Well it’s Saint Patrick’s Day already, which means it’s time to go out to the pub with the lads and knock back a couple of brews and eat your body weight in bar nachos. Oh wait, it’s a pandemic still, don’t do that. I can’t say I’ve ever really celebrated St. Patrick’s day in any real capacity at any point in my life, and this year doesn’t seem like the best time to start. So instead I’ll just sit here and talk about an upcoming game that has nothing to do with Ireland or even the color green at all. We’re talking about the upcoming cooperative action game, Dungeons & Dragons:Dark Alliance.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, Dungeons & Dragons:Dark Alliance looks to be a 4 player cooperative action game in the vein of something like Vermintide2. The way that Vermintide 2 was structured had you and your friends in this hub world where you could craft new items, level up your character, and check on your challenge progress, before you all embarked on a mission to kill a bunch of rat-folks with knives and gather the precious XP inside their bodies. Mind you, this is all me speculating, but it sure seems like Dungeons & Dragons:Dark Alliance is going to handle things in a very similar way.
I’m going off of Polygon.com’s hands on experience with Dungeons & Dragons:Dark Alliance, and they specifically call out how the game itself is geared towards co-op play, with difficulties scaling based on how many players are involved. The article mentions the core loop of the game appears to be about replaying levels on harder difficulties, gathering loot, and leveling up each character class according to whichever skill tree you choose to follow. How much variance there will actually be between different skill trees remains to be seen.
Personally, I would’ve liked the ability to just create a character instead of choosing existing ones, because that’s kind of the whole draw of a Dungeon’s & Dragons product in my eyes. To me that just seems kind of antithetical to what the biggest TTRPG is all about, but even if I can’t create my own character I’m sure it’ll be fine. It also makes sense when you consider that the PS2 era Dark Alliance games also only let you play as pre-made characters, so there is some precedent there.
The only real hangup I have with this early showing of Dungeons & Dragons:Dark Alliance, is that I never really got that into Vermintide 2 or games like it, but I really do enjoy Dungeons & Dragons, so that might be enough to keep me interested. Either way, Dungeons & Dragons:Dark Alliance is coming out for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC and the next generation consoles as well on June 22nd for the extremely attractive price of $40.
One of the best things about tabletop role-playing games is just how much versatility a player has in any given situation. Any good GM should be able to accommodate any reasonable request from their players, but the real fun come in when a player completely sideswipes you with some genuine shenanigans. Having to adjust and improvise on-the-fly is an absolute thrill that really tests my abilities to honor the request of the player while adhering to the rules and story. It’s a tough thing to develop, but it’s a necessary skill to have when running a game.
During one of my first ever games I ran, the first thing that a player of mine did was just say they were doing something, which in this case was taking a pouch of gold off of an NPC. My first reaction was to prompt them for a sleight of hand check which seemed pretty reasonable in my mind, but then they clarified and said “no, I’m just taking it.” They made it clear that there was no intent for being sneaky or surreptitious at all, they just literally wanted to take a thing that belonged to another character without any resistance. Knowing what I know now, I shouldn’t have relented and instead made them roll a contested strength check or just tell them that wasn’t going to fly without a check, but when you’re starting out you just want to please everyone and let them run free.
Don’t do that. While it may seem counterintuitive to tell your players they can’t do something, sometimes you need to remind them that TTRPGs, while a great forum for wild improvisation, are by and large very rules-heavy games. It isn’t about just saying “no” to your players, rather you need to refocus their energy so they can work within the guard rails of whatever system you’re playing. Saying “no” repeatedly to a player might result in them just checking out entirely or feeling as if they’re being picked on, so usually I try to encourage my players to try a different tactic or work with them to accomplish whatever ridiculous thing they’re trying to do.
Because I play with my friends, there’s a built in level of respect between all of us. They know that I’m trying to give them as much flexibility as I can without completely throwing out the rule book, and I know that they’re going to respect me when I tell them that there’s going to be a couple of extra steps required in the insane shit they’re trying to pull off. I ultimately want their characters to succeed in whatever they’re doing, but that doesn’t mean I have to make it easy on them and let them dictate what rules are and aren’t enforced.
There are plenty of ways that you can help work with your players to accomplish their goals, but for my money I’ve found that just asking my players if they have any abilities that would aid them in their wild requests is something I’ve found not only reinforces the rules of the game, but makes sure they’re paying attention to their character’s unique abilities. But lets say you wanted to be fun for once in your life and just let the players have a good time, well that’s when luck checks, high dice checks and even some deus ex machina can help you loosen up.
Honestly, that’s kind of the secret. If the players want to do a near impossible thing, let them try it and set the DC at 30 and give them disadvantage if you have to. They’ll probably fail miserably if they actually try which could lead to even more hilarious situations. Or maybe they’ll succeed, which might ruin an encounter, but it’ll be a moment they talk about forever. In my experience, I’ve never been so happy to get fucked over by the dice thanks to a rogue natural 20, because the players eat that shit up.
Allowing your players to try something rather than just shutting them down is something that I truly believe you have to do in order to foster a positive gaming environment. If you don’t let your players have fun, they’ll eventually stop caring and stop playing, but if you let them get away with anything then you’ll probably want to stop playing. Having been on both sides of that divide I can attest to how difficult striking that balance can be, but I assure you that striving for that balance is well worth the effort.
They say there’s a product for everything, right? If that’s the case, then where the hell is the asynchronous Dungeons & Dragons game that I’ve been imagining in my head for the past few years? Surely I can’t be expected to go out and develop a video game on my own, so I’ll do the only thing I know how to do decently and write an article complaining about it. So let’s talk about the D&D game that should exist by now, but miraculously doesn’t.
Without any real understanding as to how video games are made or what market trends look like, I feel like there’s a massive gap in the market for a video game to capitalize on the ever expanding tabletop role playing game market that’s desperately looking to be filled. I guess this all stems from my frustration with virtual tabletop (VTT) programs like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely thankful that these services exist, but some of them can be an absolute hassle to use reliably. Sometimes everything works without any issue, but other times you’re plagued with connectivity issues, or some compendium sharing option is acting weirdly because there are 4 ways to enable the same setting but you didn’t choose the right one. Hell, certain VTTs can’t even be bothered to put a fucking pause button on their music players. Add in the player frustration of having character sheets not updating properly, or certain spells just not working within the confines of the VTT itself, and you’ve got a situation where every session feels like a roll of the dice.
What if there was something else that actually worked consistently, was accessible, easily available and didn’t require too much heavy lifting from either GM or player? There are a lot of books, software and services that all claim to cut down on the prep time for a session or streamline the experience in some way, but they don’t necessarily scratch my particular itch. The two main angles of approach for this concept revolve around using phones and tablets for the players and GM respectively, or something involving a console and smartphones to achieve something similar.
I know there are ways to accomplish this right now, but in my mind I just picture my friends gathered around the TV while I flip through maps, distribute art handouts, and engage in combat with them from the comfort and privacy of my tablet without any additional software or hardware. The GM could have an app that streams to a Roku or Chromecast that only displays what the GM wants the players to see while simultaneously giving them a fully feature VTT to use on their tablet or phone. You could even accomplish a similar thing with a console and some smart phones too.
An existing alternative to this currently exists in the form of games that have campaign creator modes in them, but as a GM, I haven’t really found one that worked for me. Also, if a game like Baldur’s Gate III implements this kind of mode at some point in the future, it’s still a $60 buy in from all of my players which seems like a really hard sell especially when the VTT that we use is free for them. The way to combat that would be for a game like Divinity: Original Sin II to offer a free demo download that’s only used for playing custom campaigns that someone who owns the full product is running, but I guess the mentality is that if someone like D&D enough to play a custom campaign created inside of a video game, they probably want to buy the game anyway. That logic makes sense, but as someone who enjoys D&D way more than playing CRPGs, I can say that people like us do exist.
I would love to see a game or piece of software to come out and genuinely offer the D&D experience, not just in terms of the rules but the communal aspect of it. We’ve seen the popularity of D&D and TTRPGs in general explode over the past few years, and I can’t believe that there isn’t a more accessible option for people to get a game going that doesn’t involve one person doing an endless amount of prep. I’m sure there are like 40 different projects on Kickstarter that are trying to make good on this vision in some fashion, so hopefully one of them gets funded and actually does the damn thing. I guess what I really want is an easy way to set up a D&D session without a lot of hassle for people who have a passing interest in TTRPGs in general. Sure I’d love for my dream application to also be the optimal platform for running a long term campaign, but I’ll take what I can get at this point.
Imagine if once we all get the chance to see people in person and interact with each other again, that I could just have a bunch of people come and sit in front of my TV where they can manage their characters on screen via their cellphone while I throw goblins at them on my iPad. That seems like a no-brainer of an idea to me, but once again, I don’t know what it takes to make a game. But I bet the Jackbox folks could totally make this thing and make it well and now it’s all that I can think about.
Everything is so chaotic right now and it’s insanely difficult to focus on anything outside of the ever growing train wreck that is American politics. Even now as I write this, I fear that by the time this article goes live some horrible bullshit will have happened. I pray that everything goes smoothly and America doesn’t collapse in under its own weight, but literally anything is possible these days. But at some point I can’t keep staring at the wreckage and need to focus on things that make me happy. So here are some of the distractions I engaged in last week that brought me joy.
BALDUR’S GATE III
During my Game of the Year 2020 articles, I mentioned at one point that I wanted to check back in with Baldur’s Gate III and see how it’s evolved since receiving a few patches. Considering I had to restart the game because all previous version save files were no longer compatible, I trudged through the prologue once more and made it back to the first real explorable area. I can’t really say that I’ve noticed many differences in performance or features, but admittedly I’m still very early on and haven’t quite had the chance to really see the majority of content available in the game. They did fix the camera though, which is absolutely huge and was one of bigger issues with Baldur’s Gate III when it launched into early access late last year.
Even though I’m really enjoying playing Baldur’s Gate III, I’m still struggling with the idea of whether or not I want to dedicate too much more time into it. Considering it is an early access title, I can only imagine that save files are going to be in jeopardy a few more times during the course of development, and I don’t know that I want to play through that prologue more than I have to. It’s a decent enough tutorial level but I’ve already played it like 6 times at this point, so I might still wait on that. But in the meantime, I could always dip into Pillars of Eternity or Tyranny to get my CRPG fix.
HITMAN 3
The rebooted Hitman series of games that started in 2016, have become some of my favorite and most anticipated titles with Hitman 3 being no exception. Technically the game doesn’t launch until the day that you’re reading this, but knowing that I’ll have a Hitman game to distract me from whatever misery may come tomorrow is good enough for me to mention it. I think what I love about the series the most is how it makes you have to improvise and adapt on the fly, dashing all of your well made plans into pieces because some guard walked around a corner for the first time ever and spotted you choking the life out of your target. But that’s why you get a cool gun.
I don’t know if Hitman 3 will be any good, but the early reception on it seems overwhelmingly positive. I’m really looking forward to getting to play this one whenever the download finishes.
WANDAVISION
I didn’t expect to be this into a superhero themed TV show, but here we are. WandaVision is an insanely cool take on the Avengers characters of the same names, placing them in this incredibly weird and unsettling version of a 50’s/60’s sitcom. It’s like watching an episode of I Dream of Jeannie that occasionally does its best impression of a psychological thriller, which doesn’t sound like a great fit on paper but it totally works. While the first episode left my partner and I both unsure of whether we wanted to stick with the series, the second episode really got its hooks into us. Or maybe it just hooked me and they were being nice. Who can say?
All I know is that WandaVision is so far one of the coolest things that Marvel has done with one of their properties. My only concern is how well it will actually stick the landing. As of now, I have some ideas and theories about what’s happening or where this is all going, but it does feel like one of those stories that could end with a lame twist like saying it was all a dream or something. I don’t think that WandaVision will do that, but you never know. Regardless, we’re gonna keep watching the show.
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS
This one shouldn’t be surprising in any way, but it might be the biggest thing that’s brought me joy over the past few weeks. See, we recently decided to ditch our previous campaign in favor of one that was in a less boring setting. We landed on the Eberron setting, which is basically a magical version of the steampunk aesthetic that’s infinitely less insufferable. One of the biggest motivating factors for the change was the lack of any of the slice of life stuff that people usually engage with when playing a role-playing game. Our last setting didn’t have any real opportunities for the players to do anything outside of killing stuff and drinking ale, which made for a formulaic and uninspired game. I don’t think they minded it as much as I did, but I sensed a bit of fatigue with the module we were using. Also, I was fucking over it.
But that’s not the point. The point is that our campaign is set in a massive city that’s teeming with life and opportunity. We went through extensive character creation sessions where we really defined who their characters are. This was in service of not only creating fully realized characters, but to get my players invested in their avatars and understanding their motivations. Previous characters they made definitely wanted things, but without a setting to support those desires their characters were just walking murder-husks, devoid of any real direction.
I also changed our storytelling format to allow for more downtime and opportunities for their characters to grow through their actions. By using a combination of one-shots and custom campaigns, I’m able to hit them with story threads when they need it, and allow them to fuck around if they’d prefer that. It also allows me to react to their actions better than if I had tried to plan for said actions in advance. Everything about this campaign has been streamlined in a way that has taken a lot off of my plate. While I have a bunch of one-shots that are narratively linked together, an overarching story is something that’s entirely up to them and how they interact with the world. I might write in a bad guy here or a mission there, but I’m waiting for those plot hooks to come up naturally rather than me trying to force my players into it, all of which has made for a much more rewarding and fun Dungeons & Dragons experience for all of us.
So that’s it I guess. Hopefully when you read this, everything is cool and great. I would really prefer if we could just have something uneventful happen here at the finish line and I can go back to talking about video games without having to worry about if the former president is going to try and overthrow the government again. But yeah… good luck America. Good luck everyone, honestly.
I don’t know that I necessarily have the words to properly describe my feelings about the events of last week, nor do I know that I want to go into too much detail about it. In short, it’s been extremely difficult to watch my country rip itself apart at the behest of a sore loser who refuses to believe that more people told him to go fuck himself than those who begged for him to stay. Things are bad right now, and with the ongoing threats of violence all around the country planned for the next few days I think we’re all kind of just hanging in a limbo and waiting for whatever is coming to finally arrive. It’s times like these that I’d normally try and turn to my hobbies to distract myself from the hourly misery that’s been foisted upon us, but there hasn’t been a video game that’s done that for me in the past few months.
But where video games have failed to do the trick, I’ve found myself diving into the various Dungeons & Dragons books I own in an effort to flesh out my next campaign. I’ve been doing a ton of world building and story crafting which has been a lot of fun for me as well as a welcome reprieve from the world I live in. Not to say that any of the stories inside of those books are particularly happier than those that take place in the real world, but I guess it’s just easier to disassociate when they’re talking about goblins and orcs.
One of the things that bums me out about this period of ambivalence I’m in, is that there are games I want to play but never have the energy or will to actually start. For instance, I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate III in a few months and that game has received some significant updates that I’m eager to check out. I’ve also had the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn installed for quite a while, but I still haven’t launched the damn thing. Ideally I’d like to play that game before the sequel drops at some point this year. There are quite a lot of games that I really would like to spend more time with, but I just rarely have the energy or desire to actually do so.
The only thing I dip into regularly is NBA 2K21, a game that is literally just a way for me to occupy my hands while I watch or listen to something in the background. It’s a comfort food that’s going down real smooth these days, especially after what happened at the capitol last week. I’m just kind of using that game as a way to turn off my brain for an hour or so but I still have a ton of other games I really want to play. There’s just no motivation for me to dive into something new.
Look, I know these blogs have been overly dour and a bit more rambling in nature than I usually opt for, but it’s hard to write about video games right now with all of this shit going on. But I’m sticking it out the best I can, and I hope you’re doing the same. Be good to each other folks, and be safe.
I currently play in two Dungeons & Dragons groups, one of which I run and the other I just play in. For my group, we’d been running the newly released Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, while my other was neck-deep in a Dragonlance campaign. However, as we crept closer towards the end of 2020, we found ourselves in the middle of one of the weirdest holiday seasons of all time. So with a lot of people unable to see family and get particularly festive this year, I wanted to do something special for them the only way I knew how to: A holiday themed one-shot. It was also an opportunity for me to move away from the lackluster module of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, but that’s a story for another time. Instead, I’d like to tell you the story of Holiday Havoc: The Clausening, the holiday one-shot I ran for both of my D&D groups.
The main conceit of Holiday Havoc was that Santa Claus had essentially transformed his yearly package deliveries into a full, Amazon-esque logistics company called The Holly Jolly Corporation. How this was a sustainable business, I don’t know, but at the North Pole Santa had a big ol’ shipping and receiving center called The Holly Jolly Wish Fulfillment Center. The characters were all seasonal hires that were to be couriers for the evening, with the explanation that Santa is old and figured out a way to avoid doing the work himself. Adventurers were perfect for being holiday couriers, considering they have a knack for problem solving and Santa’s list might not be super accurate, resulting in the players wandering into dangerous situations.
They were outfitted with a sleigh, reindeer, and a magic Santa suit that had illusory capabilities that would make people think they were seeing the actual Santa in their house, and not just a goblin wearing a red jacket. I also needed a way to not have them murder everyone they encountered, cause you know, it’s a festive one-shot. So I gave them these magic bracers that transmutate all their spells into nicer and less deadly holiday themed variants of themselves. For instance, casting fire bolt would result in a piping hot beam of hot cocoa being lobbed at their face. Technically it’s still super deadly, but it’s hot cocoa so my players thankfully stopped asking questions at that odd logic. I also turned their weapons into candy canes, hard candies and peppermint bark, all of which still did the normal amount of weapon damage, but were all non-lethal variants of their armaments.
The general flow of the game was broken down into 3 different encounter types, all of which were important and added something positive or negative to the final scene of the campaign. The first encounter was your standard D&D dungeon crawl, where they would fight against enemies that I Photoshopped festive hats onto, and also find items that could help them later.
The second and most prevalent encounter was the delivery aspect of the game. I had around 10 handmade deliveries that I could send them on, but both groups only made it about 5 of them before we moved to finish the campaign. In these scenarios, I’d describe a home or locale where a present or present needed to be delivered. I made sure to let them know that deliveries weren’t complete until a present was under the tree in an effort to keep them in a situation rather than just run away from one. They could look at their bracers to see who the gift was for, their age, and what the present they wanted was. Here’s an example of what I’d read to them to get them started:
Your sleigh touches down on the rooftop of a modest two-story home. The outside of which is decorated in rainbow colored glowing bulbs, garland lining the perimeter of the windows, and a sagging snowman in the front yard. The lights on the inside appear to be off. Your magic bag fills out a little bit, but is still easy to carry. An illusory bubble surrounds the home, letting you know that you are shrouded and unable to be seen from the outside.
And once they figure out a way inside of the house I’d read this:
You find yourself in a cozy living room with a bit too many effigies to Saint Nick himself littered everywhere. The mantle is covered in holiday themed sundries with four stockings hanging from it. Beside the fireplace is a large tree that’s been beautifully decorated with care. A nearby end table has a plate of beautiful chocolate chip cookies on it, with a tall glass of milk as well.
Both simple descriptions that give you just enough information with being overly exhaustive. The idea was to essentially let the players help me fill in the blanks of this world via dice rolls and role playing. One of the later houses for instance had a dog inside of it, but the players wouldn’t have known that from the description I wrote of the place. So while they were scoping the perimiter of the house, one of the players gave me a perception check looking for something that I can’t quite remember, but they mentioned a dog. Since they rolled well, I manifested a “beware of dog” sign that was covered in snow that they had uncovered. Building off of that knowledge, they asked if there was a doggy door on the backdoor. They rolled an investigation check and thus found a doggy door that was big enough for their Kenku party member to fit through.
I kept encouraging each player to do something in these scenarios because it would help them in the third encounter type I had made for this campaign. The players were tasked with delivering to 100 houses and a minimum of 1 high-risk location (dungeon crawls). Since I had only made about 10 deliveries like the one described above, I needed a way to simulate their success in these ambiguous deliveries that felt like they had an impact on it, so I devised a new mechanic: the delivery roll. I figured it would be incredibly unfair if I picked a skill from the list and said that it was the delivery skill they’d roll for success, so the delivery roll would just be a straight d20 roll. Something needed to augment this roll though, and I figured tying a modifier to the success and participation level of the previous encounters would be just the thing.
So I told everyone that their successes and failures in the second encounter type would either grant them a +d6 or a -d6 to the ambiguous delivery rolls, and would keep track of their successful and unsuccessful skill checks during these scenes. I told them that not participating meant you’d just get no modifier on the ambiguous delivery rolls, along with the fact that doing well on those meant getting buffs or boons like a random potion or temp HP. There wasn’t an exact science to tracking this stuff, and usually if they ended up doing something hilariously funny or clever I’d reward them for it regardless of how the dice worked out for them.
They had other narrative things to contend with like a rival courier group and the prospect of a prize from Santa for completing deliveries quickly, efficiently and safely as well to keep them engaged in the little story that there was. I also included a Chuck E. Cheese analog in the for of Cheddar Chandler’s Exploratorium, a place that was in the middle of renovations to become a more teen friendly affair called Cheddar Chandler’s Extreme Teen-a-torium. It was a place of dangerous and unfinished challenges like rope swings, scaling big walls, and vague obstacle courses, all of which culminated on the arcade and show floor of the establishment, where the party would face off against a monstrous version of Cheddar Chandler himself, along with his army of break dancing teens.
While that was a blast, there were some other missions that didn’t make the cut for time purposes. For instance, there was an abandoned guild hall that a bunch of goblins had turned into an evil snowman production facility, which seems really normal when you consider that the other scenarios were Home Alone and Die Hard related missions. I wanted to really hit those classic holiday themes hard.
The whole thing culminated in a showdown on the warehouse floor of the Holly Jolly Wish Fulfillment Center against the rival courier group and a bunch of Santa’s elves. They’d come to find that Santa had been corrupted by the magic of being Santa for so long and became just wildly evil, to the point where he had brainwashed the rival couriers into fighting the party. There were some cool things in the factory the party could mess with such as dangerously high speed conveyor belts, explosive barrels and forklifts which one player did try to use, but lacked a key to turn the thing on.
At the end of it all, they’d be tasked with picking a new Santa Claus for the next few centuries. I had no idea how that would end or who they would choose, so I just kind of didn’t write an ending outside of some flowery language around how beautiful the holidays were. Alas, neither group ever made it that far but I sure had a blast running this campaign anyway, and I know they did too. And that’s kind of the only thing that matters, isn’t it?
It’s been a bit since I’ve actually told a story from my D&D games, hasn’t it? Lately I’ve been prattling on about my ethos and how I prep for games, but sometimes all you need is a good story about players being overly confident. So buckle in everyone, cause this one is short but oh so sweet.
For context, our DM had a lot of affinity for the Dragonlance universe, so we ultimately decided to play through a module of their choosing using the D&D rule-set. I don’t know if Dragonlance is its own game or set of modules or something, but I was interested to play it regardless, and so was the rest of my party.
The story was mostly spearheaded through our cleric, a man on a mission to restore the power of the gods who had abandoned the region for some reason. So in a very Wizard of Oz kind of way, the backstory was set up with the cleric meeting each of us on his travels, conscripting us into is mission. Each character had their motivation for finding the gods except mine, who was more loyal to the cleric than his mission. They were buds.
So we wandered around, going village to village in search of anyone who could help point us in the direction of a way to achieve our goal of bringing the gods back. After a few sessions, an NPC we all hated, and a terrible boating incident, we found ourselves deep in a forest where we were on the trail of a derelict temple to the gods. In said forest, we found a village of these dragonborn folks who were praying to an effigy of a big dragon. We had no reason to engage with them outside of the fact that this was the first non-swamp related thing we’d seen in about 3 sessions.
One of the many problems we had was that we’d been fighting these dudes in small packs all throughout the swamp, so they had made it clear they were hostile. We luckily had the drop on them, as they were staring at their effigy in prayer while we approached from behind them. Just to be clear, there were enough of them to fuck us up as efficiently as possible. So we had to devise a clever plan to get by them for reasons I still am not entirely sure about. But unfortunately, overconfidence trumped careful planning which prompted our warlock to flex his charismatic muscles.
He elegantly pranced over to the dragonborn clan, whispering sweet nothings into their ears and caressing their cheeks with the back of his palm. It was like watching a ribbon dancer perform without said ribbon. As he performed his floor routine in front of the dragonborns, who were now facing in the direction of where we were hiding, he played his dumbest card yet. Quick side note here, he was not a dragonborn, he was just a dude. That’s important to know because he literally tried to convince these fools that he was their god in humanoid form as a way to get them to not attack us anymore.
It was sultry, it was sexy, and it was the best plan he could come up with. With a plan this stupid, how could it not work? Well the dice found a way to fuck us, and our warlock couldn’t charm these lads with his puny roll of 13. So suddenly our warlock found himself on the wrong side of a wall of fire that placed him in a closed arena with about 15 angry dragonborn who just witnessed this megalomaniac try to be the focus of their idolatry. Not a great position to be in.
Initiative was rolled, the dragonborn all got into perfect ass-kicking formation around our warlock, and then my turn came around. I was a tiefling monk, which meant I could both move very quickly and resist fire damage. Wall of Fire is a spell that requires you to make a dexteriy saving throw that if you fail, you take 5d8 fire damage, also known as just enough damage to kill a stupid warlock. So I used my mobility spells and natural fire resistance in tandem, couple that with a good saving throw to avoid the brunt of the fire damage, and I was able to leap through the wall of fire, grab a stupid warlock, and drag him back to the other side.
He failed his saving throw to get through the fire, but we were able to heal him quickly enough and bail out on the entire dragon cult thing. We chastised him appropriately and continued our adventure. But for the briefest of moments, there was the possibility that we could have made an army of dragonborn wreck shop in our stead. And honestly, isn’t that what D&D is all about?
This week has and continues to be surprisingly busy for me, which hasn’t left me a ton of time to play the games I’ve wanted to. Alongside that, I’ve been neck deep in preparing and running my D&D campaign, which requires an alarming amount of time and dedication. I genuinely don’t know how people could balance that workload along with leading a normal, pre-pandemic life. But anyway, let’s recap the week.
First and foremost, Baldur’s Gate III was released into early access which was both exciting and extremely disappointing. While the game shows incredible promise, but in its current state it just isn’t the solo D&D experience I’m looking for. It did make me excited about a CRPG for the first time in my life. I suspected at one point that Baldur’s Gate III might be the game to do that, but I’m glad to see that “prophecy” fulfilled. I have no doubt that with time many, if not all of my issues with the game will be addressed in some way, but right now I’m taking it easy and letting the game marinate.
Aside from that, I tried out some demos from the Steam Game Festival over the weekend, and while some of them were okay, nothing really blew me away. That is with the exception of a game called SuchArt!. SuchArt! puts you in the position of one of the only, if not the only remaining human artist alive, which I think is because the robots that rule this universe are incapable of making good art or something. Robots will send you requests for art pieces that you need to fulfill to the best of your abilities.
What I really enjoy about SuchArt! is how despite its goofy premise, the tools at your disposal to make the art are surprisingly robust. There are several types of brushes, canvases, stencils and other art adjacent tools that may or may not actually be used in art such as hair dryers and Nerf guns that fire paint. It’s extremely goofy, but also very therapeutic and calming to play.
Outside of those two, I’ve played some more NBA 2K21. I enjoy it. It’s fine.
And yeah, it’s just been a lot of D&D prep work on top of all of that. We’re running the latest adventure module, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, which is okay. I’m not a supremely experienced DM by any means, but there are some things in the book, and specifically more that’s missing from the book, that make the whole story feel disjointed and bolted together. There’s been a lot of tweaking I’ve had to do in order to make the story feel cohesive, which might just be a thing that DM’s have to do with these bigger campaigns, but I’m just uncovering that.
Oh, also, I voted. You should vote too. Oh, and wear a fucking mask.
Before I dive into the bulk of this article, it should be mentioned that no video game could ever truly capture the Dungeons & Dragons experience solely because there are static limitations to any video game. You can account for a lot of things as a game designer and try to cater to dozens of styles of play, but no game could adapt to the wild and imaginative things that players regularly ask of their DM’s quite like a living, breathing person present. Yet in spite of all of that Baldur’s Gate III already shows incredible promise when it comes to representing D&D and is a game I’m genuinely enjoying.
Don’t get me wrong, Baldur’s Gate III is a technical mess at the moment but I know what I signed up for when I decided to buy a game that’s in early access. I’m not going to harp on the performance of the game too much, but if you’re curious about what I mean by a “technical mess,” I can summarize that really quickly.
In its current, fresh into early access condition, Baldur’s Gate III runs inconsistently, usually fluctuating anywhere between running at 20 fps to 144 fps on my machine. Lip syncing for the new “cinematic” conversations is basically non-existent, and graphical glitches from T-posing, duplicating NPC’s you’re actively talking to, and ragdolls going wild are common occurrences. That kind of stuff is all bound to be smoothed over during the course of their early access period, so I’m not worried about that.
With that said, there are some things I would very much like to see fixed, changed and improved that pertain more to how the Dungeons & Dragons rules are translated into a video game. While this article isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, it does represent the things that I have personally noticed. I really love D&D, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in its mechanics or lore, so this is truly just representative of how I enjoy playing Dungeons & Dragons.
SHOW ME THE NUMBERS
In D&D you have a core set of skills like strength or wisdom, that as you pour stat points into them you’re granted a higher modifier. A modifier is the number you add to your roll or in some cases subtract from it, representing…well your skill at a particular ability. For instance, a rogue is going to be pretty good at sneaking around, picking pockets and doing cool flips, so their dexterity score and thus, modifier are going to be higher. Without just explaining the rules of D&D anymore than I already have, the rogue would have a couple of numbers they can add to a D20 roll in order to clear the difficulty class (DC) that represents how hard what they’re attempting is.
A DC of 7?
Baldur’s Gate III does this as well, but oddly enough reverses it. Instead of you adding numbers to a roll to clear a DC, all of your stats and bonuses subtract from the DC. It may not sound like a big deal, but after years of playing D&D it’s an incredibly jarring change. I suspect that the reason for this change is to make it simpler for new players with little to no experience with D&D to comprehend what’s going on. It’s obfuscating the math as not to confuse people and just have them focus on the dice roll itself, but that should definitely be something I can toggle on and off. As a player and a DM, I want to see those numbers.
Also, it just feels better to roll higher numbers than it is to roll low ones.
CHECKS, PLEASE
Considering that there isn’t really a DM in Baldur’s Gate III outside of a narrator who pops in regularly to make you feel like everything you’re doing is wrong, there isn’t much of a way to just perform random skill checks as far as I can tell. In D&D, if I find myself in an ancient library as a barbarian, I’m going to just sit back and contemplate how flammable these “books” as you call them, actually are. Yet if I’m a big brainy wizard, I’m going to be rolling arcana and history checks like they’re going out of style.
Half of the fun of playing D&D is being able to uncover clues or lore about the world through performing well timed checks. Being able to do a perception check when I enter a room or run a nature check on a potentially poisonous berry are just a sliver of ways that players get to feel powerful and useful as their characters.
There isn’t really any of that going on in Baldur’s Gate III however. The way that certain skill checks are handled is kind of bizarre and a little too passive for my liking. The only active checks I can perform are in dialogue situations, where I pick the line of dialogue that allows me to roll an insight or deception check. I understand this limitation in conversations because the alternative would be an colossal feat of programming. Allowing me to just roll whatever check I want in any and all conversations seems akin to asking Larian Studios to work on Baldur’s Gate III till the end of time.
But outside of conversations and combat, it’s just weird to me how pushed into the background a lot of these checks are. Almost every skill check that occurs while exploring is transformed into a passive check. I assume the game is rolling a dice in the background, but it’s still incredibly weird that I have no say over what check I’m rolling and when. I wouldn’t mind if there was some sort of “active DM” situation that would prompt me to roll a stealth check when I wander into a bad situation unwittingly. And if I do succeed on a passive perception check it would be nice to know what it is I noticed, because virtual Ari might see it, but flesh Ari does not.
While I’m bellyaching about the checks in Baldur’s Gate III, I wouldn’t mind if the game slowed itself down entirely to act like a DM. If there’s a trap I’ve wandered into, stop the game and bring up a menu that says, “hey, you fucked up and didn’t check for traps cause we don’t let you just do that, and now you’ve gotta roll dexterity saving throws for these party members. Good luck!” That’s the kind of D&D stuff I’m looking for from Baldur’s Gate III.
I think I just want Baldur’s Gate III to capture the feeling of sitting down to play D&D more than I want it to capture the world and lore. Sure those things are important to me, but when I ask for more transparency in dice rolls and checks, it’s because I’m trying to get that rush of playing D&D out of Baldur’s Gate III first and foremost.
PARTY PLAY
This one is genuinely confusing to me, because it’s such an important part of the communal experience of D&D that its absence from the game is beyond odd. In D&D, your character cannot and should not be a skeleton key that can just do everything. Your characters are supposed to be flawed and fallible, which is why adventures travel in parties. The wizard may be a really smart magic-man, but he needs the fighter and her strength to defend him cause he’ll just get squished like a bug.
In its very early access state, Baldur’s Gate III seems to miss that mark by a wide margin. At the moment, my party has a cleric, fighter, rogue and a warlock, all with different skills and proficiencies that should work fairly well together. In combat, different skills and abilities work wonderfully together. Having the rogue shoot an oil barrel causing its contents to create a puddle under my enemies, followed by my warlock igniting said oil was a satisfying example of synergy, but outside of combat that isn’t really the case.
What isn’t in Baldur’s Gate III is an easy way to compare the skills and proficiencies of your characters without having to dig through a menu. So when I’m trying to break down a door or disarm a trap, I have to make an assumption on the fly of who to send to tackle said obstacle. Giving me a prompt or tool tip that just says like, “lock picking check” and then an ordered list of who in my party has the highest relevant skill for it would be nice.
But the most infuriating example of this is in situations where you have to talk to people. Baldur’s Gate III doesn’t do a great job of incorporating the rest of your party into your conversations. Sure, their lifeless husks will loom in the background unblinking while a man tells you the sad story about his brother or whatever, but they won’t help you in any way. For instance, if my character had a super low charisma score, I’d have to live with that every single time I entered into a conversation with someone. I wouldn’t be able to let the smooth talking bard (who isn’t in the game yet) do their thing and schmooze people over, no, instead Gronk the dwarf with a brain injury is going to ruminate on the income disparities that run rampant throughout the city of Waterdeep. That’ll fucking go well.
All I’m saying is, the adventuring party relies on one another for their talents and abilities, and I feel like Baldur’s Gate III doesn’t deliver on that in certain aspects of their game to varying degrees.
WAIT, I WANT TO GO BACK
There are times in D&D where a player might have a plan in their mind that they try to enact, only to find out that mechanically it wouldn’t be possible. That’s the good thing about having a cool DM, they’ll let you know that your harebrained scheme isn’t going to work or they might even work with you to make that nonsense happen. What’s even cooler is when a DM let’s you rewrite your turn upon finding out that said nonsense isn’t going to work.
Baldur’s Gate III is not a cool DM and is a bit of an asshole when it comes to you being able to fix your mistakes. Now I’m not asking for Baldur’s Gate III to allow me to just try out spells on enemies till I get the result I like or anything, but I don’t think it would be a big deal if it let me undo my movement if I haven’t taken an action yet. With the camera and path-finding in Baldur’s Gate III being what it is, which is to say it’s bad, being able to undo your movement in your turn would be extremely helpful.
Too often I’ll find that I’ve wasted my movement, taken an opportunity attack, and ended up in prime position to be blasted by 3 wizards and an archer. All of this could be fixed with a simple “undo” button. To be entirely fair though, that button may exist somewhere, but lord knows I haven’t found it yet.
STOP, NO, WAIT, GO THERE
I never thought an isometrically oriented game could have so many camera and movement control issues, but here we are. It’s borderline maddening how many times I’ll try clicking on something that I can clearly see, only for my character to interpret “go there” as, “climb that mountain behind you.”
Part of this frustration has to do with the camera, which might function exactly like it did in Larian’s previous titles, but I couldn’t say for sure. But in Baldur’s Gate III, the camera does this cut away trick to reveal the area in front of and around you while dissolving any trees or natural coverings that would normally obscure you to account for whatever angle you’re viewing the action from. Think of how The Sims does it, where those things are still there, but you need to rotate the camera to see them again.
What Baldur’s Gate III does which has resulted in my great frustration, is allowing me to click on things that I can’t see. There was an instance where there was a natural stone archway that formed out of the side of mountain that had a road running underneath it. I made the mistake of stopping too close to the archway I suppose, which resulted in me trying to click further up the road to progress forward, but the cursor actually clicked the top of the archway that was dissolved away by the camera. I couldn’t see the thing I just clicked on, but my party tried to climb that archway with gusto.
Luckily for me though, there wasn’t an actively burning fire on the way up the mountain or else my party would have just charged right in there without any sort of self-preservation in mind. For instance, during the tutorial you find yourself in an area where fire is happening all around you and you need to kind of just walk past it. There’s a pretty large path to follow, but your characters only know of the most efficient route to get to where you clicked, which is barreling straight through regardless of what’s in their way.
The amount of accidental fire damage I’ve take in Baldur’s Gate III already is alarming, and I really hope the path-finding gets better cause I’ve already wiped my entire party because instead of running around the combat encounter, they walked right into and stopped in a puddle of grease putting them in prime roasting position. It was a nice present for my enemies I suppose.
WHERE IS IT?
Look, I don’t have a ton of experience with games like Baldur’s Gate III so I’m sure that a cluttered inventory and unorganized hotbar are just expected at this point, but the way in which Baldur’s Gate III “organizes” your spells is truly abysmal. For those who don’t know, casting spells in D&D is a bit of a process that involves making sure you have the spell slots available, picking a level, and then casting the spell and rolling its damage. If that didn’t make any sense to you, that’s fine, just know that Baldur’s Gate III makes finding your spells a chore.
Instead of giving me a list of spells I could cast and then asking me what level spell slot I want to burn on it, they just give you an icon for each spell at each level. Wanna cast magic missile at level 2? Well you gotta scroll through the hotbar to find the magic missile icon with a little roman numeral 2 on it. It’s painfully unintuitive at the moment, but I suspect it’s a remnant of trying to shove the D&D mechanics into Divinity: Original Sin II‘s engine.
Your spells are also just kind shoved into the hotbar all willy-nilly, something I think you can reorganize, but it crams everything your character can do into it with no organization. For instance, I have a fighter in my party who can perform strikes that can cause the fear condition in an enemy. I recently leveled her up in a way where she’s received some spells she can use as well. Instead of separating those skills into folders that are marked as “fighter abilities” or “cantrips,” it’s just all kind tossed in there for you to click through along with the myriad of spell scrolls you pick up, making combat kind of a slog when it’s the turn of a magic user.
In the same vein, the initiative tracker is absolute garbage and needs to be changed entirely. There are times where it’s supposed to be my turn, but then someone else just gets to cut in front of me for some reason. I’ve even had instances where a character I’m controlling will get two turns in one round. It’s bizarre.
AM I THE ONLY ONE PLAYING BY THE RULES?
I don’t want to be that guy or anything, but it sure does feel a bit like the enemies in Baldur’s Gate III are just kind of freestyling it when it comes to their abilities. I noticed this very early on when there’s a goblin attack you find yourself in the middle of. I’ve played enough Dungeons & Dragons to know the goblin stats pretty damn well, so I took notice when the goblin took more than 7 HP worth of damage and still lived.
Goblin – D&D Beyond
It’s a really weird an unwelcome choice to tinker around with the stats of enemies when you’ve got literal books worth of reference material to pull from. I understand the need to alter things to make them work in a video game, but this one seemed completely unnecessary. Now I can’t use the Monster Manual as my own personal strategy guide.
I’VE PLAYED THIS GAME BEFORE
If there is one thing to me that is more damming about Baldur’s Gate III than anything else I’ve already mentioned, it’s that this game feels awfully similar to another Larian Studios game, Divinity: Original Sin II. I didn’t play very much Divinity: Original Sin II, but I sure as hell played enough to recognize it when juxtaposed with what’s supposed to be a game recreating the D&D mechanics. Aside from both games having a ton of visual similarity, there are two mechanics that I’ve personally seen that made me feel like I was playing a version of Divinity that was cosplaying as D&D.
First and foremost has to be the movement and map structure. I know it’s way more dynamic and interesting if you can have free access to just about anywhere on the map during a combat encounter, but for a game trying to present the rules of D&D accurately, there should be some sort of grid-based movement. In D&D, each grid block is supposed to represent 5 feet, which is important to know and be aware of considering how many things are tied to your precise position.
I hate this stupid hat, but it gives me +1 to dex saves
For example, I tried to set up this choke-point in a hallway that would effectively be a gauntlet of blades for the enemies trying to escape and alert their buddies. I managed to get 3 of my party members in what I assumed was stabbing range, but these enemies just found this sliver of daylight and plowed throw untouched like they were Barry Sanders or something. It’s things like this that make me yearn for some grid that confined movement or even an arrow I can point that’ll alert me about what I’m getting myself into if I move somewhere.
The other Divinity-esque thing I’ve seen is how much Baldur’s Gate III incorporates environmental effects and hazards into its gameplay. At first, the ability to knock over a bucket of water onto an enemy and light them up with a lighting bolt for extra damage seems awesome, but then you might find a pathway obscured by some fire and have to make the choice of burning a spell slot on it or not. These choices certainly come up in standard D&D play, but the frequency at which these hazards present themselves are a little too much for my tastes.
Like I said, I haven’t played a lot of Divinity: Original Sin II, but from my understanding you have less resource intensive ways of dealing with things like that than you do in D&D.
ROLL THEM BONES
Okay this one is really just me being ridiculous, but I stand by the fact that it should be more fun to roll the dice than it actually is. Clicking a big die and watching the numbers change is fine and all, but what if there was like a physics driven dice I could roll? That would be a lot of fun for me, a simpleton who is easily amused by physics in video games. It would also make it feel more like I was playing D&D proper.
Despite all of my bellyaching about some of the mechanics in Baldur’s Gate III, I’m really enjoying it for what it is. It’s very early and I’m sure I’m not saying anything the developers haven’t already heard, but as someone who plays Dungeons & Dragons regularly these were just some of the things that stood out to me. I haven’t dipped into the multiplayer just yet due to reports of it being busted, but I look forward to giving that a shot once a few patches hit.
I know worrying about certain mechanics that are present in this current version of Baldur’s Gate III is premature at best, and I’m sure Larian Studios will make great strides over the course of their period of early access. It’s going to be a long time before Baldur’s Gate III fully releases, and by then I’m sure I’ll barely be able to recognize it as the same thing I’m playing now.
Ultimately, I might be looking for something that Baldur’s Gate III cannot or isn’t attempting to deliver on. I want that feeling of playing Dungeons & Dragons more than anything else. It’s a big ask for sure, but I feel like this is the closest I’ve come to getting to play a single player D&D game in the rule set that I know. I might take a break from Baldur’s Gate III until some more patches and fixes get implemented, but I can assure I’ll be reading the patch notes that come with every update just to see if it’s the right time to dive back in.
Welcome to another fantastic edition of this blog where I sometimes talk about video games. Boy howdy are there a ton of video games I want to talk about this week, I’m basically swimming in rewarding gameplay experiences that I’m eager to discuss. It’s hard to convey sarcasm through a written piece, but that was all a big fib. I did a lie. No, this week has mostly been about me reading a book, hearing about how people are enjoying games I know aren’t for me, and watching the slow and steady erosion of our democracy continue unabated. So hell yeah, video game blog time!
Honestly it’s been a week of just reading through the latest Dungeons & Dragons module, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, and preparing to run that for my group. You can read more about what that process has been like in September’s Master of Disaster feature on “prepping,” but to quickly summarize, it’s been a lot of work and a lot of fun. It’s consuming most of my time these days but I’m enjoying the process of it all.
Rime of the Frostmaiden – Wizard’s of the Coast (Image Published on IGN)
Otherwise I’m just kind of watching people lose their collective minds over the release of Hades and Spelunky 2, two rouge-like games that I know aren’t for me. But seeing all of this praise being dumped on these games is making me feel like I owe it to myself to at least give them a shot. I’m really in a holding pattern until next week when Baldur’s Gate III enters early access and the desire to play other games will leave my body.
Oh, and there’s that clusterfuck of a “pre-order” situation that Sony and Microsoft both waded into unwittingly that’s been interesting to watch. For those who don’t know what happened, both Sony and Microsoft had some pretty rough pre-order snafus, with people even ordering the wrong Xbox in some cases. It was bad, and even though I literally just wrote about my wanting both Sony and Microsoft to delay their consoles, I still keep trying to get a PS5 anyway. Like, there’s barely anything to play on launch day as is, but I just want the new shiny thing! I can’t buy a 3000 series graphics card because I’d literally have to upgrade everything else in my computer to accommodate it so I want the funny looking PlayStation instead!
But hey, all of that is small potatoes when stacked up against the deluge of bullshit that’s currently going on in the world. So do yourselves a favor, check your voter registration and make sure you vote on November 3rd. Seriously, it’s fucking grim out there and it’s getting worse every day.
The Bonus World 