As far as missing Shadowheart, she will move to the Emerald Grove after your first long rest, giving you another chance to meet her if you found a way to skip her and/or turned down her offer to join you. Finally, if you still haven't recruited her by the time you get the cutscene where her artifact protects you, she will show up, protect you, and be like, "This is why we should travel together". You probably could still turn her offer to join down, but you will still find her at some point.
I did a run where I literally refused to let her in my party, I ended up knocking her unconscious and stealing the artefact when she showed up near the goblin camp. Didn't see her again after that, and in Act III Lady Viconia said she was dead.
eventually she either winds up attacking you or the prism just magically teleports into your inventory. Shart is necessary to deal with illithid shit, to some extent.
@@PiroMunkie She interrupted Lae'zel at that point in my game. So Lae'zel being the simple being that she is, killed her and we progressed without her, so far, no problems.
I was mad about the first Kethric fight for a different reason, I hit all my charisma checks and convinced him to surrender and then the game just goes “nope he retreats and forgets everything you just talked about”
Definitely wish it could have gone differently, especially since they were the ones to give us the option!! But after reading all his journals I kind of viewed it as...well, sometimes cats will seek the privacy of a small secluded space when they're deathly sick....
I mean they wrote it so if you do succeed, Dame Alynn comes in and ruins the moment so he doesn't surrender, but it does affect the next fight with him in that it just skips his phase of the fight, and jump straight into fighting myrkhul. So i think it's at least something
it's not pointless. if you succeed all the checks in the second fight as well, you actually skip the first stage of his bossfight and jump right to the apostle of myrkul.
I skipped having to fight him before he turns into the avatar for the same reason. The cut to him just giving up and dropping back to come back up as the avatar was a little glaring because i didn't expect it to happen
@@benthomason3307this. It makes that encounter significantly easier by passing those checks. I actually rolled a nat 20 on the final 99dc skill check vs the brain on my tactician run which also seemingly does nothing, when it in fact reduces the brains HP by some percentage at the final battle. (5 or 15% or something)
The false urgency makes sense, once you find out the artifact is preventing the change, it goes away. You sorta get breadcrumbs leading you to believe this or something like this all the way to the reveal. Nettie (spelling) even says things like "You should be changed already, why aren't you?"
I don't remember if this info is still up to date, but Larian studios (the studio behind the game), did precise that they had to significantly scrap their original storyline because of the deadline. So some dialogue are more lampshade/placeholders. The time pressure you have at the beginning of the game, in the original draft was more of a thing, like having your character(s) physically changing (veins appearing, etc...) which they said would possibly be included in the game later down the road in futur content update.
It’s always great forcing players to come up with reasons for their character to be with the party. Definitely easier than having to try and tailor the absolutely perfect opening adventure to every one of their characters’ ideals and goals.
It's the player's job to stay together, it should be the player's job to come up with the reason they are staying together. I make it very clear that "this is a cooperative party game" before we start. If the players don't want to adventure or stay together on their own, I'm not running the game. The GM has enough to without convincing people to play the game that _we all agreed to play._
Even if it is a need to survive together if that is how the game starts. Then it could end up as a found family situation. Just something minor to keep them together to bond over and grow into a friendship.
BG3 can afford to let you miss companions and entire subquests because its just encouragement to replay the game. You usually don't replay a DnD compain on the other hand.
Exactly! It adds so much replay value. To me it's pretty obvious because there are 6 Main companions. So you can take 3 on the first and the others on the second run. I am struggling with my completionist FOMO though. I have Lae'zel active and shadowheart on the bench permanently so I decided to enter Act 2 through the mountain pass but I completely cleared the underdark for XP and loot before.
Things that are fine in BG3 that I wouldn't want at the table: Throwing health pots at unconscious people's feet and having them absorb the healing liquid through their boots somehow. Quicksaving. Nobody reacting to the vocal component of Guidance, especially in confrontational situations. Being able to get a downed character back up simply by going over and patting them on the ass a few times using the help action. Shared inventory. Barrelmancy.
How would quicksaving work on tabletop? I mean loading an earlier save would essentially be time travelling, a nearly impossible feat but not impossible. If you can work that into your game as a DM with limitations (like changing timelines will have unforeseen consequences, you may kill your wife if you accidentally kill your father in law, or if you load a lot you may break the timeline altogether) I would guarantee your players will have fun. Hard to see how fun it would be though.
@@messierchicken You tell your DM you cast quicksave, and then later on you can cast the spell quickload to return to that point in time, all events, gains, and losses restored to what they were. The player characters, and only the player characters, retain full knowledge of what happened.
Once my players dealt with the first threat in the 4th act of my campaign, they discovered notes that told them when the big bads plans are going to come to fruition. I told the players straight up, you have 60 in game days from this moment to kill as many of the higher ups of this evil organization, or do what you need to so that they get weaker. The only thing I'm going to mess with is I'll make sure they can get to the boss fight in time. Other than that it's up to them to get what they think is important done. Will they finish their personal quests? Will they seek out each of the gods towers? Will they just go around killing barons in cool boss fights. I dunno, but I can't wait to see what they get into 😊
In the same vein as the Ketheric escaping thing, I remember thinking distinctly during the parts where Orin is messing with you by pretending to be random NPCs and then teleporting away "Cool vibe yo, it's just a pity I could never do this with an NPC in an actual game because the party would do everything in their power to prevent them from escaping during literally the first taunting."
Legendary Escapes, my guy. Legendary action dimension door or misty step or a unique escape method. At my table, offensive actions don't happen without either passing a stealth check or rolling initiative first.
@AverageJ03Gaming never, ever pull bullshit like that. The entire point of a ttrpg is to let the players play a game where the outcomes are determined realistically, by the rules of that world. If you're going to flat out deny them the ability to beat the situation, just write them a novel and stop pretending their decisions matter.
Without the pressure that was the first thing you talked about, noone would ever try the deal with ethel in act 1. Perfect for the story in game, but i agree with you about your point about a false “doom timer” in dnd. Still the fact that the npc’s assumes that the parasites are standard mind flayer parasites is the logical thing to think, since its not until ethels attempt to remove it we get to Know that the parasites are something else... or more. The “guardian” does state this later on as well.
re: Dead-end skill checks, not having the right character at hand, being able to miss entire plot or character elements, etc. There's one very important explanation for why all of that is OK or even GOOD in a video game, but terrible in a tabletop game. You can replay the video game, and the replay value is increased because there are many interesting elements you don't get to explore in your first playthrough-your D&D campaign is not replayable!
A cool thing about the game is while it feels like D&D, it's still a video game. I mean, none of us were expecting we would play this game and go "Wow, this is just like Dungeons and Dragons! I can just play this forever now instead of playing D&D!" - what we weren't really expecting is that - it would be this close, this fun, and this complex. It's still a game- you need 50x the normal number of magic items because they cant account for what the player is going to want to play as. There aren't enough returning pikes to have everyone in your party become a frenzy barbarian and throw the pike, but there IS enough for everyone to have their own unique build AND feed Gale! Heck, I was in act 3 finding items going "Hey Gale, you hungry?" and he's like "Oh famished- wait, why are you holding up a - oooooh you scamp!" And then we would suplex a commoner we thought was Orin. It usually was Orin... usually. Then you can play the game multiple times and find all these cool things you missed- which if those things weren't in the game- sure would have made second and third playthroughs a bit more boring, so I'm kinda glad you can miss things - but i get the FOMO. You don't want to do that to your table top players- but sometimes they have to have consequences for their actions even if those actions success rate relied on a dice roll. As for missing out because you lack a party member- yeah, well- let's be real, if your playing with a bunch of real people, do you feel bad you missed out on Shadowhearts storyline- because Shadowheart didn't both coming to the game this week- or- was never in the campaign to begin with? In TTRPGs - its not really a thing to miss out on content for other players that aren't playing! That said- I hope you are doing a modded playthrough! The mod that removes the party limit is awesome- and if it makes fights too easy since you have so many more characters- there is also a mod called "Sit this one Out" it lets you banish X characters when combat starts and leaves them out of the fight till the battle is over! (warning- its not perfect so if you banish an important story character and the end of the fight triggers an event they might be banished for a few seconds and the trigger! :D) Also, if you want an attunement mod- you could... just limit yourself- if you can... But how could you resist- those fancy gloves? With those fancy boots? and that fancy armor? With that sexy amulet? Look at this ring- would a ring with barely any real magical power really be attunement? I mean- all it does is - Add 2 radiant damage to every damage roll you make - so long as they are not in the dark!!! That's not useful! Practically Gale food! - so just wear it-
@@messierchicken yes... That's part of the joke. Also adding 2 radiant damage to all of your spell damage is incredibly good. In regular 5e dnd getting a flat +2 bonus to damage on almost anything is good. It's a higher damage increase than taking a longsword over a short sword and its on spell damage which usually requires special options to even get a damage boost like agonizing blast for warlock that only affects a single cantrip or empowered evocation a 10th level feature that only modifies evocation spells. Even the equivalent magic item to a martial classes +1 to +3 weapon for spellcasting doesn't add to damage. It just adds to spell save dc and spell attack rolls (arcane Grimoire, amulet of the devout etc).
The biggest difference with mass effect characterization is that each character has their own reason for joining Shepard. Garrus wants to take down Saren out of principle, Wrex wants Saren dead for a paycheck, Liara wants to know why her mom's involved, you're Kaiden's direct superior so of course he's coming along, Ashley owes her life to you and wants to do right by her now dead squad and see it to the end, and Tali is a mix of curiosity, rite of passage into adulthood, and a sense of responsibility for finding out about it in the first place. Everyone has their own unique reason for being there initially and then they all grow together and come to individual conclusions as to why they need to be there to see it to the end. The characters in BG3 are all together because they're infected by a tadpole. That's it. They all develop their own feelings about it later and try to drive their individual endings depending on dialogue and story choices but for the most part, the only reason they journey together is because they're infected. There just isn't a greater motive and if there is, it's either "get rid of it" or "use it" and it doesn't matter what your feelings about it are because in the end, they'll all gather around the campfire anyway. I don't love the itemization in the game either but I will say it has made me entirely rethink how to do magic items going forward. Magic items that slightly augment class features in the game are sweet, I wish there were more, and I'm going to use ideas like it in my games going forward. Stuff like the bracers that grant temp HP when your rage ends or healing a D6 when you inspire someone and the ones that combo off smites. Its great and I'd love to see more for stuff like action surge and sneak attack and channel divinity, stuff that's crucial and integral to characters and just provides a small yet meaningful benefit to the individual character for things they're going to be using all the time. Makes PCs feel like the DM is paying attention to the character when they get items like that.
When I run large scale combat that involve friendly and hostile creatures, I use a sort of "tag" system (terminology borrowed from MMOs) where if a player attacks something they and whoever they were already fighting join initiative, otherwise they'll just be narrated at the end of the round
30:37 - Lae'zel does exactly that, when you enter the Mountain pass. And also you technically kinda can miss Shadowheart on the beach too (if you leave her at nautiloid), but she finds you anyway, when you trigger the cutscene with the 3 chosen ones for the first time (cause of the artefact, duh). Your point stands, but still.
I really feel like bg3 is one of those games that is a masterpiece *because* it is so ambitious. It pushes the limits of what is possible with a video game. A lot of the solutions for the criticisms involve a massive amount of coding that may not always be possible (killing ketheric on top of moonrise or attacking orin Gortash and ketheric and the elder brain). The fact that the insane amount of freedom they did achieve is insane. And I agree that it kind of does set itself up to create some passionate critiques of the game, because they went out of their way to create freedom but can never deliver the same way that tabletop can
well said, although a game like Detroit become human is more akin to allowing you proper freedom, where failure actually leads to a new interesting narrative instead of cutting you off from content. So at least in narrative terms, I think that game does it so much better.. but of course, BG3 is much more ambitious in terms of scope. Development time would have probably been doubled at least to create something akin to that. Maybe for BG4.. however a team up between quantic dream and larian.. one can dream indeed.
Good to know there's no time limit on saving Lae'zel....because it happened so early I forgot about it since I was more engaged in other companion quests lol and like....talking to cats around the city....
@@LauraLovesHugs Its more of a special treasure hunt though, as Malenia is prominent in a lot of the games marketing and present in the intro cinematic, your almost certian to find some parts of the puzzle through normal blind play, so you have plenty of chances to enage with the hunt and try to find your way there, its very doable without a guide if your taking your time with the game.
To be fair, with the worm thing you are supposed to feel rushed in character and then you find out WHY you don’t need to rush fairly quickly so I think it works
It is a game ,and the whole point is just like D&D you can miss things.As a DM I have had things planned that players missed as I gave them freedom to choose.
Tali. I played with Tali for all three games, but when i sided with Legion so the Quarren home planet became the giths, she straight up took her helmet off then jumped off of the cliff. Talk about character story archs
Truly. The only time I don't side with the Quarians during that battle is when I have the ability to usher in peace in the first place. Which rarely happens, because Legion is a cutie pie.
Here’s how I managed the Monty Haul for BG3. 1. Backpacks. You can hold them in your inventory to sort different kinds of items. They have infinite storage space as long as you have the encumbrance to carry everything in them. I would have separate backpacks for all of the personal effects of the characters in my party as well to make sure they didn’t lose any of their quest items. 2. No consumables. I have a bad case of “very useful; therefore never use” syndrome. I just sell them. Unless they’re scrolls I can give to Gale to learn new spells, but I’ll still sell the duplicates. 3. Your camp chest. There is an option after selecting an item to send it to your camp chest. It has infinite storage space, doesn’t count against your encumbrance, and you only can’t access it in dungeons. You can pop back to your camp anywhere else just to grab things and go back to the adventure (or shopkeeper). I highly recommend that you use backpacks for this as well. It’s a little more difficult because you have to go through two loading screens to check it, but if you only ever send backpacks completely full of stuff to your camp chest, it really helps with organization.
Allies of necessity are far from a mistake. A group of misfits who dislike each other but are brought together by circumstance is the classic trope in fiction that has created many great stories, especially in found family fiction. If the players all buy in, it can be a great time in a TTRPG.
When your companion gets kidnapped you actually do have a time limit. Take too long and you show up and they're dead. Plus BG3 has to have so many magic items to make sure every class gets something. At your own table you can just drop what you want your group to have.
I'm pretty sure I completed 2-3 side quests and long rested several times on my Tav playthrough and my companion was still alive, so either that part tends to break or the time limit is ludicrously forgiving.
@@lockthepope According to the bg3 wiki (the good one) there's no time limit since orin waits for you to murder gortash, but if you go to the temple of bhaal and then leave and long rest then they get murdered i think.
I mean, technically the game could do that too, but: a) It would be pretty hard to implement well, and b) it would feel cheap and too inconsistent and overall dumb
I long rested about 900 times before even engaging in that quest and he was fine so the time limit must be really, really, really long. I think there is only a time limit if you go to the temple before you kill Gortash.
I think bg3 drops stuff at players they might need or will need. Like in the crypt with withers, you can find scrolls for protection against evil and good. In the Bhaal temple, you were able to find Otto's irresistible dance (now nerfed unfortunately). And of course there's always torches when you might need them, fire resistance potions at grymforge etc. Sometimes I'm trying to figure out fights based on what kind of scrolls or consumables are placed nearby, and usually it really helps!
like monty said, i wish companions would come as a +1 on relevant quests. i hate only having 3 main party members on a playthrough and just saying “these other ones don’t get to do their stories”
The time pressure issue actually kinda happened to me with Disco Elysium. I blame myself because I got so caught up in the story that I didn’t take the time to solve any of the side missions near the end of the game. The beauty of RPGs is their replay ability though, which is awesome
Exactly, replay value. Doing reruns of a TTRPG campaign is considered bad practice in just about every group. No one wants to repeat the last campaign just to “go for 100%”, it’s just not how TTRPGs work.
The Fake Time Pressure was a huge negative experience for all the reasons you mentioned. Also, not wanting to use illithid powers for fear of ruining playthrough. I didnt engage with the illithid power system... at all....
My first playthrough I had a specific character in mind that I'd made previously just so I'd have an excuse for throwing caution to the wind just to find out what would happen. I used the illithid powers, I touched every suspicious item, explored everything I possibly could; I prioritized screwing around and finding out.
Ketheric's forced escape... what if you COULD actually kill him, but he still shows up at the 2nd arena? This time visibly corrupted by Myrkul. "You have one last chance" type of deal. The 2nd fight could be much harder in this route - not because the game knows you're too strong (*wink*), but because Ketheric STARTS the fight already empowered.
It's not fake time pressure if it's perceived time pressure. The tadpoles are, lore wise, an extreme threat to self. The conflicts with each other are points of interest in the story being told. These people don't like each other. They don't think the same way. Yet, they have to work together for the sake of self-preservation. Higher needs demand that they do. Conflict between PC's is a good thing. It creates interesting situations and dialogue. Getting along is boring. Having to work together when your personalities don't is why this works. The tadpoles are also not the only reason why they are traveling together, as revealed later by the Emperor, the artifact itself which shields them from the Absolute's influence in act 3 forces them to stick together or become Mind flayers. The time pressure is transferred to pressure to continue to cooperate with entities you may be morally or fundamentally aligned against.
I found that kinda ironic as a statement, because its far more likely and easier to do in a video game to actually have a timer running in the background
I had a haunted house that you couldn't eacape until you helped one of the trapped spirits. But the mote you interact with the house on a given day, the more stress you accumulate (-1 to all d20s per level). Long resting makes the house absorb your highest level spell slot and a hit die. So after yhe fuest long rest, players really want to notbtake another, but resources are fading and stress is once again accumulating.
Thank you for calling out the whole false time pressure aspect. I've had a bit of a complex since the very first time I managed to finish a CRPG when I was 12 years old, Savage Empire. The game tells you how long you took to beat it and I apparently managed to waste over a thousand years.
There's are two mechanics in Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen known as "The Fray" and "Battlefield Events" that help stimulate a large-scale battle without including multiple enemies. Basically your fight takes place in a small section of the battlefield and if you stray too far (or are pushed) the people fighting around you will try to get cheap shots in. Add in random events on the battlefield and it serves to make it feel like you're in the middle of a large fight without having to handle dozens of NPCs.
Yeah, mass combat is one of those things that actually gets easier the further back you go into D&D editions. Because the older editions were deriving from wargaming, with larger group combats as the focus already, they tended to focus more on having rules and concepts for dealing with such scenarios at the ready (it was centered on the whole concept of hirelings, really). Later editions kept increasing the focus on a small table with one character each, and so D&D has kind of lost focus on putting people into large combats with lots and lots of people fighting on either side.
I think one of the things that boggles me a bit with bg3 is that sometimes you have race / class / subclass specific dialogue options but the response is just the same as one of the other options, just make the npcs have a different unique response to it
Really enjoyed and appreciated this. Love the game, love all the content around it for the last six months+, but deep critiques have been absent or fairly limited to things like the easy difficulty. Great video.
I think the only reason companions hating each other in BG3 is because they are not players and Larian is smart giving you the freedom to do as you please when it comes to them. But I also think it is the result of a side problem of not knowing when to encourage or discourage the player. Like for example on the Nautaloid if you fail checks but find the key to unlock Shadowheart it outright suggests it might turn her into a mindflayer like in the adjacent room. Or when you meet Gale it outright says "This sigil looks dangerous" which at a table would be DM for "It's gonna be pretty stupid if you touch this." Or reading the mind of the mindflayer that's pinned in rubble feels like such a trap because afterwards you have to make the low save to prevent "kissing" the squid. And wouldn't you know it my latest play through I failed the low save due to s nat 1 and instantly died. That felt like such a trap because of those F***ing nat 1 instant fails! I hate them so F***ing much. I have had Astarion with expertise, and guidance, and gear bonuses with +13-17 fail due to a nat one a trap he could easily pass without rolling and blow up my whole F***ing party! *wakes up 3 hours later* Whose blood is this?
Nat 1s are why I played a halfling in my Honor mode run. Lucky is busted if you're not allowed to savescum. Halfling Bard is probably the objective "best" class if you disallow save/reload.
I like playing a Warlock in Honor Mode cause I can adapt how I evolve my character depending upon whether me and shadow heart steal the everburn blade on the nautaloid for instance and or find a suitable pact weapon early ECT and worse case scenario I multi class into whatever works best and I always got an effective cantrip I can beef up if need be
I actually don't like that the skill checks have this giant "SUCCESS" / "FAILURE". This automatically makes the player think they failed and need to try again to get a success instead of letting the dice tell the story.
The time pressure thing most glaringly happens when they say that we need to hurry to baldurs gate and because the army is coming. When you arrive there there's a lot of stuff to do in act 3 that feels out of place because there's supposed to be urgency to save the city. Like going to the circus. I don't agree that 2 is a problem. I find it very interesting to put people together that wouldn't work well with each other otherwise. I don't agree with 3 as well. Usually there are multiple ways to solve a quest and very rarely you get truly locked out. Besides, that's kinda the point of skill checks.
I actually managed to save everyone on my last try (balanced difficulty). I wasn't even really optimized, but I learned the things you can do to make it a little easier, and I swept.
I think some of the criticisms here are poorly thought out specifically about what companion to bring on which mission. It is already there for you. Its in your quest journal and in the dialogues with the characters altho sometimes not explicitly stated. But Karlach does specifically state "don't go after the paladins of tyr without me". Half of Lae'Zel's dialogues in act 1 are "we have to go to the nearest creche". Shadowheart's dialogues are all about shar. I mean does the game have to spoon feed you this?
@@Wav03 right, but how would this issue even translate into tabletop? The entire party is going to be going on every adventure together. You aren't swapping out companions, and if there are NPCs tied to certain locations, then as the DM you are likely already using the NPC to drive the players there. This was one of the points in the video that felt like they were complaining about BG3 specifically simply because they didn't read the journals or actually talk to their companions and just rushed through the encounters.
It does get kinda sluggish a bit in BG3 with a lot of enemies, but I think it's fine for in a video game format. I love it when you look at a the initiative bar at the top is like ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯ But you do one Ice storm with wet and now it's ▯▯▯▯▯▯
Pillars of Eternity didn't start with a shipwreck/curse/etc for the group of characters. The player character starts in a caravan that's attacked and everyone else is killed other than 1 or 2 tutorial companions, but even they both die at the end of the tutorial dungeon. Then you meet the rest of the potential companions on the road and at various locations and you can either ask to have them join you (with Eder or Pallegina for example) or they will ask to join you after some introductions (such as with Aloth or Durance). Heck, you can complete huge portions of the game without running into some of the final possible companions (like Grieving Mother) if you don't go to the areas where you can meet them until later in the game's 2nd or 3rd acts even though it's possible to recruit everyone in Act 1 if you know where to go and what to do. It's very piecemeal and everything follows from (mostly) naturalistic reasons, and even some of the more "forced" upon characters (like Aloth) actually have character based reasons for joining the main character on their journey that get revealed later on in the story as secret motivations. That said, I think that the Allies of Necessity trope is great, even at the table, and don't know what you two are going on about here. Sure, it's not the best way of doing things if you're talking TOTALLY new players. That much is true. But even semi-experienced players can get behind the notion of characters put together by circumstances beyond their control. Heck, what ended up becoming one of my favorite characters ever in my more active TTRPG years was just a character I picked up that that the DM had made as a DMNPC to aid the party after I showed up late to a session that was already impromptu to begin with because another player couldn't make it in a very thrown together adventure. Me and the other players figured out who our characters even really were as we played through the adventure that session based on nothing but pretty basic archetypes and pre-filled stat sheets the DM had given us, adding flavor and personality as we went, and it all evolved very naturally into a really solid group dynamic by the end of the session, to the point that this slap-dash campaign ended up superseding our original campaign that we had been meeting for. All it takes is a decent group of regular players at a table and you can throw all sorts of scenarios at the players that do not, in any way, have to be ideal circumstances for total newbies. Heck, if I remember correctly, the basic scenario of the original box set of AD&D even started this way, with the party all being prisoner's in a wizard's dungeon and having to work together to break out, forcing them to have to rely on each other to escape. Which was seen as a great way to throw together any possible combination of characters the player's might come up with.
The reason I was so frustrated with the Ketheric fight (aside from that one time when I talked him into surrendering only to have Nightsong show up and ruin everything) was when I was trying to play as a "follower". I raided the grove, I freed Nere, I helped abduct Isobel, I got Nightsong ready to be transported to Ketheric and then I go up to him to proudly present him the artifact that he is looking for, only to be railroaded into Balthazar's chambers with the next quest goal to kill Ketheric. I was so annoyed, partially by the Emperor not minding his own business and constantly getting in the way of me becoming part of the cult, but moreso annoyed by the writing. Why let me make all the decisions in favor of the absolute if you're gonna throw me under the bus? I think I would've even preffered an early "bad" ending here where I give up the artifact, get overwhelmed by the Absolute and serve as a thrall while the dead three rule the world. Or AT LEAST give me a dialogue option to willingly give Ketheric the artifact, have Ketheric figure out that the artifact won't leave my side, have my character beg for mercy and then have Ketheric throw me into Balthazar's chamber. But I couldn't even do that, I only had options that were opposing him. Not only did that change the course of my playthrough completely (when I got down to the Myrkul fight, my character asked Gale to blow himself up because in my mind they were so devastated about what happened with the artifact that they just wanted to end it all. I left it at that for weeks before I picked up that playthrough again to finish it properly), it also took away a lot of my feeling of freedom as a player and left a bad taste in my mouth.
I disagree that "the whole party hates each other but has to work together" is a game-breaker in ttrpgs. It certainly takes enthusiastic buy-in and a session 0 aimed at establishing ground rules, but with the right group it could be a lot of fun.
You can easily kill everyone in your group! Problem solved. You sole the rest 2 to 3 year campaign. It is different to have “hate” than really hate and kill every other character like it should be…
@@haukionkannel "Hate" doesn't automatically mean "kill". But if people are into it, having a character death from PvP or two can be fun. I can totally see a situation where Lae'zel v. Shadowheart ended with one of them killing the other, and the loser making a new character. If part of the reason you're playing is the character drama, then PvP isn't necessarily a bad ending.
I was really feeling the four character party limit towards act 3. It did help teach me the power of action economy as a dm. There were some times in the game when like ten enemies would get their turn and bring my party to half hp. Thus I'm spending a lot of my actions healing and not dealing damage. I wish we could have a party of six in the game.
One I Can think of right now is : permanent debuff. I can think of two if them, thé deal with Antie Ethel, and the amulet of the laughing Monk. Yes, both of them are presented as relatively Bad ideas (especially Ethel), but it gets you permanent debuffs YOU CAN NEVER GET RID OFF. Now it is fine because you have other characters who Can Do checks, but you do not have that at your table. It was a good thing that the character I had already had a bad wisdom, but damn, I would have been pissed if I had a debuff to wisdom on my cleric. And I was so pissed that the debuff never got away. It would have been so satisfying to get ride of it for story reasons, but no. Maybe, if you want to do something like that for your players, talk with them about this before, and then offer quickly a solution if they are okay with having a debuff on a stat (never their main stat) for one or two sessions...
time pressure: i did this to my players in my game but i gave them a one-year in-game doom clock to stop the big bad before the gods just purge everything themselves and start over. This may seem like its too far off to matter but it def lit a fire under their asses i can tell you that, tho i doubt it would be the same for each group of players.
Allies of necessity being a problem? some RPG systems actually use that as their basis. Dungeon crawl Classics kind of unites the PCs Even though they don’t know each other or like each other in a tough situation they have to overcome. Also, As someone who has played since first edition this is very much early D and D. Try having a first edition barbarian joining a party with a wizard (they are literally forbidden by their class description at early levels) or having a paladin and assassin in the same party. The characters in this game barely arguie and fight compared to what I have seen in early table top. (I know, 5E ironed a lot of this out lol)
Something I wish more games did is to take a page out of the Fire Emblem book, and introduce "Supports." Which is an odd name for bonding between other party members - and your own. As the bond raises between characters you get short conversations / cutscenes between them letting their personalities shine through more. The support is built as characters partake in activities together. What's even cooler is that these bonds will lead to the characters developing relationships with each other, romantic and otherwise. (It of course helps that Fire Emblem tends to have double digits of characters to choose from, so way more pairings.) A lot of RPGs end up with the main character being the only real tie between the party. Sure there are some conversations, but often in other RPGs they don't amount to much. I would have loved to see the campsite trigger nicer events between characters. Have Sadowheart and Halsin bond over fishing, while Lae'zel and Wyll talk about their different styles of Chivalry.
I don't know the last patch you played, but they have improved large combat encounters so that a group of enemies sharing a turn will all act together. If they're all just Dashing, they'll do it up to five at once. If they're attacking they will all move at once and then make their attacks in order.
I too thought i had to minimize long rests to get the tadpole removed asap. It wasnt until i saw there was a keybind for illithid powers that i realised our tadpole wasn't going anywhere.
I didn't really get the time crunch thing. On like my 2nd or 3rd long rest, Lae'zel points out that you should have already transformed by now, so something must be different. Not sure what you mean by the shadow curse and the Orin kidnapping thing. It seemed clear to me that those two things weren't going to be time limited.
100% agree with all you've mentioned. As for the magic items - there is great design/philosophy difference between 5 edition of D&D and pre-3e editions. Generally in earlier editions powers and abilities were achievable by items, while in 5e powers and abilities are granted by class and subclass feature. I run both - 5 edition and Moldvay Basic edition - and what you said about "thrower character" really rings true. In B/X I'd give character an item, in 5e I'd give them a subclass.
I noticed the long enemy turns picking up Withers. I just moved into his room to make all the enemies come to me, but it takes like 3 turns of just waiting for them to dash.
I used the time pressure doom clock in my campaign. The premise was the boundaries of the realms were breaking down and near the end, at night, hell, the abyss, and the dream realm all merged with the material plane causing things like the blacksmith to become a half devil and a acolyte in a church being a bandersnatch. Painting a gruesome scene where the kid killed everyone and the party was set with moral dilemmas when trying to find sanctuary. The last 10 sessions only allowed time for 3 long rests, (hindsight, messed up mages) but definitely set up some intense moments for story telling.
4:21 to be honest, 1st act conversations with npcs tell you, that you should already feel the symptoms, but you don't. Also the hag can give you insight on how your tadpoles are strange. And Omelum. And then all the interactions with cult of the Absolute give you understanding that you are probably not in that type of danger
spoilers for act three ahead ------------- expand to see it but there is something you said that actually was done well where you wouldn't notice in act three, if you don't solve the murders as soon as you hear about them more people die until they are all dead. you can actually save them all if you work to find the murderer as soon as you hear about him and stop him from killing more of the people on the list. Every long rest progresses the murders.
Am I the only one who didn't feel bad about killing the squirrel? I didn't find it that cute and the whole segment reeked of trying too hard to me, lol
Urgency events are honestly amazing on the tabletop, if they matter. I play my game with a calendar that depicts certain things. For instance the Full moon nights are times where the link between the material world and the spirit world is stronger, meaning there's more dangers in the woods etc. Thus, it might be a good idea to finish a quest in the woods before the full moon. Equally I made some goblin like monsters request the players return for the full moon, indicating there was something that would happen then. Due to the time the players spent on their previous quest it wasn't a given they could return in time. That previous quest also had a sort of time limit, as if a month passed the eggs they were hunting would hatch. These sort of things works way better on the Tabletop, because I don't have a prewritten story. There's no game over if they fail a quest. They just lost out on a reward, and time. It also grounds the world in a form of reality. When a game has neither a day/night cycle, nor a passage of days, then any time pressure is just going to be vague - and thus usually meaningless.
37:38 Kelly, have you heard of the mob attack rule in the Dungeon Master's Guide? Instead of rolling for groups, you just look up how many of them would hit based on their attack bonuses. Saves you SO MUCH TIME when you have large groups of the same kind of creature.
The thing with timepreassure is even worth as when you understand that can have as much long rests as you need, you then find dukes advisory dead in the tavern, grimforge empty and so on.
Not sure you switch to just dealing with goblins in act one. You do get an elder god that just hangs out at your camp. The weirder part for me was that all the companions felt like high level NPCs de-leveled to level 1.
I actually liked this aspect though. It allowed for the characters to have interesting backstories of varying degrees while keeping a standard level progression with a reasonable excuse (mindflayer parasite shenanigans). Often I've shown up to the table and you have a bunch of players bringing their new characters with elaborate backstories that are WAY too elaborate for level 1s, but they don't even have an excuse for why all that stuff happened and they're still level 1.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoeI feel like the Parasite excuse is just a bit too handwavy, it works with Gale IMO, because most of a wizards power is in their mind, but why in the world does Karlach, who fought on the goddamned front lines of the Blood War for an entire decade drop to lvl 1 because a squid man put a squid worm in her brain? Or Wyll, who gets all of his magical powers from an outside source already?
@@lockthepope Uhh, everything's in the mind, friend. Know how to swing an axe? You did that in your mind first. Know how to poke with a sword? It's in the mind first. If you had a psychic parasite eating and consuming your memories and experiences, you'd lose talent at whatever you'd be doing. If anything, it works the LEAST for Gale, because he's got a magical source of power embedded in his body that you'd think would fight off the parasite.
Oh the part about players killing the villain too early is one I learned the hard way. At this point they were following this guy since level 2 (we were playing Dragon Age not D&D, but that hardly matters) and it was all coming to a climax during the great banquet. I envisioned two general outcomes - the villain would succeed in his plans and the bad thing happens, or the players stop him and he runs away. For the second option I had prepared a massive boss battle in the graveyard where he would summon a horde of demons and zombies to aid him in combat. And then, as he was running away one player character (and also the villain's son) cast grease under his horse, allowing the chase to catch up with him before he even left the mansion's gardens. He quickly got surrounded by my players and guards and what was supposed to be an epic combat turned into a tense cluster with the villain resorting to mind controlling some of the PCs and NPCs (which actually led to the death of one PC the villain held specific grudge against, as he mind controlled him into becoming his physical shield against any attacks), before he was eventually literally butchered. Now the thought of making him escape anyway crossed my mind because "damn, I had this encounter prepared", but I made a good choice of just allowing stuff to happen and it ended up being the most memorable session of the entire campaign and the only time I literally received a standing ovation after I said "and that's where we're going to end tonight's game".
I have to throw in that the fact that you can miss half the game is perhaps the most amazing thing that makes this game so replayable! The game is not made to be fully experienced in one playthrough, and that is awesome!
I would agree if you didn't get journal updates telling you when a quest was no longer completable. Trying to play a hetoic character, then having save the tiefkings in moonrise close off because you resolved Shadowheart's plot in the gauntlet of Shar feels awful. My first encounter with Ketheric was the fight because I assumed I couldn't miss stuff at moonrise, when I knew it was the climactic location of the act.
Much like the first two BG and really all crpgs, the issue is you don’t have a group of players. Only the main character is a pc. Everyone else are npcs. So you can totally have them all at each others throats. There is only one player. I’ve dm’d lots of solo games and pull crap like that all the time. But once the party is actual players, any dm worth the title should know to reign in party conflict.
37:30 In the goblin camp specifically, if a couple or more goblins are too far away they actually get grouped together and take their turns at the same time, but I agree the game doesn't "detect" situations like this often enough.
I tried to play it true to my reactions, so ... yea the person pulling the knife on me died every time. I understand this limits my story, but I feel I was being true to myself.
For time restraints, one of the best done examples I know of is from Baldur's Gate: The Iron Throne. It's admittedly a bit of an issue in terms of finding the damn thing because there's only 1 quest that I know of that brings you there and it's in an illegal to enter area but if you find it and enter it is amazing. You have 6 rounds and a map of the facility to save as many people as possible and it really is amazing as just a moment where you have a primary objective in Duke Ravenguard and 17 side objectives in all the prisoners and Omeluum and you either can follow the advice Omeluum gives you when entering and have a pretty tense but easy enough rush through the prison freeing people along the way and focusing on Ravenguard, or you can do what I did and split the party 3 ways and meticulously plan who goes where so you can just barely squeeze out every rescue and some extra loot along the way. It's time restraints done well because while it's a trivial enough restraint on the main objective but still a pressing one it makes getting all the side objectives done insanely difficult and insanely fun to do. I was ready to sacrifice Shadowheart to get everyone out but I was saved on the very last turn ny Omeluum being able to teleport itself and Shadowheart back to the ship right before everything blew. It was so stressful and an amazing experience and something that could possibly be an example on how to do these missed opportunities in Baldur's Gate 3 better
To what you said about managing large numbers of enemies in combat... I've been toying with the idea of having minion "swarms", similar to the insect or vermin swarm stat blocks.
One thing that a lot of CRPGs do that BG3 did at least once that I can remember is when you're sneaking up on some enemies and you get a cutscene and then it takes all your party members, clusters them up and drops them in the center of the room no longer hidden so the enemies can start off bombarding them with AoE spells and effects.
The allies of necessity thing has me thinking. I've been with my group for years and we've had all kinds of dynamics in different campaigns. This could be interesting to try out.
Agreed with pretty much everything you guys said. Mod support for consoles would be awesome. Would love to see dlc or even a sequel that follows the party to Avernus and the astral plane to help karlach and wyll free themselves/fight the blood war and fight with laezel against vlakith. Those would be good settings for higher level pcs as well giving us the chance at level 20.
“More than half a dating sim”. Also something that should absolutely not be brought to the table without a solid session 0 and a very good working relationship with the other players, but darn if I didn’t shriek with laughter at that line.
It's fine table top, just so long as you follow the bg3 rules for it, i.e only with npcs and the dm is comfortable. For pc to pc, you're absolutely right.
Great video. Yeah my first Durge playthrough, I ended up killing Karlach and Halsin myself. I also sided with the goblins, and slaughtered the grove, so Wyll left my party, never to be seen or heard from again. I was able to recruit Minthara, and later on I also recruited Jaheira and Misnc. But...they both betrayed me when I went full Slayer/Spawn of Bhaal, and after I killed Orin, they showed up with Harpers to kill me. Even when I went non-lethal to try not to kill them, they still left my party. Still, fun playthrough though. Would recommend. :)
I think the problem with the time pressure they give you is the same problem with the tadpole comsuption, it seems there is a consecuense but the only consecuence is to willingly turn into a mindflayer, it was lack of time to finish all the things they want, so we have the remmants
29:15 I've had this happen at my table. The only solution I've found is to close my book and say, "Okay, I'll write that for next week. See you guys then." After 3 weeks in a row of basically not playing, they finally got the picture that their choices mattered, but let the DM know what you're doing.
35:18 - I've read that BG3 uses a d4 for initiative rolls (and doesn't use a d20 for initiative rolls at all), specifically to favor outcomes where the player characters tend to have all of their turns grouped together. Good video. I agree with all of your points except the "too many enemies" one. Like.. I think you're coming from "D&D doesn't handle this well, so you shouldn't do it." Which... that I agree with. However, I'd say that's a problem with D&D's system, not BG3, and not with roleplaying in general. Other systems handle mass combat well, even when individual enemies are still their own "unit." In BG3, that escalation of encounters felt like it really added to the sense of growing peril for me, so I loved it. Especially because tabletop D&D never affords that scale.
around the 30:20 part: they could've easily done what pillars of eternity 2 did, they told you who they recommended to come on certain quests for additional story or dialogue. I feel like itd be easy to add to the journal the TAV writing "i think i should bring *party member* along for this one..."
I would like to add a little something to the point about players being able to miss things: First off, most if not all of the cpanions have multiple backups to meet you again later on. More importantly though, stuff like being able to miss the whole underdark is what makes this a good game. Because this means that your exploration actually ended up with you exploring and finding something awesome. In video games there is a big trend of studios being unwilling to invest money into content that the player won't see and making 100% sure that you will guaranteed see every non minor bit of content. These kinds of designs make "finding" things feel way less exiting and interesting than in games like BotW, Elden Ring or BG3 and leads to a game feel very railroady. One of the big advantages D&D has always had is that you can give the players full exploratory freedom and a genuine sense that they could go any direction they chose and see if they find something for very little development cost, because as the DM you can just make it up on the spot or have what you want to happen be just where the players choose to go. Being able to miss major bits of the world in all acts is actually a VERY important part in respecting the players freedom of choice and giving players a feeling of agency. That being said I do agree that it would be nice for the companions try to actively get your attention for story beads they WANT to be involved in when you do them.
Awe man! So, I once started a campaign where the players were all "npc" they were town's folks with regular jobs and lives. It was a lot of taking turns individually, but the organic way they all came across each other was amazing (my opinion). There was one player that didn't like the concept, which lead to a second player leaving with them. There are things I could, and retrospectively should have, done differently to make it more enjoyable for them. It felt more real than any other campaign I've been involved with. They all hit lvl one and started they're own journeys that were intertwined linking them together over and over inevitably they formed up due to a large scale event. Overall best opening to d&d I've experienced.
My first play through I played as a Dragonborn Warlock that made a pact with Fiend an archdevil, I was supper excited! Yeah so no one, and mean no one even cared, not even a topic of conversation, I guess it's common thing to do in D&D
35:20 re: the party's initiative always being clumped. This is an intentional design choice for BG3, which uses a D4 instead of a D20 for initiative rolls. This means characters with high dexterity will almost always go first and there's way less variance.
In my first play through i went through the goblin camp,killed every boss and i looted minthara’s lute then i put it on a dead body i got plate from just for half a hour later i find that orc who asks the spider lute and im like “you kidding me?” But i got back and found the lute anyways.
I actually missed the Githyanki creche in act 1 because it seemed like Halsin was telling me going through the Underdark was the only option due to the curse, but then I was actually able to go back to the Creche during act 2, I had no idea that wasn't the "correct" way until later.
With Monty's confidence about his party's ability to take on 3 big enemies all at once and win, I would love to know how he built his character and how he changed his companions to have that sort of power.
I believe you can be as high as level 10 at that point (at least in honor mode) so a really good party might be Gloomstalker ranger 7/Assasin rogue 3 for a nuclear first round. Anyone who is dead before they get to act is a huge boon. Add in arrows of slaying, the knife of the undermountain king, covert cowl, elixir of viciousness, luck of the far realms, and killers sweetheart, you could easily dish out 50+ damage on that sneak attack+gloom stalker first attack, and have consistent crits on follow up turns after surprise ends. Then have a magic missile Gatling gun wizard, spell sparkler staff to give them lightning charges, callous glow ring which deals 2 extra radiant damage per missile on illuminated targets, and the magic missile necklace that lets you shoot an extra missile, and you could actually make them a sorcerer for quickened spell to shoot 23 missiles (hasted) for a minimum 4-5 damage each, averaging closer to 7-9 damage (lightning charge interactions make calculating that really hard) I think that evocation wizard might get to add their INT bonus to each middle at some point but I don’t remember. That would mean each missile could easily do a minimum 9 damage. That’s 135 MINIMUM damage if you don’t quicken a casting for a third MM. A hexblade 3 paladin 7 could throw down 3-5 smites at level 2-3 with a great sword for a total of 10d6+16d8+25 damage for an average of 132 damage, assuming no great weapon master. Finally just for some AOE a spirit guardian cleric with haste can throw down 5d8 damage to any enemy and have an action dash or use the boots of speed to double their movement, and still throw down a spirit guardian for 3d8+5 damage. Combined with being able to get a few powerful summons just before thanks to the restoration pod before the fight like earth elementals and a cambion, and you’re looking at some really solid damage. Easily killing ketheric with 145 HP, Orin with 98 HP and 153 HP in her slayer form, not sure if she would instantly transform. Gortash is the hardest one with 252 HP but if you’ve nuked both of the others you still can drop like half his health or more before he even acts if you get a surprise round, and your spirit guardians cleric can clear all the necromites and intellect devourers, and probably throw some damage out on everyone else too. The strategy I would run with this comp is precast haste with the wizard on themselves, have the gloom stalker start a surprise round, have the cleric precast spirit guardians and drink a speed potion and dash around killing everything they can. Then the gloomstalker would finish their attacks on bosses, leaving them alive if they’re low health and switching to a new target. The the Gatling gun wizard would throw missiles at each low health boss to finish them off, also drinking a speed potion. At this point Orin (even if she was slayer form) and ketheric should be dead. That leaves your paladin to smite gortash as hard as he can, hopefully getting a crit with high damage rolls and small chance he gets finished off. If not, then you move to the first non surprise round of combat, where gortash may get to go first thanks to his alert feat, but otherwise, he should be a pretty free kill. Don’t forget to have scratch help dame Aylin out (throw invis pot at him and have him sneak over to her before combat starts) and you’ve easily killed all 3 of the chosen in moonrise.
They have a video on character builds for bg3. Double hand cross bow ranger thief for astarion, with sharpshooter. Light domain cleric with healing ring bless thing to up attacks. Sorlock with items to add damage to eldritch blasts empowered by lightning dragon sorceror soul (with twin haste ready). Bearbarian with gwm. Does crazy damage really quickly in a fight.
Funny thing is... Our party in Curse of Strahd hated each other at first. There was a paladin that belonged to an order of monster hunters (Oath of Zeal from Grim Hollow), there was two dampirs (myself as a Hexblade Warlock and another friend, a Rogue) a fallen angel divine soul sorcerer (Downcast ancestry from Grim Hollow) a Tiefling Ranger, and a Shadar-Kai Cleric of the Raven Queen who was incredibly afraid of vampires, because she was imprisioned by one. And this party ended up becoming like a family... 😂 It was one of our coolest funniest parties ever...🥲
As far as missing Shadowheart, she will move to the Emerald Grove after your first long rest, giving you another chance to meet her if you found a way to skip her and/or turned down her offer to join you. Finally, if you still haven't recruited her by the time you get the cutscene where her artifact protects you, she will show up, protect you, and be like, "This is why we should travel together". You probably could still turn her offer to join down, but you will still find her at some point.
I did a run where I literally refused to let her in my party, I ended up knocking her unconscious and stealing the artefact when she showed up near the goblin camp. Didn't see her again after that, and in Act III Lady Viconia said she was dead.
eventually she either winds up attacking you or the prism just magically teleports into your inventory.
Shart is necessary to deal with illithid shit, to some extent.
@@PiroMunkie She interrupted Lae'zel at that point in my game. So Lae'zel being the simple being that she is, killed her and we progressed without her, so far, no problems.
I was mad about the first Kethric fight for a different reason, I hit all my charisma checks and convinced him to surrender and then the game just goes “nope he retreats and forgets everything you just talked about”
Definitely wish it could have gone differently, especially since they were the ones to give us the option!! But after reading all his journals I kind of viewed it as...well, sometimes cats will seek the privacy of a small secluded space when they're deathly sick....
I mean they wrote it so if you do succeed, Dame Alynn comes in and ruins the moment so he doesn't surrender, but it does affect the next fight with him in that it just skips his phase of the fight, and jump straight into fighting myrkhul. So i think it's at least something
it's not pointless. if you succeed all the checks in the second fight as well, you actually skip the first stage of his bossfight and jump right to the apostle of myrkul.
I skipped having to fight him before he turns into the avatar for the same reason. The cut to him just giving up and dropping back to come back up as the avatar was a little glaring because i didn't expect it to happen
@@benthomason3307this. It makes that encounter significantly easier by passing those checks.
I actually rolled a nat 20 on the final 99dc skill check vs the brain on my tactician run which also seemingly does nothing, when it in fact reduces the brains HP by some percentage at the final battle. (5 or 15% or something)
The false urgency makes sense, once you find out the artifact is preventing the change, it goes away. You sorta get breadcrumbs leading you to believe this or something like this all the way to the reveal. Nettie (spelling) even says things like "You should be changed already, why aren't you?"
I don't remember if this info is still up to date, but Larian studios (the studio behind the game), did precise that they had to significantly scrap their original storyline because of the deadline. So some dialogue are more lampshade/placeholders.
The time pressure you have at the beginning of the game, in the original draft was more of a thing, like having your character(s) physically changing (veins appearing, etc...) which they said would possibly be included in the game later down the road in futur content update.
The game doesn’t handhold. I like it
It’s always great forcing players to come up with reasons for their character to be with the party. Definitely easier than having to try and tailor the absolutely perfect opening adventure to every one of their characters’ ideals and goals.
It's the player's job to stay together, it should be the player's job to come up with the reason they are staying together. I make it very clear that "this is a cooperative party game" before we start. If the players don't want to adventure or stay together on their own, I'm not running the game. The GM has enough to without convincing people to play the game that _we all agreed to play._
@@Chris-fn4df this x100
Even if it is a need to survive together if that is how the game starts. Then it could end up as a found family situation. Just something minor to keep them together to bond over and grow into a friendship.
BG3 can afford to let you miss companions and entire subquests because its just encouragement to replay the game.
You usually don't replay a DnD compain on the other hand.
Exactly! It adds so much replay value. To me it's pretty obvious because there are 6 Main companions. So you can take 3 on the first and the others on the second run. I am struggling with my completionist FOMO though. I have Lae'zel active and shadowheart on the bench permanently so I decided to enter Act 2 through the mountain pass but I completely cleared the underdark for XP and loot before.
Things that are fine in BG3 that I wouldn't want at the table:
Throwing health pots at unconscious people's feet and having them absorb the healing liquid through their boots somehow.
Quicksaving.
Nobody reacting to the vocal component of Guidance, especially in confrontational situations.
Being able to get a downed character back up simply by going over and patting them on the ass a few times using the help action.
Shared inventory.
Barrelmancy.
I agree, but how barrelmancy would even work in a tabletop?
@@raulmagalhaes4153 Wizard subclass? You conjure forth explosive barrels.
How would quicksaving work on tabletop? I mean loading an earlier save would essentially be time travelling, a nearly impossible feat but not impossible. If you can work that into your game as a DM with limitations (like changing timelines will have unforeseen consequences, you may kill your wife if you accidentally kill your father in law, or if you load a lot you may break the timeline altogether) I would guarantee your players will have fun. Hard to see how fun it would be though.
@@messierchicken You tell your DM you cast quicksave, and then later on you can cast the spell quickload to return to that point in time, all events, gains, and losses restored to what they were. The player characters, and only the player characters, retain full knowledge of what happened.
I don't even like throwing potions in the game. I feel like the thing about potions is that they're supposed to be drank.
Once my players dealt with the first threat in the 4th act of my campaign, they discovered notes that told them when the big bads plans are going to come to fruition. I told the players straight up, you have 60 in game days from this moment to kill as many of the higher ups of this evil organization, or do what you need to so that they get weaker. The only thing I'm going to mess with is I'll make sure they can get to the boss fight in time. Other than that it's up to them to get what they think is important done. Will they finish their personal quests? Will they seek out each of the gods towers? Will they just go around killing barons in cool boss fights. I dunno, but I can't wait to see what they get into 😊
my players didn't find the goblin hideout in phandelver till when they were LITERALLY headed to wave echo cave.
That can be rough if they have a lot of traveling to do without teleporting. But otherwise its a lot of "time".
In the same vein as the Ketheric escaping thing, I remember thinking distinctly during the parts where Orin is messing with you by pretending to be random NPCs and then teleporting away "Cool vibe yo, it's just a pity I could never do this with an NPC in an actual game because the party would do everything in their power to prevent them from escaping during literally the first taunting."
Legendary Escapes, my guy. Legendary action dimension door or misty step or a unique escape method. At my table, offensive actions don't happen without either passing a stealth check or rolling initiative first.
@AverageJ03Gaming never, ever pull bullshit like that. The entire point of a ttrpg is to let the players play a game where the outcomes are determined realistically, by the rules of that world.
If you're going to flat out deny them the ability to beat the situation, just write them a novel and stop pretending their decisions matter.
Without the pressure that was the first thing you talked about, noone would ever try the deal with ethel in act 1. Perfect for the story in game, but i agree with you about your point about a false “doom timer” in dnd. Still the fact that the npc’s assumes that the parasites are standard mind flayer parasites is the logical thing to think, since its not until ethels attempt to remove it we get to Know that the parasites are something else... or more. The “guardian” does state this later on as well.
re: Dead-end skill checks, not having the right character at hand, being able to miss entire plot or character elements, etc. There's one very important explanation for why all of that is OK or even GOOD in a video game, but terrible in a tabletop game. You can replay the video game, and the replay value is increased because there are many interesting elements you don't get to explore in your first playthrough-your D&D campaign is not replayable!
A cool thing about the game is while it feels like D&D, it's still a video game. I mean, none of us were expecting we would play this game and go "Wow, this is just like Dungeons and Dragons! I can just play this forever now instead of playing D&D!" - what we weren't really expecting is that - it would be this close, this fun, and this complex. It's still a game- you need 50x the normal number of magic items because they cant account for what the player is going to want to play as. There aren't enough returning pikes to have everyone in your party become a frenzy barbarian and throw the pike, but there IS enough for everyone to have their own unique build AND feed Gale! Heck, I was in act 3 finding items going "Hey Gale, you hungry?" and he's like "Oh famished- wait, why are you holding up a - oooooh you scamp!" And then we would suplex a commoner we thought was Orin. It usually was Orin... usually.
Then you can play the game multiple times and find all these cool things you missed- which if those things weren't in the game- sure would have made second and third playthroughs a bit more boring, so I'm kinda glad you can miss things - but i get the FOMO. You don't want to do that to your table top players- but sometimes they have to have consequences for their actions even if those actions success rate relied on a dice roll.
As for missing out because you lack a party member- yeah, well- let's be real, if your playing with a bunch of real people, do you feel bad you missed out on Shadowhearts storyline- because Shadowheart didn't both coming to the game this week- or- was never in the campaign to begin with? In TTRPGs - its not really a thing to miss out on content for other players that aren't playing! That said- I hope you are doing a modded playthrough! The mod that removes the party limit is awesome- and if it makes fights too easy since you have so many more characters- there is also a mod called "Sit this one Out" it lets you banish X characters when combat starts and leaves them out of the fight till the battle is over! (warning- its not perfect so if you banish an important story character and the end of the fight triggers an event they might be banished for a few seconds and the trigger! :D)
Also, if you want an attunement mod- you could... just limit yourself- if you can... But how could you resist- those fancy gloves? With those fancy boots? and that fancy armor? With that sexy amulet? Look at this ring- would a ring with barely any real magical power really be attunement? I mean- all it does is - Add 2 radiant damage to every damage roll you make - so long as they are not in the dark!!! That's not useful! Practically Gale food! - so just wear it-
Adding 2 radiant damage ring is actually useful for a certain Radiating Orb build.
@@messierchicken yes... That's part of the joke. Also adding 2 radiant damage to all of your spell damage is incredibly good. In regular 5e dnd getting a flat +2 bonus to damage on almost anything is good. It's a higher damage increase than taking a longsword over a short sword and its on spell damage which usually requires special options to even get a damage boost like agonizing blast for warlock that only affects a single cantrip or empowered evocation a 10th level feature that only modifies evocation spells. Even the equivalent magic item to a martial classes +1 to +3 weapon for spellcasting doesn't add to damage. It just adds to spell save dc and spell attack rolls (arcane Grimoire, amulet of the devout etc).
The biggest difference with mass effect characterization is that each character has their own reason for joining Shepard. Garrus wants to take down Saren out of principle, Wrex wants Saren dead for a paycheck, Liara wants to know why her mom's involved, you're Kaiden's direct superior so of course he's coming along, Ashley owes her life to you and wants to do right by her now dead squad and see it to the end, and Tali is a mix of curiosity, rite of passage into adulthood, and a sense of responsibility for finding out about it in the first place. Everyone has their own unique reason for being there initially and then they all grow together and come to individual conclusions as to why they need to be there to see it to the end.
The characters in BG3 are all together because they're infected by a tadpole. That's it. They all develop their own feelings about it later and try to drive their individual endings depending on dialogue and story choices but for the most part, the only reason they journey together is because they're infected. There just isn't a greater motive and if there is, it's either "get rid of it" or "use it" and it doesn't matter what your feelings about it are because in the end, they'll all gather around the campfire anyway.
I don't love the itemization in the game either but I will say it has made me entirely rethink how to do magic items going forward. Magic items that slightly augment class features in the game are sweet, I wish there were more, and I'm going to use ideas like it in my games going forward. Stuff like the bracers that grant temp HP when your rage ends or healing a D6 when you inspire someone and the ones that combo off smites. Its great and I'd love to see more for stuff like action surge and sneak attack and channel divinity, stuff that's crucial and integral to characters and just provides a small yet meaningful benefit to the individual character for things they're going to be using all the time. Makes PCs feel like the DM is paying attention to the character when they get items like that.
When I run large scale combat that involve friendly and hostile creatures, I use a sort of "tag" system (terminology borrowed from MMOs) where if a player attacks something they and whoever they were already fighting join initiative, otherwise they'll just be narrated at the end of the round
30:37 - Lae'zel does exactly that, when you enter the Mountain pass.
And also you technically kinda can miss Shadowheart on the beach too (if you leave her at nautiloid), but she finds you anyway, when you trigger the cutscene with the 3 chosen ones for the first time (cause of the artefact, duh). Your point stands, but still.
I really feel like bg3 is one of those games that is a masterpiece *because* it is so ambitious. It pushes the limits of what is possible with a video game. A lot of the solutions for the criticisms involve a massive amount of coding that may not always be possible (killing ketheric on top of moonrise or attacking orin Gortash and ketheric and the elder brain). The fact that the insane amount of freedom they did achieve is insane. And I agree that it kind of does set itself up to create some passionate critiques of the game, because they went out of their way to create freedom but can never deliver the same way that tabletop can
well said, although a game like Detroit become human is more akin to allowing you proper freedom, where failure actually leads to a new interesting narrative instead of cutting you off from content. So at least in narrative terms, I think that game does it so much better.. but of course, BG3 is much more ambitious in terms of scope. Development time would have probably been doubled at least to create something akin to that. Maybe for BG4.. however a team up between quantic dream and larian.. one can dream indeed.
Good to know there's no time limit on saving Lae'zel....because it happened so early I forgot about it since I was more engaged in other companion quests lol and like....talking to cats around the city....
It is a single player game at heart, so throwing together random characters works well.
"..you do not want players to miss dungeon like Grimmforge."
Dark souls laughting at hiding entire Tree and a Lake sections behind double ilusion :D
To be fair that tree and the lake of ash isn't that big and isn't really a dungeon. But I get your point. They hid so much in that game
@@werewolfjedi38 in elden ring the entire area leading up to malenia is hidden behind several secrets you have to find throughout the game.
Video games have replay value, no one really replays D&D campaigns.
@@LauraLovesHugs Its more of a special treasure hunt though, as Malenia is prominent in a lot of the games marketing and present in the intro cinematic, your almost certian to find some parts of the puzzle through normal blind play, so you have plenty of chances to enage with the hunt and try to find your way there, its very doable without a guide if your taking your time with the game.
@@werewolfjedi38To be fair, the Painted World...
To be fair, with the worm thing you are supposed to feel rushed in character and then you find out WHY you don’t need to rush fairly quickly so I think it works
If you rush hard enough, as I did, you actually miss why you don't need to rush for a while.
You find out why you don't need to rush by long resting, so if you're trying to avoid long resting because of the rush it's sort of a problem. 😅
@clonedelta22 it was the same with me. I went through the goblin camp without finding out on my first playgrough. Ended up reloading.
I never felt any sense of urgency. And I could not find a single party member that I could have any sympathy for. I despised all of them.
It is a game ,and the whole point is just like D&D you can miss things.As a DM I have had things planned that players missed as I gave them freedom to choose.
Tali. I played with Tali for all three games, but when i sided with Legion so the Quarren home planet became the giths, she straight up took her helmet off then jumped off of the cliff.
Talk about character story archs
Geth = Gith, I can see it, but I agree Tali was my favorite companion.
Truly. The only time I don't side with the Quarians during that battle is when I have the ability to usher in peace in the first place.
Which rarely happens, because Legion is a cutie pie.
Here’s how I managed the Monty Haul for BG3.
1. Backpacks. You can hold them in your inventory to sort different kinds of items. They have infinite storage space as long as you have the encumbrance to carry everything in them. I would have separate backpacks for all of the personal effects of the characters in my party as well to make sure they didn’t lose any of their quest items.
2. No consumables. I have a bad case of “very useful; therefore never use” syndrome. I just sell them. Unless they’re scrolls I can give to Gale to learn new spells, but I’ll still sell the duplicates.
3. Your camp chest. There is an option after selecting an item to send it to your camp chest. It has infinite storage space, doesn’t count against your encumbrance, and you only can’t access it in dungeons. You can pop back to your camp anywhere else just to grab things and go back to the adventure (or shopkeeper). I highly recommend that you use backpacks for this as well. It’s a little more difficult because you have to go through two loading screens to check it, but if you only ever send backpacks completely full of stuff to your camp chest, it really helps with organization.
Yea, that is the problem. You can get everything while in reality you should not. That is the problem, not how to mucking it,
Allies of necessity are far from a mistake. A group of misfits who dislike each other but are brought together by circumstance is the classic trope in fiction that has created many great stories, especially in found family fiction. If the players all buy in, it can be a great time in a TTRPG.
When your companion gets kidnapped you actually do have a time limit. Take too long and you show up and they're dead. Plus BG3 has to have so many magic items to make sure every class gets something. At your own table you can just drop what you want your group to have.
I'm pretty sure I completed 2-3 side quests and long rested several times on my Tav playthrough and my companion was still alive, so either that part tends to break or the time limit is ludicrously forgiving.
@@lockthepope According to the bg3 wiki (the good one) there's no time limit since orin waits for you to murder gortash, but if you go to the temple of bhaal and then leave and long rest then they get murdered i think.
I mean, technically the game could do that too, but: a) It would be pretty hard to implement well, and b) it would feel cheap and too inconsistent and overall dumb
I long rested about 900 times before even engaging in that quest and he was fine so the time limit must be really, really, really long. I think there is only a time limit if you go to the temple before you kill Gortash.
I think bg3 drops stuff at players they might need or will need. Like in the crypt with withers, you can find scrolls for protection against evil and good. In the Bhaal temple, you were able to find Otto's irresistible dance (now nerfed unfortunately). And of course there's always torches when you might need them, fire resistance potions at grymforge etc.
Sometimes I'm trying to figure out fights based on what kind of scrolls or consumables are placed nearby, and usually it really helps!
like monty said, i wish companions would come as a +1 on relevant quests. i hate only having 3 main party members on a playthrough and just saying “these other ones don’t get to do their stories”
The time pressure issue actually kinda happened to me with Disco Elysium. I blame myself because I got so caught up in the story that I didn’t take the time to solve any of the side missions near the end of the game. The beauty of RPGs is their replay ability though, which is awesome
missed elements in a single-player device-based game => extra play-throughs
missed elements in a TTRPG => entirely different
This!
Exactly, replay value. Doing reruns of a TTRPG campaign is considered bad practice in just about every group. No one wants to repeat the last campaign just to “go for 100%”, it’s just not how TTRPGs work.
Who wants to do another 200HR playthrough when 80% of it is searching containers, walking and slow combat (not to mention the bugs)
Can't missed elements just be recycled into your next campaign?
@@sjwarhammer4039 yes, but why spend all that time making things just so you can hide it away?
The Fake Time Pressure was a huge negative experience for all the reasons you mentioned. Also, not wanting to use illithid powers for fear of ruining playthrough. I didnt engage with the illithid power system... at all....
Seems like they could easily have made a real, but longer than reasonably needed time limit for these without otherwise comprising the game.
And that was a good choice not to use ithilien powers!
My first playthrough I had a specific character in mind that I'd made previously just so I'd have an excuse for throwing caution to the wind just to find out what would happen. I used the illithid powers, I touched every suspicious item, explored everything I possibly could; I prioritized screwing around and finding out.
Ketheric's forced escape... what if you COULD actually kill him, but he still shows up at the 2nd arena? This time visibly corrupted by Myrkul. "You have one last chance" type of deal.
The 2nd fight could be much harder in this route - not because the game knows you're too strong (*wink*), but because Ketheric STARTS the fight already empowered.
It's not fake time pressure if it's perceived time pressure. The tadpoles are, lore wise, an extreme threat to self. The conflicts with each other are points of interest in the story being told. These people don't like each other. They don't think the same way. Yet, they have to work together for the sake of self-preservation. Higher needs demand that they do.
Conflict between PC's is a good thing. It creates interesting situations and dialogue. Getting along is boring. Having to work together when your personalities don't is why this works.
The tadpoles are also not the only reason why they are traveling together, as revealed later by the Emperor, the artifact itself which shields them from the Absolute's influence in act 3 forces them to stick together or become Mind flayers. The time pressure is transferred to pressure to continue to cooperate with entities you may be morally or fundamentally aligned against.
4:52 "And a video game is not going have a clock running to your inevitable death"
*Fallout 1 and 2 just entered the chat*
I found that kinda ironic as a statement, because its far more likely and easier to do in a video game to actually have a timer running in the background
Fallout 2’s “ticking clock” basically does not exist. You need to waste something like 20 years.
I had a haunted house that you couldn't eacape until you helped one of the trapped spirits. But the mote you interact with the house on a given day, the more stress you accumulate (-1 to all d20s per level). Long resting makes the house absorb your highest level spell slot and a hit die. So after yhe fuest long rest, players really want to notbtake another, but resources are fading and stress is once again accumulating.
A good one. I'm definitely stealing that.
Thank you for calling out the whole false time pressure aspect. I've had a bit of a complex since the very first time I managed to finish a CRPG when I was 12 years old, Savage Empire. The game tells you how long you took to beat it and I apparently managed to waste over a thousand years.
Garrus & Morrigan.... Monty instantly names the 2 best characters from Mass Effect and Dragon Age. :D Oh Morrigan, we miss you so.
There's are two mechanics in Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen known as "The Fray" and "Battlefield Events" that help stimulate a large-scale battle without including multiple enemies. Basically your fight takes place in a small section of the battlefield and if you stray too far (or are pushed) the people fighting around you will try to get cheap shots in. Add in random events on the battlefield and it serves to make it feel like you're in the middle of a large fight without having to handle dozens of NPCs.
Yeah, mass combat is one of those things that actually gets easier the further back you go into D&D editions. Because the older editions were deriving from wargaming, with larger group combats as the focus already, they tended to focus more on having rules and concepts for dealing with such scenarios at the ready (it was centered on the whole concept of hirelings, really). Later editions kept increasing the focus on a small table with one character each, and so D&D has kind of lost focus on putting people into large combats with lots and lots of people fighting on either side.
You should do a video about the magic item design in BG3 and why you like it
I think one of the things that boggles me a bit with bg3 is that sometimes you have race / class / subclass specific dialogue options but the response is just the same as one of the other options, just make the npcs have a different unique response to it
My favorite magic item from BG3 was the mace that gave you fairy farie on a miss. It super cool
Really enjoyed and appreciated this. Love the game, love all the content around it for the last six months+, but deep critiques have been absent or fairly limited to things like the easy difficulty. Great video.
I think the only reason companions hating each other in BG3 is because they are not players and Larian is smart giving you the freedom to do as you please when it comes to them. But I also think it is the result of a side problem of not knowing when to encourage or discourage the player. Like for example on the Nautaloid if you fail checks but find the key to unlock Shadowheart it outright suggests it might turn her into a mindflayer like in the adjacent room. Or when you meet Gale it outright says "This sigil looks dangerous" which at a table would be DM for "It's gonna be pretty stupid if you touch this." Or reading the mind of the mindflayer that's pinned in rubble feels like such a trap because afterwards you have to make the low save to prevent "kissing" the squid. And wouldn't you know it my latest play through I failed the low save due to s nat 1 and instantly died. That felt like such a trap because of those F***ing nat 1 instant fails! I hate them so F***ing much. I have had Astarion with expertise, and guidance, and gear bonuses with +13-17 fail due to a nat one a trap he could easily pass without rolling and blow up my whole F***ing party! *wakes up 3 hours later* Whose blood is this?
Nat 1s are why I played a halfling in my Honor mode run. Lucky is busted if you're not allowed to savescum. Halfling Bard is probably the objective "best" class if you disallow save/reload.
I like playing a Warlock in Honor Mode cause I can adapt how I evolve my character depending upon whether me and shadow heart steal the everburn blade on the nautaloid for instance and or find a suitable pact weapon early ECT and worse case scenario I multi class into whatever works best and I always got an effective cantrip I can beef up if need be
I actually don't like that the skill checks have this giant "SUCCESS" / "FAILURE". This automatically makes the player think they failed and need to try again to get a success instead of letting the dice tell the story.
The time pressure thing most glaringly happens when they say that we need to hurry to baldurs gate and because the army is coming. When you arrive there there's a lot of stuff to do in act 3 that feels out of place because there's supposed to be urgency to save the city. Like going to the circus.
I don't agree that 2 is a problem. I find it very interesting to put people together that wouldn't work well with each other otherwise.
I don't agree with 3 as well. Usually there are multiple ways to solve a quest and very rarely you get truly locked out. Besides, that's kinda the point of skill checks.
Yeah, there are no day scaled time pressures in BG3, but the underwater facility is really rough.
My #1 fear for honor mode
@@elambruce7491I just skipped it for honour mode
Councilor Florick does get executed if you dont save her in time...wich does nothing to stop you from saving the prisoners at the underwater prison.
@@Sirfinchyyy You have 8 rounds to save everyone, while in combat.
I actually managed to save everyone on my last try (balanced difficulty). I wasn't even really optimized, but I learned the things you can do to make it a little easier, and I swept.
I think some of the criticisms here are poorly thought out specifically about what companion to bring on which mission. It is already there for you. Its in your quest journal and in the dialogues with the characters altho sometimes not explicitly stated. But Karlach does specifically state "don't go after the paladins of tyr without me". Half of Lae'Zel's dialogues in act 1 are "we have to go to the nearest creche". Shadowheart's dialogues are all about shar. I mean does the game have to spoon feed you this?
They prefaced this video by saying that the mistakes are only mistakes in a table top setting
@@Wav03 right, but how would this issue even translate into tabletop? The entire party is going to be going on every adventure together. You aren't swapping out companions, and if there are NPCs tied to certain locations, then as the DM you are likely already using the NPC to drive the players there. This was one of the points in the video that felt like they were complaining about BG3 specifically simply because they didn't read the journals or actually talk to their companions and just rushed through the encounters.
It does get kinda sluggish a bit in BG3 with a lot of enemies, but I think it's fine for in a video game format.
I love it when you look at a the initiative bar at the top is like ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯
But you do one Ice storm with wet and now it's ▯▯▯▯▯▯
Does cold damage get buffed by the wet status?
@@Grintock it makes the target vulnerable/ weak to cold and lightning , so they take double damage from it
Pillars of Eternity didn't start with a shipwreck/curse/etc for the group of characters. The player character starts in a caravan that's attacked and everyone else is killed other than 1 or 2 tutorial companions, but even they both die at the end of the tutorial dungeon. Then you meet the rest of the potential companions on the road and at various locations and you can either ask to have them join you (with Eder or Pallegina for example) or they will ask to join you after some introductions (such as with Aloth or Durance). Heck, you can complete huge portions of the game without running into some of the final possible companions (like Grieving Mother) if you don't go to the areas where you can meet them until later in the game's 2nd or 3rd acts even though it's possible to recruit everyone in Act 1 if you know where to go and what to do. It's very piecemeal and everything follows from (mostly) naturalistic reasons, and even some of the more "forced" upon characters (like Aloth) actually have character based reasons for joining the main character on their journey that get revealed later on in the story as secret motivations.
That said, I think that the Allies of Necessity trope is great, even at the table, and don't know what you two are going on about here. Sure, it's not the best way of doing things if you're talking TOTALLY new players. That much is true. But even semi-experienced players can get behind the notion of characters put together by circumstances beyond their control. Heck, what ended up becoming one of my favorite characters ever in my more active TTRPG years was just a character I picked up that that the DM had made as a DMNPC to aid the party after I showed up late to a session that was already impromptu to begin with because another player couldn't make it in a very thrown together adventure. Me and the other players figured out who our characters even really were as we played through the adventure that session based on nothing but pretty basic archetypes and pre-filled stat sheets the DM had given us, adding flavor and personality as we went, and it all evolved very naturally into a really solid group dynamic by the end of the session, to the point that this slap-dash campaign ended up superseding our original campaign that we had been meeting for.
All it takes is a decent group of regular players at a table and you can throw all sorts of scenarios at the players that do not, in any way, have to be ideal circumstances for total newbies. Heck, if I remember correctly, the basic scenario of the original box set of AD&D even started this way, with the party all being prisoner's in a wizard's dungeon and having to work together to break out, forcing them to have to rely on each other to escape. Which was seen as a great way to throw together any possible combination of characters the player's might come up with.
The reason I was so frustrated with the Ketheric fight (aside from that one time when I talked him into surrendering only to have Nightsong show up and ruin everything) was when I was trying to play as a "follower". I raided the grove, I freed Nere, I helped abduct Isobel, I got Nightsong ready to be transported to Ketheric and then I go up to him to proudly present him the artifact that he is looking for, only to be railroaded into Balthazar's chambers with the next quest goal to kill Ketheric.
I was so annoyed, partially by the Emperor not minding his own business and constantly getting in the way of me becoming part of the cult, but moreso annoyed by the writing. Why let me make all the decisions in favor of the absolute if you're gonna throw me under the bus? I think I would've even preffered an early "bad" ending here where I give up the artifact, get overwhelmed by the Absolute and serve as a thrall while the dead three rule the world. Or AT LEAST give me a dialogue option to willingly give Ketheric the artifact, have Ketheric figure out that the artifact won't leave my side, have my character beg for mercy and then have Ketheric throw me into Balthazar's chamber. But I couldn't even do that, I only had options that were opposing him. Not only did that change the course of my playthrough completely (when I got down to the Myrkul fight, my character asked Gale to blow himself up because in my mind they were so devastated about what happened with the artifact that they just wanted to end it all. I left it at that for weeks before I picked up that playthrough again to finish it properly), it also took away a lot of my feeling of freedom as a player and left a bad taste in my mouth.
I disagree that "the whole party hates each other but has to work together" is a game-breaker in ttrpgs. It certainly takes enthusiastic buy-in and a session 0 aimed at establishing ground rules, but with the right group it could be a lot of fun.
You can easily kill everyone in your group!
Problem solved. You sole the rest 2 to 3 year campaign. It is different to have “hate” than really hate and kill every other character like it should be…
@@haukionkannel "Hate" doesn't automatically mean "kill". But if people are into it, having a character death from PvP or two can be fun. I can totally see a situation where Lae'zel v. Shadowheart ended with one of them killing the other, and the loser making a new character.
If part of the reason you're playing is the character drama, then PvP isn't necessarily a bad ending.
I was really feeling the four character party limit towards act 3. It did help teach me the power of action economy as a dm. There were some times in the game when like ten enemies would get their turn and bring my party to half hp. Thus I'm spending a lot of my actions healing and not dealing damage. I wish we could have a party of six in the game.
Rolling 1 as auto failures. I'm calling it now. It's cusswords.
Boom! 22:00 minutes in, 1s as auto failure complaint! I feel so validated. I wish I could mod on the console, because it sucks sucks sucks.
Did my honor mode as a halfling for exactly this reason
"It's cusswords." Is amazing and i really needed the laugh it gave me so thanks for that Internet stranger
@@jettfighter9106 For real, halflings are sleepers for this very reason as far as top 3 races, with Gith and Elves.
the dice rolling was not good design. they only made it optional long after we finished the game and wasted all that time already.
One I Can think of right now is : permanent debuff.
I can think of two if them, thé deal with Antie Ethel, and the amulet of the laughing Monk.
Yes, both of them are presented as relatively Bad ideas (especially Ethel), but it gets you permanent debuffs YOU CAN NEVER GET RID OFF. Now it is fine because you have other characters who Can Do checks, but you do not have that at your table. It was a good thing that the character I had already had a bad wisdom, but damn, I would have been pissed if I had a debuff to wisdom on my cleric.
And I was so pissed that the debuff never got away. It would have been so satisfying to get ride of it for story reasons, but no.
Maybe, if you want to do something like that for your players, talk with them about this before, and then offer quickly a solution if they are okay with having a debuff on a stat (never their main stat) for one or two sessions...
time pressure: i did this to my players in my game but i gave them a one-year in-game doom clock to stop the big bad before the gods just purge everything themselves and start over. This may seem like its too far off to matter but it def lit a fire under their asses i can tell you that, tho i doubt it would be the same for each group of players.
Allies of necessity being a problem? some RPG systems actually use that as their basis. Dungeon crawl Classics kind of unites the PCs Even though they don’t know each other or like each other in a tough situation they have to overcome. Also, As someone who has played since first edition this is very much early D and D. Try having a first edition barbarian joining a party with a wizard (they are literally forbidden by their class description at early levels) or having a paladin and assassin in the same party. The characters in this game barely arguie and fight compared to what I have seen in early table top. (I know, 5E ironed a lot of this out lol)
Something I wish more games did is to take a page out of the Fire Emblem book, and introduce "Supports." Which is an odd name for bonding between other party members - and your own.
As the bond raises between characters you get short conversations / cutscenes between them letting their personalities shine through more. The support is built as characters partake in activities together. What's even cooler is that these bonds will lead to the characters developing relationships with each other, romantic and otherwise. (It of course helps that Fire Emblem tends to have double digits of characters to choose from, so way more pairings.)
A lot of RPGs end up with the main character being the only real tie between the party. Sure there are some conversations, but often in other RPGs they don't amount to much.
I would have loved to see the campsite trigger nicer events between characters. Have Sadowheart and Halsin bond over fishing, while Lae'zel and Wyll talk about their different styles of Chivalry.
I don't know the last patch you played, but they have improved large combat encounters so that a group of enemies sharing a turn will all act together. If they're all just Dashing, they'll do it up to five at once. If they're attacking they will all move at once and then make their attacks in order.
Best thing that I implemented from BG3 is the Weapon Action system. It's literally a game changer.
I too thought i had to minimize long rests to get the tadpole removed asap. It wasnt until i saw there was a keybind for illithid powers that i realised our tadpole wasn't going anywhere.
I didn't really get the time crunch thing. On like my 2nd or 3rd long rest, Lae'zel points out that you should have already transformed by now, so something must be different. Not sure what you mean by the shadow curse and the Orin kidnapping thing. It seemed clear to me that those two things weren't going to be time limited.
By my 3rd long rest on my first playthrough I was already out of Act 1 though, so I did miss a lot by trying to move quickly
100% agree with all you've mentioned. As for the magic items - there is great design/philosophy difference between 5 edition of D&D and pre-3e editions. Generally in earlier editions powers and abilities were achievable by items, while in 5e powers and abilities are granted by class and subclass feature. I run both - 5 edition and Moldvay Basic edition - and what you said about "thrower character" really rings true. In B/X I'd give character an item, in 5e I'd give them a subclass.
I noticed the long enemy turns picking up Withers. I just moved into his room to make all the enemies come to me, but it takes like 3 turns of just waiting for them to dash.
I used the time pressure doom clock in my campaign. The premise was the boundaries of the realms were breaking down and near the end, at night, hell, the abyss, and the dream realm all merged with the material plane causing things like the blacksmith to become a half devil and a acolyte in a church being a bandersnatch. Painting a gruesome scene where the kid killed everyone and the party was set with moral dilemmas when trying to find sanctuary. The last 10 sessions only allowed time for 3 long rests, (hindsight, messed up mages) but definitely set up some intense moments for story telling.
4:21 to be honest, 1st act conversations with npcs tell you, that you should already feel the symptoms, but you don't. Also the hag can give you insight on how your tadpoles are strange. And Omelum. And then all the interactions with cult of the Absolute give you understanding that you are probably not in that type of danger
Y'all talking about Mass Effect hurts my soul, I wish those devs were still making games. Can Larian's next project be a space opera trilogy, please
Bioware? They literally have teasers for both the next Mass Effect and Dragon Age installments. They are definitely still making games
I'd love to see a video on what BG3 magic items you'd bring to tabletop!
spoilers for act three ahead ------------- expand to see it but there is something you said that actually was done well where you wouldn't notice
in act three, if you don't solve the murders as soon as you hear about them more people die until they are all dead. you can actually save them all if you work to find the murderer as soon as you hear about him and stop him from killing more of the people on the list. Every long rest progresses the murders.
Am I the only one who didn't feel bad about killing the squirrel? I didn't find it that cute and the whole segment reeked of trying too hard to me, lol
Urgency events are honestly amazing on the tabletop, if they matter. I play my game with a calendar that depicts certain things. For instance the Full moon nights are times where the link between the material world and the spirit world is stronger, meaning there's more dangers in the woods etc. Thus, it might be a good idea to finish a quest in the woods before the full moon.
Equally I made some goblin like monsters request the players return for the full moon, indicating there was something that would happen then.
Due to the time the players spent on their previous quest it wasn't a given they could return in time. That previous quest also had a sort of time limit, as if a month passed the eggs they were hunting would hatch.
These sort of things works way better on the Tabletop, because I don't have a prewritten story. There's no game over if they fail a quest. They just lost out on a reward, and time. It also grounds the world in a form of reality.
When a game has neither a day/night cycle, nor a passage of days, then any time pressure is just going to be vague - and thus usually meaningless.
37:38 Kelly, have you heard of the mob attack rule in the Dungeon Master's Guide? Instead of rolling for groups, you just look up how many of them would hit based on their attack bonuses. Saves you SO MUCH TIME when you have large groups of the same kind of creature.
The thing with timepreassure is even worth as when you understand that can have as much long rests as you need, you then find dukes advisory dead in the tavern, grimforge empty and so on.
Not sure you switch to just dealing with goblins in act one. You do get an elder god that just hangs out at your camp. The weirder part for me was that all the companions felt like high level NPCs de-leveled to level 1.
I actually liked this aspect though. It allowed for the characters to have interesting backstories of varying degrees while keeping a standard level progression with a reasonable excuse (mindflayer parasite shenanigans). Often I've shown up to the table and you have a bunch of players bringing their new characters with elaborate backstories that are WAY too elaborate for level 1s, but they don't even have an excuse for why all that stuff happened and they're still level 1.
@@MidlifeCrisisJoeI feel like the Parasite excuse is just a bit too handwavy, it works with Gale IMO, because most of a wizards power is in their mind, but why in the world does Karlach, who fought on the goddamned front lines of the Blood War for an entire decade drop to lvl 1 because a squid man put a squid worm in her brain? Or Wyll, who gets all of his magical powers from an outside source already?
@@lockthepope Uhh, everything's in the mind, friend. Know how to swing an axe? You did that in your mind first. Know how to poke with a sword? It's in the mind first. If you had a psychic parasite eating and consuming your memories and experiences, you'd lose talent at whatever you'd be doing. If anything, it works the LEAST for Gale, because he's got a magical source of power embedded in his body that you'd think would fight off the parasite.
I would definitly enjoy a series about your opinion on characters in games like bg3, mass effect or dragon age, for sure.
Oh the part about players killing the villain too early is one I learned the hard way. At this point they were following this guy since level 2 (we were playing Dragon Age not D&D, but that hardly matters) and it was all coming to a climax during the great banquet. I envisioned two general outcomes - the villain would succeed in his plans and the bad thing happens, or the players stop him and he runs away. For the second option I had prepared a massive boss battle in the graveyard where he would summon a horde of demons and zombies to aid him in combat.
And then, as he was running away one player character (and also the villain's son) cast grease under his horse, allowing the chase to catch up with him before he even left the mansion's gardens. He quickly got surrounded by my players and guards and what was supposed to be an epic combat turned into a tense cluster with the villain resorting to mind controlling some of the PCs and NPCs (which actually led to the death of one PC the villain held specific grudge against, as he mind controlled him into becoming his physical shield against any attacks), before he was eventually literally butchered.
Now the thought of making him escape anyway crossed my mind because "damn, I had this encounter prepared", but I made a good choice of just allowing stuff to happen and it ended up being the most memorable session of the entire campaign and the only time I literally received a standing ovation after I said "and that's where we're going to end tonight's game".
A prologue where you get to know everybody? like the boat in Divinity Original Sin 2?
I have to throw in that the fact that you can miss half the game is perhaps the most amazing thing that makes this game so replayable!
The game is not made to be fully experienced in one playthrough, and that is awesome!
I would agree if you didn't get journal updates telling you when a quest was no longer completable.
Trying to play a hetoic character, then having save the tiefkings in moonrise close off because you resolved Shadowheart's plot in the gauntlet of Shar feels awful. My first encounter with Ketheric was the fight because I assumed I couldn't miss stuff at moonrise, when I knew it was the climactic location of the act.
Much like the first two BG and really all crpgs, the issue is you don’t have a group of players. Only the main character is a pc. Everyone else are npcs. So you can totally have them all at each others throats. There is only one player. I’ve dm’d lots of solo games and pull crap like that all the time. But once the party is actual players, any dm worth the title should know to reign in party conflict.
37:30 In the goblin camp specifically, if a couple or more goblins are too far away they actually get grouped together and take their turns at the same time, but I agree the game doesn't "detect" situations like this often enough.
I tried to play it true to my reactions, so ... yea the person pulling the knife on me died every time. I understand this limits my story, but I feel I was being true to myself.
For time restraints, one of the best done examples I know of is from Baldur's Gate: The Iron Throne. It's admittedly a bit of an issue in terms of finding the damn thing because there's only 1 quest that I know of that brings you there and it's in an illegal to enter area but if you find it and enter it is amazing. You have 6 rounds and a map of the facility to save as many people as possible and it really is amazing as just a moment where you have a primary objective in Duke Ravenguard and 17 side objectives in all the prisoners and Omeluum and you either can follow the advice Omeluum gives you when entering and have a pretty tense but easy enough rush through the prison freeing people along the way and focusing on Ravenguard, or you can do what I did and split the party 3 ways and meticulously plan who goes where so you can just barely squeeze out every rescue and some extra loot along the way. It's time restraints done well because while it's a trivial enough restraint on the main objective but still a pressing one it makes getting all the side objectives done insanely difficult and insanely fun to do. I was ready to sacrifice Shadowheart to get everyone out but I was saved on the very last turn ny Omeluum being able to teleport itself and Shadowheart back to the ship right before everything blew. It was so stressful and an amazing experience and something that could possibly be an example on how to do these missed opportunities in Baldur's Gate 3 better
best takes about the game I've seen so far, great job.
To what you said about managing large numbers of enemies in combat... I've been toying with the idea of having minion "swarms", similar to the insect or vermin swarm stat blocks.
It’s not for everyone, but the DMG has an option on pg 250 for handling mobs. It’s pretty handy if you want to avoid rolling tons of attacks.
One thing that a lot of CRPGs do that BG3 did at least once that I can remember is when you're sneaking up on some enemies and you get a cutscene and then it takes all your party members, clusters them up and drops them in the center of the room no longer hidden so the enemies can start off bombarding them with AoE spells and effects.
The allies of necessity thing has me thinking. I've been with my group for years and we've had all kinds of dynamics in different campaigns. This could be interesting to try out.
Agreed with pretty much everything you guys said. Mod support for consoles would be awesome. Would love to see dlc or even a sequel that follows the party to Avernus and the astral plane to help karlach and wyll free themselves/fight the blood war and fight with laezel against vlakith. Those would be good settings for higher level pcs as well giving us the chance at level 20.
“More than half a dating sim”.
Also something that should absolutely not be brought to the table without a solid session 0 and a very good working relationship with the other players, but darn if I didn’t shriek with laughter at that line.
It's fine table top, just so long as you follow the bg3 rules for it, i.e only with npcs and the dm is comfortable.
For pc to pc, you're absolutely right.
Great video. Yeah my first Durge playthrough, I ended up killing Karlach and Halsin myself. I also sided with the goblins, and slaughtered the grove, so Wyll left my party, never to be seen or heard from again. I was able to recruit Minthara, and later on I also recruited Jaheira and Misnc. But...they both betrayed me when I went full Slayer/Spawn of Bhaal, and after I killed Orin, they showed up with Harpers to kill me. Even when I went non-lethal to try not to kill them, they still left my party. Still, fun playthrough though. Would recommend. :)
I think the problem with the time pressure they give you is the same problem with the tadpole comsuption, it seems there is a consecuense but the only consecuence is to willingly turn into a mindflayer, it was lack of time to finish all the things they want, so we have the remmants
29:15 I've had this happen at my table. The only solution I've found is to close my book and say, "Okay, I'll write that for next week. See you guys then." After 3 weeks in a row of basically not playing, they finally got the picture that their choices mattered, but let the DM know what you're doing.
35:18 - I've read that BG3 uses a d4 for initiative rolls (and doesn't use a d20 for initiative rolls at all), specifically to favor outcomes where the player characters tend to have all of their turns grouped together.
Good video. I agree with all of your points except the "too many enemies" one. Like.. I think you're coming from "D&D doesn't handle this well, so you shouldn't do it." Which... that I agree with. However, I'd say that's a problem with D&D's system, not BG3, and not with roleplaying in general. Other systems handle mass combat well, even when individual enemies are still their own "unit." In BG3, that escalation of encounters felt like it really added to the sense of growing peril for me, so I loved it. Especially because tabletop D&D never affords that scale.
around the 30:20 part: they could've easily done what pillars of eternity 2 did, they told you who they recommended to come on certain quests for additional story or dialogue. I feel like itd be easy to add to the journal the TAV writing "i think i should bring *party member* along for this one..."
I would like to add a little something to the point about players being able to miss things:
First off, most if not all of the cpanions have multiple backups to meet you again later on.
More importantly though, stuff like being able to miss the whole underdark is what makes this a good game. Because this means that your exploration actually ended up with you exploring and finding something awesome.
In video games there is a big trend of studios being unwilling to invest money into content that the player won't see and making 100% sure that you will guaranteed see every non minor bit of content.
These kinds of designs make "finding" things feel way less exiting and interesting than in games like BotW, Elden Ring or BG3 and leads to a game feel very railroady.
One of the big advantages D&D has always had is that you can give the players full exploratory freedom and a genuine sense that they could go any direction they chose and see if they find something for very little development cost, because as the DM you can just make it up on the spot or have what you want to happen be just where the players choose to go.
Being able to miss major bits of the world in all acts is actually a VERY important part in respecting the players freedom of choice and giving players a feeling of agency.
That being said I do agree that it would be nice for the companions try to actively get your attention for story beads they WANT to be involved in when you do them.
Awe man! So, I once started a campaign where the players were all "npc" they were town's folks with regular jobs and lives. It was a lot of taking turns individually, but the organic way they all came across each other was amazing (my opinion). There was one player that didn't like the concept, which lead to a second player leaving with them. There are things I could, and retrospectively should have, done differently to make it more enjoyable for them. It felt more real than any other campaign I've been involved with. They all hit lvl one and started they're own journeys that were intertwined linking them together over and over inevitably they formed up due to a large scale event. Overall best opening to d&d I've experienced.
My first play through I played as a Dragonborn Warlock that made a pact with Fiend an archdevil, I was supper excited!
Yeah so no one, and mean no one even cared, not even a topic of conversation, I guess it's common thing to do in D&D
35:20 re: the party's initiative always being clumped. This is an intentional design choice for BG3, which uses a D4 instead of a D20 for initiative rolls. This means characters with high dexterity will almost always go first and there's way less variance.
On my first run, I played blind and never found Lae’zel. She was actually downed in the Nautiloid so I assumed she was just dead.
In my first play through i went through the goblin camp,killed every boss and i looted minthara’s lute then i put it on a dead body i got plate from just for half a hour later i find that orc who asks the spider lute and im like “you kidding me?” But i got back and found the lute anyways.
I actually missed the Githyanki creche in act 1 because it seemed like Halsin was telling me going through the Underdark was the only option due to the curse, but then I was actually able to go back to the Creche during act 2, I had no idea that wasn't the "correct" way until later.
With Monty's confidence about his party's ability to take on 3 big enemies all at once and win, I would love to know how he built his character and how he changed his companions to have that sort of power.
I believe you can be as high as level 10 at that point (at least in honor mode) so a really good party might be
Gloomstalker ranger 7/Assasin rogue 3 for a nuclear first round. Anyone who is dead before they get to act is a huge boon. Add in arrows of slaying, the knife of the undermountain king, covert cowl, elixir of viciousness, luck of the far realms, and killers sweetheart, you could easily dish out 50+ damage on that sneak attack+gloom stalker first attack, and have consistent crits on follow up turns after surprise ends.
Then have a magic missile Gatling gun wizard, spell sparkler staff to give them lightning charges, callous glow ring which deals 2 extra radiant damage per missile on illuminated targets, and the magic missile necklace that lets you shoot an extra missile, and you could actually make them a sorcerer for quickened spell to shoot 23 missiles (hasted) for a minimum 4-5 damage each, averaging closer to 7-9 damage (lightning charge interactions make calculating that really hard)
I think that evocation wizard might get to add their INT bonus to each middle at some point but I don’t remember. That would mean each missile could easily do a minimum 9 damage. That’s 135 MINIMUM damage if you don’t quicken a casting for a third MM.
A hexblade 3 paladin 7 could throw down 3-5 smites at level 2-3 with a great sword for a total of 10d6+16d8+25 damage for an average of 132 damage, assuming no great weapon master.
Finally just for some AOE a spirit guardian cleric with haste can throw down 5d8 damage to any enemy and have an action dash or use the boots of speed to double their movement, and still throw down a spirit guardian for 3d8+5 damage. Combined with being able to get a few powerful summons just before thanks to the restoration pod before the fight like earth elementals and a cambion, and you’re looking at some really solid damage. Easily killing ketheric with 145 HP, Orin with 98 HP and 153 HP in her slayer form, not sure if she would instantly transform. Gortash is the hardest one with 252 HP but if you’ve nuked both of the others you still can drop like half his health or more before he even acts if you get a surprise round, and your spirit guardians cleric can clear all the necromites and intellect devourers, and probably throw some damage out on everyone else too.
The strategy I would run with this comp is precast haste with the wizard on themselves, have the gloom stalker start a surprise round, have the cleric precast spirit guardians and drink a speed potion and dash around killing everything they can. Then the gloomstalker would finish their attacks on bosses, leaving them alive if they’re low health and switching to a new target. The the Gatling gun wizard would throw missiles at each low health boss to finish them off, also drinking a speed potion. At this point Orin (even if she was slayer form) and ketheric should be dead. That leaves your paladin to smite gortash as hard as he can, hopefully getting a crit with high damage rolls and small chance he gets finished off. If not, then you move to the first non surprise round of combat, where gortash may get to go first thanks to his alert feat, but otherwise, he should be a pretty free kill. Don’t forget to have scratch help dame Aylin out (throw invis pot at him and have him sneak over to her before combat starts) and you’ve easily killed all 3 of the chosen in moonrise.
They have a video on character builds for bg3.
Double hand cross bow ranger thief for astarion, with sharpshooter.
Light domain cleric with healing ring bless thing to up attacks.
Sorlock with items to add damage to eldritch blasts empowered by lightning dragon sorceror soul (with twin haste ready).
Bearbarian with gwm.
Does crazy damage really quickly in a fight.
Funny thing is... Our party in Curse of Strahd hated each other at first. There was a paladin that belonged to an order of monster hunters (Oath of Zeal from Grim Hollow), there was two dampirs (myself as a Hexblade Warlock and another friend, a Rogue) a fallen angel divine soul sorcerer (Downcast ancestry from Grim Hollow) a Tiefling Ranger, and a Shadar-Kai Cleric of the Raven Queen who was incredibly afraid of vampires, because she was imprisioned by one. And this party ended up becoming like a family... 😂 It was one of our coolest funniest parties ever...🥲
That is such a mixed bag party. I dig it. Hopefully it is still going.
@@KnicKnac we finished this campaign already... 🥲
@@RockLucena Hopefully you have notes and fantastic memories of that campaign
@@KnicKnac that we do. 😃