I found this funny.
Complaining that BG3 follows D&D 5E (5th edition) is like complaining that Sim City is about city building. The ruleset that you don’t like in the game is literally what the game is based on, on purpose. It is a D&D campaign (the vast majority of which do not reach level 20).
It’s like saying “I don’t like Batman because he doesn’t kill people”. It’s literally what the character is based on.
It’s fine to not like a thing, even for the foundational reasons that make the thing what it is. It seems dumb to expect it to be different. It’s what it is because people like the thing it is based on.
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I haven’t played it in awhile admittedly, but I don’t remember hating the story of D3. As I recall, several of the characters had good dialogue and some of the exchanges with the followers were entertaining. I remember Lyndon trying to get away from his wife. Covetous Shen was pretty good. I mean, as far as the first three Diablo games go, their stories have never been epic poems or Elizabethan theater, but I also don’t think any of them were particularly abysmal. Maybe I should play them again and see if they hold up at this point.
What did you like about D4’s story in particular that made you interested in it? From what I’ve seen of the cut scenes and dialogue, it seems pretty straightforward as well.
As far as BG3’s story is concerned, I’ve already seen quite a bit about it that I’m not interested in, to say the least. I’m not sure why everything has to be some weird fusion of a 90’s sitcom and a dry depressing GRRM novel these days; maybe that’s all my fellow millennials are familiar with at this point. But having grown up doing my absolute best to ignore that segment of the culture, I’m not at all excited to see it taking over modern entertainment.
As a retro gamer, I kinda love the ancient goofy UI and the campy oddities of that game that people would not replicate in modern PC games.
However, if you’re looking for a way to update some of the game and make it more friendly by modern standards, there’s a wide variety of mods on Nexus Mods that you could use. I haven’t used any of them myself, so I’m not sure which ones you’d be interested in, but it might be worth taking a peek: Link
The most popular one seems to be a mod to restore a bunch of the cut content that people have apparently found and dug up at this point.
This might be a purely mechanical issue. Not sure how much 5e you’ve played but that rule set completely breaks down after about 12th level or so (not sure where BG3 stops as I can only play the game very, very sporadically do to a med condition). The power creep is stupidly insane and it’s virtually impossible to make good adventures work after that. I’ve been in more than half a dozen campaigns that all basically fell apart in or around this time and had numerous discussions with other gamers about this problem.
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Maybe, but this problem existed in the original Baldur’s Gate games as well. If I was one of the people working on that system or game, I would simply fix it. There’s no reason Wizards of the Coast can afford to send strongmen to people’s houses but can’t figure out how to let Larian Studios abridge their game to make it better and more interesting. If they have time to be hilariously evil people, they probably also have time to let someone else make a decent videogame with their IP. There’s a disparity in ruthlessness there that I find annoying, I dunno. Seems hypocritical on their part.
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Have you read about WotC tactics lately? 
Mildly kidding. It could very well have been a combination of many things. And who knows, maybe BG3 will have expansions that push this to lvl 20?
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It would be really fun to actually make a spoof game where your goal is to assemble a team of ex-cons, violent felons and other general ne’er-do-wells and take contracts from WotC to intimidate fans and shut down fan projects. The final boss of that game could be the creator of the game itself, whose attack is to throw your Cease and Desist letters at you, and fold them into various types of weapons and monsters that take a life of their own. Of course that boss would then be unbeatable, and the canon ending is that you fail to reign him in.
Maybe Baldur’s Gate 3 could be modded at some point to be that spoof game. That’d make my life. 
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Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian commented in an interview on the problems with Level 12-20 adventures in D&D:
Vincke said that he would find it “very hard” to make an adventure that takes players from level 12 to level 20, because in D&D, those levels start awarding players with godlike powers. For example, some of D&D’s highest level spells include things like:
- Astral projection, letting you mosey around the astral plane
- Foresight, letting you literally see into the future and gain advantage on rolls while enemies gain disadvantage (because you know what they’re going to do)
- Power Word Kill, a spell that just makes any creature with less than 100 HP immediately die
- Wish, which is just as powerful and open-ended as it sounds
“[Level 12-20] adventures require a different way of doing things, in terms of antagonists you’re going to have to deal with, which require a lot of development to do them properly,” Vincke said. “Which would make this much more than an expansion in terms of development effort. A lot of D&D adventures are sub-level 12 for precisely that reason. So it sounds like neat, easy expansion material until you start thinking about it and it’s not as easy as one would imagine.”
Especially with things like Wish, its basically impossible for a video game to cover all of the possibilities, while a DM can be somewhat more reactive and think of something on the spot.
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They’re just not creative enough. I could come up with satisfying ways to do a lot of that stuff. It’s a matter of scope. Instead of trying to create every possibility, you create enough of them that it’s fun.
On the matter of the Wish spell, Wish has been a permanent bane of game developer’s existences, and yet nobody, not even people who play D&D itself, have ever expected the devs to get it exactly right. If there were 50 interesting things you could use it to do and say only 20 of them were told to you upfront in the way the game presents the ability, people would find that absolutely insanely entertaining. If you could even use it to sequence break the game and do certain things you’re not supposed to be able to do, that would be mind-blowing to a lot of people.
Vincke’s statements amount to “Creativity is hard.” Yeah, it is. But that doesn’t mean we, for the rest of human history, back away from wacky hi-jinks and grand projects. You just think about it and get more creative.
Mind you, this is a studio that used to be known for this. If you play Divinity: Original Sin, there is a lot of that type of creativity in that game. It’s true that creative people expend and run out of what are their best ideas eventually, but that’s why you hire new people and have them collaborate to come up with these sorts of things. Those people then inspire each other and create new ideas that they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise, and more quickly than they would have otherwise. This was well understood until not that long ago.
He says it’s “very hard” and “requires a different way of doing things”.
He didn’t say they wouldn’t do it ever.
Creativity only works in an environment of limitations. Without limitations you get some pretty rank stuff because no one has to consider thinking outside the box to make it better, you can just throw poo at the wall all day long and call it ‘creative.’
I’m not making excuses for them. I really don’t have a dog in the fight for video game stuff. But I work in a creative industry. Unlimited creativity is so overwhelming over-rated it’s one of those romanticized myths like people with bipolar are so creative it must be wonderful (it isn’t, it actually sucks.)
Look at the decades from 2000-2020 and how ‘unlimited’ creativity in computer graphics got us a crap ton of awful movies because they had all this ‘now’ unlimited creativity. Go back to 75. Jaws would not have the reputation of being so good if the limitation of the stupid mechanical shark breaking down all the time and they had to find ways to get around that.
@JustSomeGuy you mentioned:
I’m not saying this as a jab like it often is done on the internet. I mean it seriously. Make them some pitches. They’ve done a lot of homework on this, if the pitches show them something they haven’t thought of or done, this could grab their attention and get them to say, “ah, hey, you know that actually is interesting, let’s see what we can do with this.”
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Divinity: Original sin and Divine Divinity are two of my favorite games. I had so much fun playing them. The banter from your Deathknight ‘companion’ was hilarious at times.
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Oh no yeah I would love to do that. I have done so in the past. Most of my ideas and critiques go ignored except among friends and friendly places like this. Since they’re in a unique position to use this IP, it wouldn’t really be me giving away anything I could do myself either. When I get done with some of my other writing I need to do this weekend, I’ll draft an idea or two for them to do 13-20 and the Wish spell. Hadn’t occurred to me Larian might actually be interested in that, but now I’m taking that into consideration. Good thought, I appreciate it.
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A few potentially helpful tips. Lots of people don’t like to hear this but try to find out the appropriate ‘channel’ to send solicitations/pitches. In the film industry, especially the independent level, there’s no job security and you are constantly having to pitch stuff all the time. It’s annoying.
Don’t do it in a forum, discord, chat or anything like that in a public arena unless you a) don’t care if they use it without asking, b) don’t care if they never see it or acknowledge it and c) don’t care if you never get any credit and/or compensation for it.
Because of legalities and the potential for gratuitous and superfluous law suits, many companies won’t take ‘unsolicited’ stuff. The won’t even read it and they’ll have filters that dump stuff like that automatically. That said, they will have ways you can do it. They might have info on the website, or you can always use their contact to ask them how to go about making a professional pitch on an idea that is fundamental to the game.
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I really liked the oil spell and completely ignoring the story to worm my way into areas and things I wasn’t supposed to be in yet. I think I so broke the story in that game that I actually had to do the exploit where you tear down the door to the final boss, haha.
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Yeah, I seem to recall one of those games having an issue where you could break the questline by skipping around and killing quest monsters before you were ‘supposed’ to do it. Reloading saves to fix that was always annoying.
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Yeah, the NPCs weren’t too bad, but act 3 & Azmodan’s endless monologing about how his X will kill us, oh, we’ve killed his X? Well, his Y will defeat us! Oh, we murderised his Y? Well his Z will definitely turn us into Strawberry jam! Oh, we’ve jam-ified the elite anti-nephilim jamification squad? Not to worry, his … 
And I didn’t appreciate Cain being killed off as he was, “the stranger” wasn’t surprising in the least, nor was Belial. And as for the Butcher’s “vegetables bad, meat good”, talk about playing to the cheap seats…
I don’t expect a story worthy of the Booker Prize, but I do expect it to be a teensy bit more engaging than the Topsy & Tim books that I used to teach my kids how to read.
I liked Lorath and the other main npc in D4.
Arpg plot doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be not-shit.
It’s a lot easier to fix things when you don’t actually have to make them work (ie, armchair dev).
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I always found this hilarious. And to be fair, I’m pretty sure the devs did too because at one point, if I’m not mistake (been a LONG time says I played the game let alone the campaign) your PC starts making snide comments about Azmodan’s incompetence.
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I see, I’ll have to watch some of the let’s play’s and see if I can get some of the context of why you like them. I agree, Azmodan was a little obnoxious.
Also, that’s fair. But like I mentioned earlier, it’s a matter of scope. You don’t have to give players absolute freedom to do anything they want to do with every mechanic. A lot of the DM’s job in a D&D campaign is trying to think of clever ways to trick creative and mischievous friends of theirs not to break the game without outright telling them “no.” (Well that and, accepting that breaking the game a certain amount is a valid part of the experience.) What that usually involves are compromise, wit and forethought. My generation seems not to be the greatest bunch in human history when it comes to those things, so we all find tasks that require them a little intimidating. Perhaps more than we should.
About the topic earlier with stories - I tend to agree with you they just have to be not-bad in an ARPG, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be great. The simpler the game, sometimes the more impressive the story can be just because you weren’t expecting anything from it. Regular RPG’s kind of have a disadvantage in that the story needs to be engaging to encourage the player to continue. But games like Max Payne illustrate why good storytelling can elevate any kind of game. There’s a little Kirby side-story that was included in Kirby Superstar that I love as an essay on how to hold the player’s attention with a narrative called Revenge of Meta Knight. If you get bored, you can watch a longplay of it here: Link It’s not high art or groundbreaking, but it is a very good example of how adding context to what the player is doing can be emotional and fun, and can allow you to cause the player to experience themes in a game that they otherwise would find difficult to experience. I really love it.
Spoilers:
My favorite part of Revenge of Meta Knight is when Dynablade, your bird friend, gets shot down as she caries you back to Meta Knight’s warship. The fact that she helps you as the player makes you care about her, giving gravity to the very next moment when the goons say they’ve shot her down and you see her sinking out of the shot in the background. Even as a kid I remember feeling the sensation of wanting revenge for her. Thinking, “Oh, these guys have to PAY for this!” It’s very cool coming from what would otherwise be considered a game for children.
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