My Life as a Drowid, 1: Who Are You?

"I'm just an ex-con trying to go straight and get my kids back."

- Bender the Robot's crowd-pleasing wrestler persona

________________________________________

Spoilert: as this series is both commentary and a playthrough summary, expect a few first-act spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3.

________________________________________

 

 

(edit: Fuck Drizzt.)

 

It's late August, when an old man's fancy turns to Faerun. Being still relatively new to DnD 5e, I won't bother moving away from my standard Wizard / Druid preference. Having already created a wood elf party in Solasta with myself as Druid, I was edging toward something short and wizardly, but my jaunt through early access indicated drow might be major players in this campaign. Also, the focus on Illithids (especially on hard difficulty) makes me want something with a high will save... or WIS save, whateverthefuck 5e uses. And I just happen to have a combo in mind that's always intrigued me.

Werwolfe, drowid extraordinaire, at your service.

I mean, the Underdark has a fully thriving ecosystem, the management of which should supply an albeit narrower niche for druids adapted to under-ness and dark-ness. And, seeing as drow males are already frequently relegated to the status of pet mages on a leash, it should suit my support caster preference just dandy. Stands to reason the wealthier mistresses must have some use for shroomers and umber-wranglers, and the "spore" subclass cinched the deal. Infectious glory unto Her Legginess Lolth!

 

I don't want to completely replay my Kingmaker mystic theurge though, so instead of Lolth-centric poison spells, I'll likely steer more toward creepy-crawlies, rocks and vines. No light spells! - and as little fire as possible. For central companions, the gith bitch is a must, plus a little peek at the roster suggests I may be able to recruit the drow ambassador to the goblins. Plus maybe the obligatory rogue? Shadowheart picks too many fights with Lae-Lae. The wizard and warlock transgress my No Filthy Hu-Mons rule. Eh, play it by pointy ear.

 

The campaign starts much like my barbarian from the preorder did, especially as druids have lost much of their personality by the loss of their animal companions. (Hell, if any core class feature were done away with, it should be the shapeshifting, but that's a lengthier discussion on its own.) At low levels at least, playing a druid now just feels like an armor-gimped cleric with no turning.

I will concede that race, class and skill checks are so far quite frequently integrated into convos, talking to many animals, up to the point of my drow being able to take some quintessentially drow-ish actions like murdering a goblin child for talking trash at me. Let me restate my appreciation for Larian's sheer work-hour investment, at least thus far supplying an impressive array of gameplay flavors. They sure saw me coming:

also a critic third and a fashion victim fourth

Combo dialogue options crop up far more regularly than in most cRPGs. Sadly, the very next encounter also shows that no amount of effort will compensate for skewed priorities:

To set Kagha up as antagonist and 'proper' druidism as benevolent flower power, I got fed four redundant options, all to refuse punishing the little brat who tried stealing a prized artifact crucial to a community's last line of defense. Eventually, even unmasking Kagha's motivations results in the dialogue dangling the possibility of siding with the shadow druids (which would certainly be in my interest) only to pull it away at the last second. This pattern seems to be repeating constantly. While you can make violent or diplomatic decisions (perhaps with some impact on your playthrough, remains to be seen) anyone can make those decisions with variations in flavor text. The odd infanticide aside, drowids don't do things differently than other class/race combos; they do the same thing on different pretexts.

Now, granted, that's still a lot more than DnD games used to offer. Plus, given most of Larian's potential customers think "RPG" means either an MMO or Diablo-clone action game where your character's background influences nothing beyond what color l4z0rz you shoot at the space-goblins, I might have to provide some context for my eventual point. Let's see...

- and neither's she, but who's counting?

 

That's from Kingdom Come: Deliverance, one of the most beautifully immersive games I've ever seen. It achieved that status in no small part by portraying the cognitive and behavioral restrictions inherent in its medieval setting - a world where everybody knew their places. (Usually at the bottom.) Though linear, its quests felt meaningful for characters' awareness of their circumstances. By definition, most don't get to be exceptions to the rule. Peasant or foreigner, lord, priest or refugee, its characters actually stay in character.

BG3 on the other hand makes a deliberate point of nobody's background constraining them in the slightest.

The first time you meet ogres, they're led by a smart one.

The first drow you talk to is a religious convert, as are the goblins discoursing in grammatically complete patois.

Even the second Illithid you meet is a benevolent healer - a fucking mind flayer! (Not to mention his hobgob bestie.)

Everybody's an exception! Everybody's a precious little unique snowflake! Everybody's oh-so-goshdoggoned speshul I could just wring their posturing necks!

The stupidest though would have to be the tieflings, who snatch the plucky misunderstood minority relay from the Drizzts I was afraid I'd be stumbling over. Guess the elfemism treadmill keeps spinning.

"And that would be bad."

Dem devilspawn's jus' reg'lr folks like yew'n'me, a-yup, jes a-tryin' a git by in this here big crazy world, salt o' tha urth, ah tell ya. (I guess sulfide salts count?) It jumps the shark though on meeting your companion Karlach, whom you're sent to hunt down as a violent criminal -

 

"how could I possibly be wrong and attractive at the same time?"

 - only to of course not only spare her (despite not really denying the nebulous charges) based on nothing more than having an honest face, but furthermore let her convince you to butcher a trio of paladins she claims are false. Based on what evidence, you ask? 'Take my word for it, I'm horny!' (And yes, of course she turns out to be right despite the utter lack of evidence or justification; she's a pulp fiction heroine.)

And yes, obviously Larian did none of this by accident. This is very much not a case of incompetence or phoning it in. BG3's writing (while not exceptionally daring so far) is both skillful and amazingly detailed without ever dragging. These are competent and aware professionals merely giving the audience what it apparently wants, following a trend that began decades ago with denying the sexes are different and ramped up significanly with Drizzt and every munchkin wanting to play a reformed badass from an evil race. The politically correct spin on devilspawn as misunderstood victims of circumstance just follows naturally on the heels of past pretence.

 

Except games have rules and the rules lend relevance to our choices and our gains. Sure, biology may not be destiny but it does skew most aspects of one's mentality. An exception here and there, okay... but when everyone's special, nobody is, and instead of immersion you start feeling like NPCs are just cheating their way off-script left and right. You un-suspend a great deal of disbelief via the impression that everyone's playing Calvinball with D20s.

____________________________________________

 

P.S.: As a good counterpoint to BG3's tieflings, take Pathfinder: Wrath of the Rightous' arguably best-written character, Woljif, who not only portrays the chaotic neutral archetype surprisingly well, but teeters believably at the edge of his demonic heritage.

It's 9 a.m.

Today's weather report reads a maximum of 29C and we've already hit thirty. Man, this is just not gonna be a golden age for meteorologists, is it?

Far: Lone Sails

Man, that was a long way to go just to scare one damn bird.

 

(Also, for a game called Lone Sails, it takes you a while to find the sails.)

 

Having merely skimmed its description, I cringed on discovering my $5 purchase fundamentally a platform-jumping game. I generally despise platformers as a simpleton's definition of "game" bogging down an entire creative medium in Donkey's primitive Kongs, in three buttons and zero thought. The last one I actually liked was the first Trine. On the other hand, platformers also appear the quintessential student project in game design, and more apt to play around with novel aesthetics to dress up that antiquated hopping. There's a lot to be said for art grants.*

Despite my prejudice, I found myself enjoying what ultimately turned out to be equal parts very simple platform jumping, walking simulator and resource management. Load up on fuel cans to gas up your "okomotive" and pay attention to favorable winds, solve some simple sequence/physics puzzles by jumping on buttons, and when push comes to shove... pull. Its brevity leaves little else to say in terms of gameplay. I did manage to die twice, merely by standing in things you really shouldn't stand in, but the only time I really got stumped turned out I'd forgotten I even had a winch for stacking so much junk on its shelf.

Play for the melancholy, barren landscapes. In fact, Far: Lone Sails makes the perfect counterpoint to Ashwalkers with its mountains of interface timesinks passed off as dramatic tension. The only point here when I felt pointlessly stalled for the sake of padding out run time was in trying to figure out whether any of the debris I kept collecting had any utility. Otherwise the lonesome, utterly depopulated landscape rolls past at a satisfying clip and the few special effects are well weighed against overuse. Proof that even bad precepts can be handled well.

 

 

______________________________________________

* Zurich again, two posts in a row. What were the damn odds?

I had avoided meeting you / with a refusal in my turned head

"My sister says she never dreams at night
There are days when I know why"

 

Suzanne Vega - Rosemary

 

 

I just flew into town and boy are my jokes tired!

 

I vacationed, saw family, was roped by them into also visiting Naples and its surroundings, so I might have something to say about Pompeii in the future. It really is an amazing place. But the trip was damned exhausting, and more frequently infuriating despite the artistic wonders and lovely locales. Suffice to say that in the past 1600 years, nobody has ever complimented the Italian people on their organizational skills.

All the preppy couples showing off in various resorts, however, put a severe strain on my philosophy that sex is not real. It's bad enough walking around attractive females in skimpy outfits, but it hurts, physically hurts to walk past couples and suffer my instincts howling at me, demanding why each of those four billion males have always been considered better options than myself, personal freedom and agency be damned. Ah, well. Over now. Good riddens to false ideals.

As for what's next here at the Den, I've kept saying these past years that I want to get back into attempting some fiction stories, but that'll be some months on. For now, since my vacation was also a vacation from games, it'll be mostly that for the near future, likely revolving around a playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3.

P.S.: Zurich wins at airports.

Werwolfe in the can

"Ben’s column has appeared every day. I don’t ordinarily read it - but I’ve made it my business to know, this time."
"Canned columns! Mr. Kilgallen told me so."
"Of course. Some of Ben’s perennial series on corrupt campaign funds. That’s a subject as safe as being in favor of Christmas."

 

- Stranger in a Strange Land

 

 

Help, I've been abducted for holding alien thoughts!

I'm leaving to visit family soon and though I could log in from there I'd rather not bother, so I'll be doing something unprecedented in my dozen years ranting nonsensically: set up a buffer of posts in advance, just like them professional-type journalists and sequential artists. So tune in, dear readers, over the coming six weeks and you'll be treated to not one but two sundry daguerreotypes, two Cowboy Bebop reminiscences, two webcomic reviews, two gaming commentaries, one anti-religious rant, two rants against the wokeysition, and also some puns 'cause they've really been piling up. Or should I say punning up? I probably shouldn't.

 

On second thought, I don't want my apartment burgled for broadcasting it'll be empty, so I'm moving this announcement to my return date.

No matter though, I'm sure it'll make just as much sense then.

Ah, professionalism.

__________________________________________

edit 2023/07/19

Hmph. I didn't entirely make it. Had to log in while away to write up or edit several pages, and one long rant was replaced by a blurb about Cole Porter. So much for my half-assed attempt at amateur professionalism. I remain, as always, Chaotic Neutral.

Bite me.

Ah, well, c'est la vie, might as well play it where it lies and let this auto-publish as scheduled.

Stink for Venus

Even all these years later, it's weird to rediscover that Waltz for Venus remains my favorite Cowboy Bebop episode -

biostatic

- and I don't know exactly why.

It's melodramatic, sure. I am hardly immune to melodrama. But then Bebop dedicated about a third of its episodes to decomposing lives and lost hopes. What makes this different? I suppose, true to its title, it's slow. Soft. Low key. But more than most, via Spike's reluctant mentorship it reiterated the first episode's likeness of the hunter to his bounty, ensuring the heroes' continuity with the rest of their world instead of elevating them to the status of HEROES writ large and in charge, invincible and unstoppable. There's also something about the deadly weed theme that hits me personally. Several of my own attempts at fiction harp on "suicide by plant" or the terror of vegetative encroachment, of... growth. Growths. Growth-ing.

But I hadn't remembered the ending's pretty good as well. Take a Futurama episode, The Sting, for comparison. The bulk of it revolves around Leela, poisoned, thinking she'd gotten her infatuated subordinate Fry killed, gradually drifting into insanity with recurring fantasies of Fry telling her to wake up. Eventually she does... to discover she's been in a coma all the time since getting poisoned, with Fry never leaving her side. They embrace, we fade to black - and hear their voices whispering to each other:

"You could really use a shower."

"You too."

That's trust. And it puts the whole rest of the episode into perspective, making you wonder how much of Fry's intrusion upon Leela's coma dreams resulted from his calling to her to wake up, and how much merely proves his pre-existing role as her emotional anchor, the trust she did not even realize she held in him, and not merely guilt as she'd thought.

And that's what makes Waltz for Venus doubly tragic. It's easy to assume the hero's wisdom, but ultimately we don't know whether Spike is right or wrong in his final decision not to divulge Rocco's secret. Maybe it would just be needlessly cruel. Letting one sibling hate the other may be a smaller burden than guilt. But truth is a far more important burden with which those close to each other should, ideally, by definition, share. The siblings' devotion is not in question. But Spike's secrecy, if insightful, projects a lack of trust in each other's decisions upon them which in turn calls into question the validity of Rocco's efforts and risks. Were they really that close, or was it all societal guilt and duty and heroic fantasies? Would they trust each other for a sniff test?

Another random picture:

 

popular stump

Dunno much from shrooms, so can't even identify them. Pretty, though. Pretty, pretty mold.

We've Often Rewound the Clock

Cole Porter's Anything Goes is usually presented as a triumphant slam against antiquated mores - which, in fairness, it largely was. But its tongue-in-cheek feigned outrage loops back in on itself several times belying its own upbeat message. I'm not willing to take it for granted that Porter considered four-letter words an advancement in prose, or that he saw any grand purpose in Vanderbilts losing the shirt off their backs while Rockefellers continued to hoard enough money to fund lavish productions. Certainly the line "me undressed you like" (sung in his name by a female character in the original production) thickly underlined his frustration that his own thing didn't quite yet go.

Well, it's a Plymouth or two later, and now his thing is the only thing that goes. A gay man staring at a straight man's ass in an unimpeachable saint, but a straight man staring at a woman's ass is condemned as a pervert. In our new olden days a glimpse of stocking really is looked on as something shocking - not because of the stocking itself but because glimpsing the glimpsable has been criminalized.

 

I think Porter was smarter than his fans give him credit for, and this particular song not quite the conqueror's anthem, not quite the paean to the glories of the moribund jazz age, that it is commonly assumed by casual listeners. Do you think Porter resented or pitied those Puritans crushed under Plymouth Rock? Maybe a bit of both? Maybe by the mid-30s he himself was beginning to suspect that samsara does not discriminate. In that spirit I would address our newly bootstrapped aristocracy, the unassailable saints and self-appointed martyrs leading the rainbow crusade, by borrowing another old phrase by another old man: how long a time do you think you can keep fooling all of the people?

The Houses of Humoring

Thinking on the Houses of Healing, my punny nature suggested one might easily build up a memorable roleplaying location on such a title of bombastic. I imagine they must've had quite a few neighbours, and if the Houses of Healing means hospital, then how about:

The Houses of Hurting   -  (barracks)

The Houses of Hailing   -  (diplomatic corps)

The Houses of Heiling   -  (we don't talk about them)

The Houses of Howling -  (kennels)

The Houses of Holding  -  (jail)

The Houses of Holing    -  (mines)

The Houses of Holing    -  (brothel)

The Houses of Holying  -  (temple)

The Houses of Hilling    -  (construction company)

The Houses of Housing  -  (tenement)

The Houses of Heading  -  (city council)

The Houses of Hedging  -  (casino)

The Houses of Hiding    -  (bank vault)

The Houses of Hiding    -  (bank vault robbers)

The Houses of Hiding    -  (tannery)

The Houses of Hi Ding  -  (where you go to level up)

The Houses of Heiding  -  (an Alpine cabin for little Swiss girls) (in a few years, merges with houses of holing)

 

While this might sound ridiculous at first, it wouldn't take much to implement it in an immersive and fruitful manner. All you need is a city council with a sense of humor. Then, expand upon this first impression and the expectation you've thereby planted in your audience's mind by showing those councillors as bad governors - or! - display them as competent in serious matters but still maintaining a sense of humor.