My Life as a Drowid, 2: Uninformed Decisions

(BG3 playthrough; some pre-Moonrise spoilers inevitable)

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The hours drag into miserably bright days with not even a pall of rain to liven the glare. Our meager band's trail coils over itself across these wounded lands unto ophidian infinity, yet fate's fangs have as yet but grazed me. My eyes had barely steeled against the impious sun when my ill-conceived survey of surface flora was cut short by the mind flayers. From then on, it was an aimless scramble for answers, for a way of cutting this voracious venom incarnate, this threat of life in death, from my skull... none forthcoming.

 

The darthiir-led circle, for all their bluster, for all their conceit, warded no more hieratic leechcraft than my own. The thing, the filth, the unnatural wizened, withered, weathered, wretched slab of leather holding court over life and death in my very camp, refuses all questions beyond its admittedly indispensible duty of last resort. The hag... the hag... perhaps I should not have been so hasty, perhaps she might indeed have wheedled answers, worm to worm, in counsel with the thing nesting in my sulci. But her kind's treachery rang all too familiarly hollow against my memories of great families' promises. Her den, warded not only against the outside as any beast's right, but against escape, spoke all too eloquently of the regal claim she holds to others' very being. And if there is one crime I cannot... but still your thoughts. She's listening. Did the hag think she failed my trust? No, old girl, I trusted your nature completely, one lurking fear to another, one rapacious wildling to another, and so you had to die.

The goblins! I nearly broke into laughter when they bowed and scraped and invited me into their celebrations. Crass little vermin, but I find their gambols refreshingly indulgent. I readied myself to congratulate whomever of my kind had tamed them. I thought a trade envoy, some ranger far from the dubious comforts of home, an enterprising independent like myself perhaps. But a highborn fallen so low, and fallen from Lolth's gaze... I nearly slew her then and there. Was she not everything I had fled to prove myself in the wilds so long ago? But old habits die hard. "Jabbress" formed upon my lips, bitterly bitten back, and ultimately I obeyed. For was she not in the right to oppose an enclave of our foes? Traitor or not, does this not serve Lolth's purpose? Were these thoughts even my - no, silence the fear. The criminal is listening.

They died. And we celebrated. And if Sylvanus would reckon with my deed let him not count the loss of his lesser servants above my own stewardship of his domain.

At last I found my way back to familiar dangers. Give me bulettes and fulminant flora over the treacherous promises of daylight. Nere! Nere, oh the look in your eye, the wounded hauteur, the foolhardy faith in such paltry distance as you'd put between yourself and the goddess' webs. Apostate I name you, and execution your sentence, may Her venom find you in death as my headswoman's blade did in life, may She accept your agony in trade for Minthara's. Lae'zel says you whimpered then, on your knees in the cave, in the poisoned air, alone, hemmed in and cornered against stronger wills, sad fool, as she struck you down. It was worth the expense of runepowder only for that. Count yourself lucky to have been freed from a crime far worse than murder.

But she is listening, the criminal. What use to deny it. The gith's mad supplication before her false goddess at last won me a chance to meet my intruder face to face. She speaks of trust, my new would-be mistress, the latest of many, and if not for my revulsion at bowing before the lich-queen's demands, I should have needed no blade but my scorn to sever her lying head. Trust? You cannot be on my side and inside my skull at the same time, deceiver, nor can you speak of freedom while transgressing the one sacrosanct boundary. Hear me now, as you are always listening, you perpetrator of the one unforgivable crime, you self-righteous invader upon territory I once safeguarded by abandoning all for the wilderness. You appear to be correct in one respect: we need each other. But we below are all too familiar with alliances of convenience. There shall come a time when you are longer convenient to me.

Thus I challenge. I await answer. None forthcoming, I thread my way further through fate's fangs.

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Le *siiigh*...

I've been enjoying my stint as anti-absolutist more than I care to admit.

na-chared palan-diriel o galadhremmin ennorath

While much of the main plot is pretty cheesy, BG3 grates less if you just treat it as random adventuring. Avoiding fire and light (aside from the Blood of Lathander which I conferred upon Shadowheart as her rightful Sharran spoil) I've somehow fallen into the role of frost mage:

- in a vain attempt to impose some reasonable measure of crowd control over Larian's obsession with handing out teleports and super-jumps to absolutely everything. But alright. I am the drowid of winter, apparently. If only I hadn't forgotten to actually craft my signature weapon for two levels' worth of backpack clutter.

I was gonna clean my inventory later, mom!

(It's not frostmourne, it's the mourning of the frost; totes original I.P., do not steal.)

As characters go, at least they're less infuriatingly infantile than Wrath of the Righteous' (think ninth grade instead of sixth grade) but I find Lae'zel the only palatable one so far, largely for stopping every so often to actually consider things:

(calling out pointless suicide runs)

Even her fanatically gullible quest for a cure is played more as a fact-finding mission with herself as guinea-pig instead of the writing pushing you as player to make the obviously stupid choice of getting into THAT contraption:

 

OK, we've got a mad scientist with an evil eye, a brain clamp physically built of your worst nightmares, mood lighting straight outta the sixth circle... and the phrase "end your suffering" - how many literally red flags can you miss?!

(And convincing her to get out of it cost me all my inspirations, damnit, even save-scumming the crap out of the convo. Damn my dump stats.)

But somehow even that comes across as more rational (or at least rationalized, in-character) than some of your other dialogues.

My biggest complaint is the very heroine of our story, the dream visitor. You have a dozen chances to ask perfectly reasonable questions about its origin, nature, proof of its claims, or to demand it STEP OFF, YA BITCH, yet your character almost never does. Moreover, Larian utterly fails to address the inherent wrongness of telepathic intrusion itself, or the hypocrisy of being spied on and puppeted around by an omniscient space ghost whose good intentions and beneficent action you're expected to believe on its word ("this rock keeps tigers away") despite this being exactly how a brainwashed puppet of a brain parasite would act! (If this actually becomes a plot point later on, I'll applaud it, but I'd also be surprised.)

Other scenes don't play out much better, with decisions like attacking the hag or not attacking a tiefling barbarian needing to be taken before relevant evidence has been presented. Minthara's acquisition alone will be worth dissecting separately for repeated irrationality. It's not that work wasn't put into these encounters, but more that Larian operates on the presumption that players should make decisons on blind faith and vague impressions (basically the antithesis of a Blue Tide path in T:ToN.) Take meeting Jaheira, when the scene treats it as your default choice to instantly, absolutely trust her and tell her all your secrets:

It runs on an out-of-character assumption that duh, it's Jaheira, everyone knows she's a heroine... except all my drowid knows about her so far is that she's a presumptuous leader from a powerful, secretive and intrusive organization which has historically sabotaged my own society rather consistently!

 

Worst of all so far, the Last Light defense combat, defending Is0bel Ne'er-Do-Well from big bad Marcus. Not only is the utterly game-changing fight triggered merely by walking into a cutscene while exploring an otherwise safe location, but despite failure being technically an option, only foreknowledge of the campaign can possibly tell you whether to take that chance. I did actually fail the fight on a first attempt (Izzy rolled low on initiative and ate three crits in the first round; escort missions, go figure) and not only is the ensuing fight both dramatic and tactically interesting (vs. a firing squad of crossbow-armed harpers)

 

- but I very much would've accepted the loss of the safe location and only shop for RP purposes. Nice, tidy way of letting the goody-goodies die without it technically being my fault, and I can always stockpile loot at camp until the next town. Problem: it instantly cancels out other unrelated quests just for being in the same location, with no alternate path. Bigger problem: if you lose your lynchpin, the villain instantly escapes with his hostage VIA CUTSCENE regardless of how the fight would actually play out, which changes your main quest in ways you could only predict, once again, by foreknowledge of the campaign. Which all left me with no real choice but to reload and play the hero. At least the developers had some smidge of self-awareness about how ridiculously this straightjackets you:

 

 

- but not nearly enough to make it work.