This Blog Needs an Enema

Assuming anyone ever skims over these months, I wonder if you've figured out yet that I'm temporizing with these onceuponatime posts because I want to devote more time to fiction writing? I mean, some won't be posted here anyway, but I do want to get the brain uploading story written before it gets obsoleted by real-life brain uploading.

 

Also when I started this damn thing was only supposed to last a couple of months, so not only did I never set up my categories carefully but I made myself a few notes. Drafts with only a topic line. And then I got distracted, and got more ideas which I got distracted from, and the half dozen original topic lines turned into twenty, and I kept assuming I'd get around to them eventually, except I keep reading and playing new stuff and the world keeps spinning and the twenty subjects turned into forty and I thought oh man, this is getting ridiculous, but I'll work through my backlog soon except I took so long that some became outdated but I thought of ways to work them into new topics and sometimes I didn't and the subject lines kept piling up and my fiction ideas have been getting nowhere because I keep getting distracted by the more easily-written blog and I've got all these old posts at the end of which I said I'd continue some other time and I lost track of them all, until I got to sixty which I thought was absurd until I hit eighty unwritten drafts and I thought enough is enough I am polishing these off right now or deleting them because most of them are useless bar napkin brain farts anyway, except now I'm closing in on a hundred and AAARGH someone save me from myself!

...

Hold on, that just gave me this really amazing idea...

No!

Nnnooooooooooooo!

Once upon a time, there woes a poor peasant.

My Life as a Drowid, 5: - and a dagger up your strat

The hour grows late. Our winding trail closes in upon itself, the doom scribed by our adventure's inception now calling as with audible voice for its own consummation. Be the planes perverse as some would have it, hold this as proof: that plans should demand so much yet yield so little. What forgotten temples were ground asunder to supply mortar for this?

Murder's child and blood's father, tyranny's toys and hope's martyr, let the hammer not falter. Each temple to ambitions years or centuries in the conniving shatters and rolls along its fellows, but who shall scatter fresh seeds among this rubble? Does the path of the chain-smasher not itself stretch unbroken, link by link past the brink of forgotten free fall, until its rattle knots meaning into an inescapable mantra?

But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!

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Some spoilers for various specific fights and quests in BG3 up to late Act 3 follow.

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Would you like to see the exact moment, early on, when I realized I couldn't hate Baldur's Gate 3?

"they kitties can walk anywhere" indeed

In Act 1, upon having barely stepped into the Shattered Sanctum, intent on burglarizing what I could to buy more gear before getting into fights, I noticed a crack in a wall. So, on an exploratory whim, I burned a shapeshifting charge on cat form and found it allowed me to bypass an ogre guard... and discovered an abandoned temple with a floor puzzle. Curiouser and curiouser. So I solved it, and down I went, and found myself in the Underdark. An entire new zone, a level or two beyond where I should be. But my path onwards was blocked by a minotaur... until I saw, to my delight, that my tiny cat form could not only squeeze through designated shortcuts but through the bars of otherwise locked prison cells. Breaking into prison for safety? Yes, please.

After whittling the guard down with the always useful Halo of Spores I teleported my group in to explore and loot the underdark's easier encounters before tackling harder ones topside.

Want to see the exact moment when I realized I couldn't love BG3?

I carefully set up the gnomes' prison break in Act 2 by sneaking up through the rafters to steal the proverbial tunnelin' spoon and toss it to them, then quietly assassinated the closest patrolling guard, dropped down into the cage and opened it for the rest of my party as we all made a break for the exit. Did it work? No. Because the alarm will sound regardless, at which point the gnomes STOP ESCAPING and the game forces you to fight, regardless of the fact you're already at the damn boats two turns before the first guard arrives.

Apparently it is possible to escape by stealth if your party leaves by another route, but damned if discovering my last hour of gameplay was invalidated didn't put me in a mood to kill everything in sight.

 

BG3 shows not only staggering scope but attention to detail, with almost every quest and every fight offering more than one solution. I've found my druidic crowd control in demand quite a few times, whether it's mummies, grunts or puppies

 

deceptively simple utility items like arrows of darkness can deny enemies useful positioning

and knockbacks into bottomless pits, whether via arrows of roaring thunder or simple shoving, are weighed into many otherwise potentially unwinnable fights like Orin or your first encounter with the hag

 

I was especially gratified to discover lugging a couple jugs of water around all this time yielded a solution to opening the vault door for the Stone Lord quest. Call Lightning, after several levels of being left by the wayside, made short work of Gortash's defensive machinery. Us has helped open doors for an invisible Astarion so he doesn't break his spell, and even humble little Scratch the plucky rescue dog was instrumental in defeating Sarevok, repeatedly "helping" me back up to force Sarevok to run back and forth eating opportunity attacks from Minthara and arrows from Astarion while he downed me ten times over. Even opening fights can usually take more than one route, and once you reach the city proper, rooftop access bypasses several locked doors (e.g. the newspaper or the fireworks shop)

 

Surprisingly often, dialogues even acknowledge you taking alternate routes, like Helsik chiding you for stealing from her or the hag support group all having diferent lines if you kill the hag before meeting them - which I did, stumbling into her lair by accident while exploring some random cellar. But the sheer number of mechanics end up tripping over each other. Sometimes it's direct.

Clearing Hope's prison annoyed me, as the enemies are deliberately given knockbacks to insta-gib you with falling damage, and surprised me when I tried pulling them to a choke point by flying beneath the floating platforms instead. But, as it turns out, the same positioning-aware algorithm leaves them loathe to surrender their initial advantage, meaning they're counterintuitively (for wardens) less disposed to patrol or investigate invisible enemies. So I just had Astarion solo the entire room, potshot by potshot - and it took fewer reloads too.

Again: those useful little arrows of darkness, this time defensive.

An act earlier in the temple of Shar, luring merregons out of their reinforced position proved more effective than I'd even anticipated, as they're programmed to send down one scout at a time.

Which scout I promptly bumrushed, round by round, while ducking behind pillars in the displacer beast's room. And then there were none. Too often you lose track of the line between legitimate strategy and just cheesing a fight. For the uninitiated, in the screenshot opening this post, an ambush is programmed to teleport in before you reach that fallen column bridge, with the challenge being to kill its leader. Okay. So reload, turn invisible and climb up to spawn-camp the leader. Hurray... strategy? I guess? Inasmuch as reloading may be termed strategic?

Quite often the problem comes from Larian not advertising WHICH routes are potentially available. (Compare to Iron Tower's games, Age of Decadence or Colony Ship: often infuriatingly convoluted and difficult, but at least you have some notion of whether TALK or HIT or SNEAK or SABOTAGE is supposed to be viable.) I've complained about this earlier in this series, but I don't agree with the interpretation of "adventure" as blindly stumbling forward on gut instinct and presumed storytelling conventions.

 

The same holds for wandering around otherwise pleasingly gigantic locales pixel-hunting for chat bubbles or highlightable terrain interactions when you're really only looking for one specific quest step advancement. Rogues are exceptionally well integrated into BG3 (especially compared to older fare like NWN2 where Neeshka got one token stealth mission) but even here it's rarely clear what you should be roguing. After blowing up Gortash's mechano-man army I found Wyrm's Rock fortress' bridge drawn up on the Rivington side. Fine, be that way. I decided to sneak Astarion back in from the cliffs to find the mechanism lowering the drawbridge once again... which mechanism, far as I can tell, does not exist. Instead you can reactivate the teleporter inside to TP your party in. Instead of an elegant, in-character and medieval-appropriate solution, you're forced into abusing Larian's idiotic obsession with constant and therefore cheapened teleportation. Other times, what looks to be a stealth mission is hamfistedly negated by GM decree.

 

Umberlee's temple has an area off-limits to riff-raff. Fine, send Astarion in again (vampires: a thousand uses and counting) except it turns out the priestess has infinite DC stealth detection with her back turned for no particular reason and without needing to cast anything. Fine. Supreme Sneak invisibility works... until you loot one pile of chests, at which point the goddess herself tells you off and turns the entire temple hostile, with extra fish-folk icing on top. Soooo... what was the point of that then? Not that the ambush isn't easily discernible for anyone with the slightest bit of metagaming experience, as the devs would only put a pool of water there (with no other objects in the room) for the fish monsters to jump out at you. It's like seeing those different colored wall patches in old cartoons: you know just where Wile E. Coyote's gonna flatten his nose. (And yeah, you can cheese this one too - just teleport out before closing the chest. Don't forget to blast the wall in the back beforehand.)

 

Lastly, let's not forget the times when the developers just got lazy and threw in a generic "fuck you":

Tacticianing the shit out of rolling those dice

Honestly, for enabling different class abilities and spells and quest solutions, BG3 leaves any of its older competitors in the dust, and I can't but congratulate them for it from the bottom of my sneaky cat form to the top of my body-slamming owlbear, from my deepest sporulation to my loftiest super-cooled ice storm. In this respect at least they've more than earned their accolades and skyrocketed sales figures.

But if you've played it (especially on higher difficulty) be honest: you've spent your avatar's every step mashing the quick-save button. As countless reddit threads will attest, this is overwhelmingly not because of "difficulty" in the sense of meaningful, interactable challenge rewarding preparation and foresight, but because the otherwise welcome tangle of options also blindsides you with red herrings or an order of operations you couldn't be expected to know without seeing the equation's answer.

Which is to say: reload.

While some blame lies in poor communication and deliberately abusing reloads to pad "hours played" advertisements, it's also another example of just how little experience the industry as a whole has in letting players drive the action, in designing any gameplay beyond hitting the thing in front of you.

Where's that drawbridge winch, Larian? Where is it?!?

Once upon a patch time, there was app rinse.

Bloodsport

"There are no victories

In all our histories

Without love"

 

Sting - Mad About You

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"Only a few days ago Carlos Suomi's plans for his future would definitely have included Athena. But that was before he had seen her so avidly viewing men killing each other."

Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Planet
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"And die young"

Kill Hannah - Kennedy

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"this sexual excitement, this love story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far literature and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years yet for you—and all full of learning.... We carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life."

[...]

"Up to within a few years of us the chief interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world."

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free

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As one of my quirks, much as I love the symbolism of lycanthropy I consume little to no werewolf-themed entertainment. Most often wolfmen are treated as muscleheaded speed bumps for the hero on his way to the mad scientist boss fight, and if the main alternative's those idiotic romance novels with brutishly virile werewolf lovers, count me out. I shall remain a myth of one. Terrible acting aside, I do tolerate some of the older werewolf flicks which played up the shock and awe of the transformation itself (instead of the sheer bulk of the finished product) even though most of their special effects were hardly up to the task. Let's (pun intended) face it: Lon Chaney Jr. looked more like an overgrown gerbil than a canid.

The 2010 remake of The Wolfman kept the flat-faced "Jojo the dog-faced boy" look out of apt deference to the classic. Sadly, it also not only kept the romance subplot filler but ramped it up to disturbingly Freudian levels. It is occasionally joked that the new Larry Talbot apparently has a sexist streak, since during his dozens-strong rampage he never attacks a single woman - even as he gorily dismembers man after man after man. However, nobody mentions the plot rewrite's Oedipal undertones, overtones and all too obvious tones.

- the first werewolf is now his father instead of a random gypsy

- the father now killed the hero's mother, who was not even mentioned in the original

- the love interest is his brother's widow instead of some chick from town engaged to an extra

- instead of killing off the first werewolf and then focusing on Lawrence's tribulations, it's now reserved for a boss fight

- instead of being killed by his father, the protagonist is now killed by the love interest

Which all yields the effect of killing your father while mackin' on your sister in law, all so you can placidly submit to her executing you for being bad, insistently witnessed by images of the hero's sainted, martyred mother. Why not have Benicio del Toro gouge his own eyes out just to drive it all home?

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I found myself wondering: whatever happened to softcore cable porn? You remember (assuming you're over thirty) those cheesy late night movies or series with B-grade acting and D-grade scripts you'd sit through for a chance of seeing a few minutes' worth of nipple. Sure, the internet largely obsoleted them, but I found it hard to believe they'd dissappeared altogether. So I looked for a few and got my answer: they've been repurposed for female audiences.

First off, men are always wrong and in the wrong and wrongheaded and doing it wrong, this being an absolute requirement of "romance" that all-pervasive female paraphilia.

Second, more abs and shoulders than nipples.

Third, the new breed of softcore porn always involves a lord's mansion, a luxuriously appointed condominium with a hundred-kilo chandelier, a penthouse with an infinity pool, high-powered boardroom meetings and exclusive clubs, and most importantly conflict, conflict, conflict! If guys aren't stabbing and shooting and punching and firing each other for your entertainment, how else are you supposed to jill off?!? With a handful of diamonds, obviously.

Compare that to the deliberately and explicitly mundane male sexual fantasies: cheerleaders, nurses or the soccer mom across the street doing yoga by her window. The girl next door routine sells great. The guy next door is not even a routine. He barely even exists from the female point of view, except as a punching bag for Prince Charming.

 

When I was growing up, feminists couldn't stop wailing about violence in porn - all the throwing her onto the bed and insulting her and pulling her hair and slapping her. Clear evidence of patriarchal terror, right? Point one: it was the '90s, alright? Every genre, every field, every medium was dark, grim, angry and dramatic. Hell, comedy was George Carlin. So you might think, obviously feminist pressure must've worked to make porn less violent, right? But was it violent before? After all, porn's always been around, and you can look at the rather prolific '70s for example, or go all the way back to pre-electric days, and overwhelmingly the story's always pretty much what it is now. The hot girl next door (or the maid, or the saucy flapper, or the soiled dove) is open for a fuck. So she fucks. Done. No karate required.

 

So what actually happened in the '80s, '90s and into the early 2000s? Well, it was decreed that porn had to be made for women, because it was unfair for anything to be made for men, regardless of the fact that women's porn (i.e. romance) had been its own highly profitable field since before modern entertainment industries were invented, and never criminalized like blue movies or skin mags. So by decree (and porn company hopes of breaking into the new female market) suddenly porn no longer required sex but drama, and conflict, and huge muscular men with waist-long hair, and opportunities for those men to display manliness. As has so often been the case, feminism created the problem it later used as justification in attacking men. They only abandoned the issue when the market for "porn for women" failed to grow beyond an initial blip, when it turned out women don't get aroused nearly so much by sex on screen as by seeing men tear each other to bloody shreds in thrillers.

 

How many Fifty Shades of Gray do you need to admit that the conflation of sex with power and violence is not primarily a male but a female instinct?

 

How many series like Taken center on portraying a superior male going on a rampage against other men in the interest of a woman? How many ogres must Prince Charming / Daddy Warbucks slaughter before he is acknowledged as a worthy provider and protector for the females of his tribe?

I might note Ayn Rand had her hero more or less rape the heroine in every version of the one single plot she wrote, and you'll reply wait, hold on, that chick was just nuts all around, you can't give her as example. But then I'll point you to the murderous denouement of The Wolfman where the romantic predator looms over the damsel's prostrate form in a scene so thickly suggesting rape you might find yourself exclaiming "cut the foreplay and stick it in already!"

 

When I was about seven years old, during a new year's party, one of the girls asked: who're you gonna marry? While most of us were either stumped or stammered out random answers so as not to look stumped, another girl immediately blurted out: Jesus! And she didn't mean in the habitual sense. Attagirl, A., shoot right for the top. (Sorry though, I hear he's married to his job.)

As I don't indulge in slashfic, I was amused at this tidbit from TVTropes about the inarguably female-dominated slashfic field and female-marketed boy-boy erotic stories:

"In many (but not all) communities, the ordering of the names is used to indicate a power relationship, and who exactly is the dominant member."

Females codify power games like males codify which hole's gettin' porked.

 

Here I'd like to remind you of Christopher Lee's astute assessment of his long-running role as Dracula:

"Certainly a bloodthirsty character, without a doubt. I also told you that the character is romantic — so he is, as far as women are concerned, and erotic."

Those Hammer Horror themed romance novels I mentioned at the start? They don't consider the supernatural element nearly enough by itself. It can't be just any werewolf ravishing the audience surrogate damsel. It has to be the ALPHA werewolf, a corporate CEO werewolf or the motherfuckin' prince! of! werewolves! Presumably he's gotta rip out a few throats (paternal or not) to win her before boning down. Seriously, if you've never tried, search Amazon for "alpha romance" or somesuch phrase

Aptly noted by Terrible Writing Advice in #45 "Alpha Heroes"

You might laugh at the first page of identical covers until noticing it's just the start of "over 60,000 results" (it's over 9000!) at which point, even assuming a hefty number of false and duplicate hits, it just gets depressing.

 

Neither is this anything new. While the original Wolfman movie wasn't quite the Oedipal head-trip its remake was, it still required the fair damsel to be courted by the lord of the manor. After his death in the end she still gets to keep her plan B utility male and the moral high ground to boot.

 

Do you wonder why humanity has not outgrown its sexual psychoses? It's because you've always scapegoated men while deliberately ignoring the market demand for combo sex/power/violence so glaringly pervading every bookshelf and marquee around you, the driving force behind the drama that is life: female mate choice.

Once high up on a time, there was a princess.

Classes & Cogitations, 7: Wizzin'

Like other core classes, the wizard suffers from undue overlap with later additions to the D&D-inspired RPG roster, but additionally must contend with the proper division of magic in whatever setting he happens to inhabit. D&D at least established the basic arcane / divine split early on (even if that line often lacks clear definition) but in other game universes like for example The Elder Scrolls where everyone's an all-purpose greatsword-swingin' battlemage, discerning schools of magic inevitably ends up as inconsequential fluff.

Let's reiterate that magic should not be demeaned by using it to punch stuff. Punchin' stuff is what actual punching is for. Also maces, axes and a dagger up your strap. Magic missiles water down both magic and missiles. By extension, the distinction between elemental magic (fire bolt, frost bolt, lightning bolt... rock... bolt? Rock.) used by so many games should really be done away with, as should basing magic around elemental resistances. It's been done to death, separating ice from fire never made much physics sense to begin with, and calling different colored magic missiles different spells shows about as much roleplaying depth as food coloring on a saltine would culinary depth. I'm not saying a big flashy nuke every once in a while doesn't have its place, but wizards should not be primary damage dealers. Move from "fireball" more toward "heat metal" - but then how should the various magic schools look?

 

Sure, in 1975 the wizard definition could be "all of the magicses" but now not only many spell but core class features overlap with later additions.

If you have witches, they're the ones who should be conjuring familiars.

If you have warlocks, they're the ones who should be conjuring demons.

If you have druids/shamans, they're the ones who should be conjuring animals.

If wizards are the nerds, shift them more toward animated suits of armour, alchemy, magical inscriptions, tomes and scrolls and general Saruman craftiness. "Fireball" should be a barrel of black powder, a flask of greek fire or a dragon's tonsils, and subject to ingredient availability.

 

So downplay or maybe conflate Evocation, Conjuration, and to a lesser extent Enchantment/Transmutation since they're witch/warlock/shaman fable staples.

Necromancy, on the other hand, is a pretty classic mad scientist field, though of course it depends on the setting's interpretation of life/death divine magic. Golems, homunculi, Frankensteiny creations in general remain sorely underexplored as playable gimmicks at least in video games so far. 

Illusion so obviously links real-world "magic" stage acts to fantasy for-realsies magic that it should remain a wizardly staple (see Gandalf throwing his voice in The Hobbit) but for the love of crap, downplay the mind control! If it were up to me I wouldn't keep sorcerers in the game at all, but if you do, then the charisma-based spellcasting class should more heavily emphasize hypnosis. For wizards, think smoke and mirrors, holograms and ventriloquism instead!

 

Abjuration's an interesting case, and suits my support caster preference, but the more defensive a wizard's spellcasting gets, the more he starts looking like a cheap knock-off unarmored cleric who can't heal and thinks "mace" is a can of pepper spray. Specific effects like protection from arrows or stone to flesh fall within the precept of wizardly erudition, but the more generic AC/HP boosts should mostly be left to more combat-oriented casters. Planar binding and its like see very little use in cRPGs, but largely for poor campaign writing. As a basic observation, letting wizards buff up their base stats and equipment with magic (as exemplified by Dragon Age: Origins' arcane warrior) is every bit as fraught a proposition as a fighter with dragon breath.

Divination though takes the cake for potentially amazing yet unused effects. Why not put various spins on predicting enemy moves, whether it's spells, called shots, AoE locations, dodges, incoming adds, terrain changes, really, anything? For a bonus, pair this with some limited form of quickened or reactive spells for any specifically interacting effect: if you divine a fireball, you get a reaction on protection from energy; if you divine an incoming crit, get a reactive flare or displacement. Why not tie divination to seeing enemy stats? Why not divine quest objectives via chicken entrails? Why not a spell to hear conversations in other rooms (clairaudience, they have that in tabletop) or magical radar (claivoyance, auspex, anyone?) with dialogue bonuses from that information going forward, or a substitute spell for barbarian/ranger tracking (which is also ignored in cRPGs, see #5 in this series) or discovering extra crafting ingredients, or sharing divining power with an ally to alter one dice roll a round at will, or predicting which way enemies will walk or turn to help a thief while sneaking, or fuck it, anything at all beyond Deckard Cain the Elder identifyin' geegaws!

Then you still must address confusion as to the types of magic in any particular setting. Does your fantasy world have divine and arcane and maybe natural magic? Does a certain type of magic (e.g. raising a zombie) require communion with otherworldly entities or is it merely manipulating inert matter? Is disease microbial or a curse? Does traveling between worlds require a pact with the fairies and a mushroom ring? Is magic inherent in all life or all matter in animist fashion, or is it a force pulled from a source or is it a property of a select few gifted individuals? Can spirits come back from the dead? Do they reincarnate or merely wander the halls of Mandos (or Elysian fields) until the end of time?

Any character might stumble into such quandaries in a fantasy world, but when designing a class centered on deliberately, consciously and quantitatively manipulating the laws of the natural and supernatural, those questions become prerequisites. Questions like "does Melf's acid arrow contain actual, liquid acid I can catch in a pickle jar?" are not mere trivialities to a wizard, but the very essence of his trade.