T w e n t y S i d e d
The Grognard: Well, we’re finally here. Baldur’s Gate. The city of a thousand sidequests. How is the team holding up?
Achilles: Better than before. Game’s shaping up to finish stronger than it started.
The Grognard: How so?
Achilles: For one thing, the story’s picked up. I’m on the trail of the Iron Throne, and by this point it’s clear that I’m some sort of god or something.
The Grognard: It’s clear? really?
Achilles: Look, this game came out over twenty years ago, and people call it the “Bhaalspawn Saga.” You can’t expect me to go in completely unspoiled. Besides, this crazy old hobo has been practically broadcasting it the whole way.
Achilles: So this means I’m basically death-Jesus, right? Like, I don’t know the exact words for all the made-up gods in this joint, but I’m one of their children or something. One of the bad ones, specifically. Am I wrong?
The Grognard: No, I’d say you more or less have the gist of it.
Achilles: So I’m destined to do some sort of goddish stuff. That makes sense, since I know there’s a sequel, which must take you to higher levels. So I have to kill Skull Helmet Guy if I want to advance the story.
The Grognard: Top Hat Guy versus Skull Helmet Guy, battling to advance the story. That description is distressingly accurate.
Achilles: So that part is good. Another good part is that we’re in a city now. Everything’s closer together. Not so much trudging around empty wildnerness.
Achilles: For another, the combat has gotten interesting.
The Grognard: It wasn’t interesting before? The combat is said to be a strong point of the series.
Achilles: Not at first it wasn’t. At low levels you can’t really do anything yet – just click on an enemy, wait, and hope your rolls are better than theirs.
The Grognard: It’s an RPG, not an action game. Some imagination is required if you want to think of them as actual fights.
Achilles: No amount of imagination can make “and then Top Hat Guy and his opponent failed to make their attack rolls, missing each other for the fourth consecutive time” into something exciting.
The Grognard: That sounds like a challenge. Perhaps it’s time to introduce you to my good friend R.A. Salvatore.
Beloved fantasy author R.A. Salvatore emerges from a previously unnoticed corner of the room.
R.A. Salvatore: Hello. I’m well-known fantasy author R.A. Salvatore, creator of the iconic Drizzt Do’Urden.
Achilles: Has he been here this whole time?
R.A. Salvatore: The use of my name and likeness for the purposes of transformative analysis, commentary, or satire is permitted under US copyright law.
Achilles: Huh?
The Grognard: Sometime he says things like that. Just ignore them. Mr. Salvatore? Let’s say my friend here is currently fighting off an assassin who’s ambushed him in the street. It’s pretty much just them taking turns making attack rolls. Could that be described in an exciting way?
R.A. Salvatore: Of course! Much of my early work was inspired by the 2nd edition ruleset, including the combat encounters – or, as I like to think of them, the battle scenes. The trick is to create a vivid picture for the audience.
The Grognard: How about a demonstration? And if possible, one that doesn’t use the phrase “attack routine”?
R.A. Salvatore: Cheeky! Okay, here goes.
As the assassin cautiously advanced, Top Hat Guy saw that the fight was evenly matched, and settled into a familiar defense routine. Long, sweeping swings of his weighted cane kept his opponent’s blade at bay, while his other hand whirled a gnomish flail faster and faster behind him, waiting for an opening. His attacker was overextending his thrusts, losing his balance at the crucial moment. Muttering a quick prayer to Garl Glittergold for luck, the bearded gnome released the spinning flail at a clever new angle, striking the assassin’s knee with a crack. The man stumbled and cried out in pain.
The Grognard: Bravo! You see? Isn’t that more exciting than “Top Hat Guy made his attack roll, inflicting nine points of damage”?
Achilles: Sure, I see what you’re getting at. But Team Top Hat’s fights don’t really look like the sort of thing you’d see in a book.
The Grognard: How do they look?
Achilles: Well, when I run into an enemy group, I just send Khalid in.
The Grognard: What, by himself?
Achilles: Usually, he’s all I need – he goes in and gets whaled on from all sides while the rest of us stand back and use ranged weapons. Top Hat Guy and his +1 composite longbow are the stars, team sling-and-shortbow are the backup dancers. Khalid is the meat shield. That takes care of your average trash mob fight.
R.A. Salvatore: I can work with that.
Apprehensive, his shield at the ready, Khalid advanced alone on the Hobgoblins. “My heart’s really not in this,” he thought to himself ruefully. He was heartened by the sound of a voice from behind him. “Steel thy courage, husband!” Jaheira cried out. “We will fight alongside you, from over here on this ridge, attacking the fiends from a distance!”
The Grognard: Honestly, this explains why Khalid is so timid. Drawing all that aggro by himself can’t be much fun. The fear is a survival strategy.
Achilles: He’s got Ankheg plate, and adventuring is a job for adults. That’s what Jaheira always tells him, anyway. Besides, if there’s trouble, I can send Minsc in to help.
The Grognard: And Minsc is all enthusiasm.
Achilles: Great enthusiasm. Great locker room guy. If you put the brain of a golden retriever into the body of an NFL fullback, Minsc would be the result. If Khalid isn’t enough, Minsc switches to his trusty two-hander. That thing hits for twenty-plus damage.
R.A. Salvatore: Aha! Big damage. I know just how to sell that.
Battered from all sides, Khalid desperately tried to catch his breath. None of the years he’d spent practising defense routines in his native Calimsham had prepared him to fight this many enemies at once. He heard a bellow from behind him. “Full plate, and packing steel!” He turned to see Minsc sprinting towards the nearest Hobgoblin, waving an enormous claymore above his head, the hamster on his shoulder squeaking furiously. With a cry he brought the claymore down, nearly splitting his target in two. “Evil, meet my sword! Sword, meet evil!”
The Grognard: So you don’t use your casters?
Achilles: Not for trash pulls. But if it looks like a tougher fight, I have Dynaheir cast web. Web is an amazing spell. It holds everything in place for like a full minute. None of them can even do anything.
The Grognard: And neither can your tanks.
Achilles: Minsc can move. That +2 spider’s bane sword of his makes him immune to web, nice bonus.
The Grognard: But Khalid? Now he’s surrounded and immobilized?
Achilles: His job is to be bait, and get all the mobs clumped up. Once that job is over, he can just chill, wrapped up in spiderwebs and unable to move, while the rest of us shoot rocks and arrows at targets barely a foot away from him.
R.A. Salvatore: You’re not making this easy on me, but I’m a pro. Try this on for size.
Trapped in a cacoon of wet, sticky webbing, Khalid’s eyes widened as a shaft buried itself in a tree trunk less than six inches from his face. “Sorry!” came a voice drifting over the wind – Gorion’s Ward. “I was aiming for one of the Hobgoblins!” Khalid squeezed his eyes shut and whispered a desperate prayer to Ilmater, god of the suffering and persecuted. All around him, his enemies were trapped in the same sticky white tomb he was, hearing the high-pitched whistle of the arrows, waiting for the inevitable strike, the hot sting of point piercing flesh.
He knew, from experience, that so long as Dynaheir’s spell persisted, there was nothing he could do.
He knew, from experience, that the most important thing was not to poop.
The Grognard: You know, we should start being nicer to Khalid. Okay, so what if there’s still something alive after all that?
Achilles: Well, you just said we should be nicer to Khalid, so you probably won’t like this, but Dynaheir also has fireball now.
The Grognard: So let me see if I’m following your strategy here. Step one is to send Khalid in, alone, while everyone else shoots arrows from the other side of the screen. If that doesn’t work, a concussion-addled man and his hamster will rush in to “help.” When their help is predictably insufficient, all of them will be encased in spiderwebs and then the whole area will be set on fire.
Achilles: Well, obviously it sounds callous when you describe it like that. But come on, web and fireball go together like chocalate and peanut butter. Khalid has some fire resist on his gear, and Jaheira has healing spells, so it all works out in the end.
The Grognard: And Minsc? Does he have any fire resistance?
Achilles: Minsc has something better: a positive attitude and a willingness to play through injuries.
R.A. Salvatore: All right, let’s bring it home.
Khalid took a shuddering breath and slowly raised another healing potion to his trembling lips. All around him were the cries of the wounded and dying, and the sweet, sickening stench of roasted Hobgoblin. He would hear them again, smell it again, he knew – in his nightmares. They always came after a fight like this.
Dynaheir, whose magic had scorched the area, sauntered towards them, her now-empty sling hanging carelessly from her hand. Unscathed by the fighting, as usual, she surveyed the carnage with a satisfied smile. “This group shows promise exceptional.”
The Grognard: Good lord. I tremble to think what’s going to happen when you get your hands on a cloudkill scroll. But if it works, it works, I guess.
Achilles: It’s working so far. I have yet to encounter a problem that couldn’t be solved with some combination of web, fireball, and blind. Blind, by the way, does exactly what you’d think it does. For single targets, it’s even better than web.
The Grognard: How about traps? Does Imoen disarm them?
Achilles: No, I dual-classed Imoen to mage, to get more blinds and webs. She hasn’t gotten her thief levels back yet, so I just use Khalid.
The Grognard: At this point I feel obligated to point out that Khalid is a single-class fighter, and doesn’t have the find/remove traps skill.
Achilles: No, but he does have high HP. So I send him down any suspicious-looking hallways alone, while everyone else hangs back and gives him moral support.
The Grognard: You don’t go easy on him, do you? I’m surprised he hasn’t died yet.
Achilles: Oh, he has. Dozens of times. I just hit quickload and try again. The thing is…
The Grognard: What?
Achilles: I think he remembers.
The Grognard: Remembers what?
Achilles: All the quicksaves and quickloads. Part of him remembers. It’s why he’s always saying things like “my heart’s really not in this,” or “if none are better.” Every time I send him alone into a group of sword spiders, or down a hallway full of poison dart traps, it’s like he’s trying to talk me out of it. It’s like he knows what’s going to happen, because part of him remembers all the times it happened before. I’m pretty sure it’s where the stutter comes from.
The Grognard: That is horrifying.
Achilles: I know, right? It’s like you said, these games are darker than people realize.
R.A. Salvatore: That’s why I created my iconic character, Drizzt Do’Urden – to be a light that brings justice to the darkest of places. When he was growing up in the Drow city of Menzoberranzan…
Achilles: Oh yeah, him. I killed him, too.
R.A. Salvatore: You what? Killed who?
Achilles: Drizzt.
There is a long, uncomfortable silence.
Achilles: What?
The Grognard: Hold on now. Achilles, Drizzt was – I believe – a level sixteen ranger, wielding some very powerful magical weapons. How could you have killed him?
Achilles: Oh, there are a bunch of ways to do it. But the easiest is to surround him, so he can’t move, then kick everyone from your party so he doesn’t turn hostile to them when you attack. Then he’s stuck, and you attack him with a reach weapon, like a quarterstaff, for about forty-five minutes. You’ll hit on natural twenties, and eventually he runs out of HP.
The Grognard: So that’s how you did it. I did it with animate dead and an invisible spotter, back in the day. A little quicker, but perhaps not quite so elegant.
R.A. Salvatore: What, both of you? Why? In Tyr’s name, why?
The Grognard: Mr. Salvatore, you have to understand, killing Drizzt is something of a tradition in this game.
R.A. Salvatore: A tradition? According to who? Drizzt was – is – a hero of the Sword Coast! One of the faces of the Forgotten Realms!
Achilles: Drizzt was a cameo appearance in a computer game. One who was selfishly hoarding some of the best gear, no less. Now I’ve got two new scimitars and some swanky new armor. If anyone asks, I’ll just say the gnolls got him.
R.A. Salvatore: You may have killed the elf, but you will never kill the spirit of justice he represents!
Achilles: Right, right, right, right, right. Look, if it bothers you that much, I can just reload a save, I didn’t really need his stuff anyway. Either way, I’ve got my party, I’ve got some good gear, and it’s time to head down the home stretch. I got the bit in my teeth now, ready to go. You two ready?
The Grognard: You know, I’m honestly not sure we are.
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
The Brilliance of Mass Effect
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
Yeah Web + sending in Minsc with that sword and then a big fireball/cloudkill is basically how I approached every single encounter for most of BG1 and 2. Works every time.
The Silence spell is absolutely hilarious and probably overpowered because it shuts down almost all casters. It’s proper revenge for them spamming Dire Charm the way they do.
You can basically instantly win any fight with a predominately caster group by hurling a silence at them and filling them full of arrows.
Not in my experience. Silence may be immensely useful in theory, but not if you have my luck of the roll combined with a roll based computer game. I think I opened many fights with silence and I’m pretty sure I not once experienced any caster of significance being silenced at all.
Silence was useful in BG2 up until mind flayers appear. It’s a big slap in the face if you use that tactic. They were a mean surprise for a variety of tactics.
I do remember using this strategy for Dragon Age: Origins. Send Alistair in, load up all the enemies with bombs, aoe down everything. Nothing in the pile lived, and Alistair gets another injury. Quick and painless for all the important people.
I wanted more interesting party members, so I ran with a full-mage party wrapped in metal and firestorms. With the occasional golem support.
Who needs tanks when you can just wear plate and conflagerate everything around you?
One of DA:O’s devs released a mod that unlocked a host of AI tactics customizations and slots.
That allows for AI reaction times to take advantage of status effects, which you obviously also had them cast on appropriate enemies. All automated so no advantage is ever missed or wasted.
With a full mage party, the sheer overwhelming high speed coordinated spell casting was something to behold. You’d see things get frozen and immediately shattered.
Where is the mod?
Hahah, this one really tickled me. Minsc isn’t the only one with a positive attitude.
You know, I always figured that Drizzt was a villain. That many Z’s in his name, the guy’s got to be up to no good! Plus, doesn’t he have a tragic backstory? Probably best you put him out of his misery.
To me, that name is less “high fantasy” and more “I just licked a 9V battery”.
Did you know, they had to rename him “Dzirt” for the Russian translations of Salvatore’s novels? Because his original name sounds dangerously close to what we call a wet fart. :)
Ha!
Reminds me of Brad Pitt, here in Sweden. His last name is basically our version of ‘Richard,’ if-you-know-what-I-mean, hint, hint, nudge, nudge.
Not sure if it’s floating around anywhere online, doubly so with the AstroTurfing for the resent Ad Astra, but I saw a pretty dang funny interview with him once where the interviewer actually had the—ahem, balls, to drop that in Pitt’s lap, and the baffled face on an actor normally so composed in public was just priceless.
The “ surround him and then kick everyone from the party” strategy is rather clever. I just abused the wand of monster summoning plus lots and lots of arrows.
Incidentally that wand was the only way I could work out to beat Sarevok too. 5 attacks with strength 18/00? No thanks.
It’s been a long time, but I seem to recall killing him by just completely unloading on him while he was still busy with all the gnolls.
Been ages since I did it, but there’s also a spot by that lake you can get him stuck at due to the rather typical for the time pathing AI.
So mighty Drizzt, one of the mightiest rangers ever in a setting full of equal over-the-top heroes, just stands there while you pelt him with completely mundane arrows. All his skill, all his experience, all his darn near epic level gear, all that tragic backstory, and it is nothing for bits of wood with pointy metal at the tip you can buy a literal bundle of for a single gold.
Kinda made me grok why the humble short & long bow had such a fearful reputation in my history books as a kid, and why crossbow men kept being compared with modern snipers all the time.
…Did kinda break a lot of fantasy stories for me, though. Hard to take the epic one-on-one sword fighting seriously, when you’ve realized how much quicker the bad guy would die if every member of the five-man-band had a cheap spear all of their own, you know?
Yeah, but in principle the guy is supposed to dodge / parry your arrows with his bullshit agility and also figure out a way to get out of your trap. It’s not his fault he’s being represented by the same brain-dead AI as every other mob in the game.
Crossbowmen were compared to snipers? That’s odd, as due to the shorter, heavier projectile crossbows were less useful at long range than regular bows. They were easier to use and more effective at penetrating armour, though.
That’s the comparison. Snipers shoot officers, which is ungentlemanly. Crossbowen could shoot knights -which was obscene because a commoner killing an armored knight just isn’t supposed to happen.
Thats about it though.
Crossbowmen were more like regular infantry with an anti tank rifle.
Specialized marksmen/scouts were usually skirmishers.
Yeah, pretty much the above, as far as I remember it.
It was basically a great big slap against the whole Medieval slash Classical understanding of how the world “should” work… but it kept being used because it’s so gosh darn effective.
See also: shotguns in WW1, aka ‘trench-guns.’ Germany of all nations made a huge stink about those and tried to have them banned… but mustard gas was A-OK in their book.
Just one of of those darkly amusing little patterns that keep repeating throughout history. I’m sure whoever sharpened the first spear got yelled at for not using his fists and teeth like a ‘real’ ape.
this is overplayed. Historically, if you could, you kill the FUCK out of that armored dude on a horse and no one at all will care. But the secret is, even with a crossbow, you aren’t particularly likely to kill that armored dude on a horse from a range too much farther than dangling off the tip of his lance. Unless the wound goes septic.
Arrows are rather poor killers of even mildly armored people. You have to not only hit, which is hard, you have to penetrate armor, which is hard, penetrate it enough to reach something vital, which is hard, and actually hit a person somewhere vital, which is hard. A fellow in harness is near immune to instant kill shots, and difficult to actually hurt period. You’d have more luck killing or spooking his horse and then getting in close with a dagger. Daggers were actually one of the more common ways to kill a fellow in harness. Knock them on their ass and then go in with the dagger. Also falling off a galloping horse will probably mess you up real bad.
So I’m late to this party, but just have to wade in.
The first issue is that crossbows are not actually all that potent given how their draw weights interact with their draw lengths. A 350lb crossbow actually ends up being equivalent to a 50lb longbow in terms of energy stored, with the stubby bolts having a fairly low sectional density (and hence lower penetration). And the truly impressive ones (the 1250lb arbalests) end up having reload rates that make muskets look fast. Where crossbows shine is in accuracy and ease of use – a man needs a lifetime of training to reliably hit a torso-sized target at 25m with a warbow (much less with a hunting bow), but needs about an afternoon to do the same with a crossbow. More than that, the sort of physique which allows a man to draw and shoot dozens of times with a 160lb bow is a rare commodity in itself – so much so that there are only about a dozen men alive today who can do it. So a crossbow is less a sniper rifle or anti-tank rifle, and more of a bizarre guided missile analogue that lets a near-blind soldier hit a tank from the same distance as an anti-tank gun, but either takes half an hour to reload or shoots piddly little missiles.
Moving on to the lethality of bows and crossbows themselves: recent testing by amateur and professional experimental archeologists has shed a lot of light on just how bows/crossbows and armour interact, and dispelled a lot of long-held myths on all sides. Here it’s fascinating to see just how deadly a powerful warbow or high-poundage crossbow can be, as well as just how well protected a man in plate is against such weapons. For instance. a recent test with a 160lb longbow, period-appropriate arrows and period-appropriate torso armour setup resulted in the arrow almost casually punching through a mail shirt and gambeson (and skewering the ballistic gel torso behind it) but destructively skipping off of the breastplate just above.
The result is that a man in full plate can be more or less arrow-proof (aside from very lucky shots or splinters getting in) at even very close ranges, while an even marginally less-armoured man (against swords and the like, anyway) might be highly vulnerable. But if an arrow does manage to get into an area covered by mail or slid between a plate it wasn’t going to be very greatly impeded from causing a very nasty injury.
So here we get to the game-relevant bit: that armour (against arrows and the like, at least) is very much an all-or-nothing affair. Armour will either keep a projectile out or not, and anything that gets past it isn’t going to result in massively reduced damage except by dint of getting through to a less vital area. Combine this with the hit-or-miss nature of how human bodies get injured, and you can have situations where one guy gets peppered with dozens of arrows without taking much more than scratches, while an identically-clad guy next to him takes one in the armpit and bleeds out in a few minutes. Hence the dislike from the nobles – a bow or crossbow is a coward’s weapon because it kills from afar (rather than up close, where I have every advantage), and a blackguard’s weapon because it kills at random (rather than my sword, which will reliably take your arm off so long as I have the strength and skill required to swing it properly).
In game, this would make projectile weapons highly variable in terms of damage output (to simulate the ‘hit an artery’ factor), with armour mediocre armour penetration that sometimes crits massively (to simulate the ‘get into an eyeslit’ factor) but otherwise does scratch damage if it doesn’t get through. This would make them ideal for NPCs rather than PCs, as the randomness factor would keep lowly orcs with recurve bows reliably dangerous all the way until the endgame while not affording the player too much joy (because having a 1/100 chance to zap the dreadlord in one hit isn’t worth it when you’re one guy instead of a horde of dudes and can’t rely on numbers like that).
An arrow that pierces skin will take a combatant out of the fight pending medical care, even if it doesn’t hit an artery or organ. Moving around with an arrow embedded in you is going to cause it to hit an artery or organ, as will attempting to remove it quickly.
Or if the main character DIDN’T just drop the handcrossbow launcher that dropped his greatest rival in a single sleep-poison dipped shot?
Or if the mages bothered to cast things that weren’t simple blasting more than like once a book? Or if powerful magical items weren’t discarded for “character” reasons only to be plucked up for use by recurring villains in the next book?
It’s hard to get properly invested when you’ve realized the pattern that every named character is an idiot.
One of the reasons I really love the Dresden Files series of urban fantasy is for that exact reason, actually.
Main character, Harry Dresden, is a self proclaimed idiot… and yeah, on the subjects he’s dense, he could basically act like a blast-door to a nuclear bunker by sticking his head out.
Thing is, though, that it’s consistent, and he’s not an idiot in every subject. In a few subjects he’s downright scary bright, with him outright having had a couple of insights over the series that’s made ancient horrors crap their pants on the spot because mortals should not know such things.
So if you’re talking magic, mythology or snooping, he’s honestly pretty on the ball even by professional standards. But when it comes to modern tech or romance… well, let’s say not even Mythbusters could get that lead-balloon of the ground. And a few books in, the reader knows those weak & strong spots almost as well as Harry himself does.
It’s amazingly how simple an idea it is, but Dresden feeling like an utter idiot when he screws up and genuinely trying to better himself is just amazingly humanizing, and makes you really feel for the dude. Really one of those examples I wish more authors would learn from instead of breaking out that damned, overused idiot ball.
That’s entirely fair. I suppose I should get more specific. It’s hard to empathize with a story where not only do people make horrible self destructive mistakes with simple decisions, but do so with alarming frequency in the same way.
Doubly so when no one calls out their poor judgement, and triply so when the reason no one does so is that they’re similarly decoupled from cause and effect.
You can have an idiot, but don’t go trying to pretend they’re anything but an idiot.
“If you put the brain of a golden retriever into the body of an NFL fullback, Minsc would be the result.”
No greater description of Minsc has ever, nor ever will be, achieved. It is purely accurate.
I’d just send in a charmed enemy / summoned creature. Alert the enemy, then move back to a chokepoint. Saves on reloads when the character dies (which I hate doing) and allows some of the enemy group to lag behind and get mopped up at my leisure.
This was a great read!
The fact that it’s referred to as the Bhaalspawn Saga really is unfortunate isn’t it? It’s as if the first Star Wars trilogy were referred to as the “Son of Darth Vader” trilogy.
There’s a bevy of chanters who recite the prophecy of Alaundo in Candlekeep, and the prophecy is quoted at the beginning of the game. You have to be genre blind not to know what’s up.
Hmmm. Well I was in the fortunate position of being genre blind when I first played – BG was my first ever crpg. I realised the truth At what I feel is the absolute optimum time – just a few minutes before the game explains it explicitly. (It drops a pretty massive hint when someone tells you that the mysterious “Koveras” has been reading a specific book and when you go read it, it is exactly that prophecy – but with the benefit of experiencing all the dreams it has a lot more meaning than when someone random person sings it right at the beginning of the game).
Also I don’t think the game does quote the prophecy – if I recall correctly it’s BG2 that does that. (BG1 begins with the Nietzsche quote about “he who fights monsters” – unless the Beamdog version does it differently?) So it really is just a random dude at the start who you hear the prophecy from, and you might not even talk to him.
Ah yes. R.A. Salvatore. When I was still playing Neverwinter (the MMO) the devs (or at least their PR department) got really, really excited about how “holy bus the actual living R.A. Salvatore in the flesh is gonna write with us lowly peasants” (not literal quote) on some of the modules. And like, I get it, I really do, the guy is definitely one of the pillars of your classic fantasy RPG settings, and as much as I like reading LeGuin or China Mieville I sometimes just want to read some schlock about people hitting each other with swords/shooting each other with lasers (as the case may be) but I do think his present day contributions might be a bit overrated.
Bear in mind I haven’t read anything Forgotten Realmsy that came out in the last 15 (maybe even 20) years but the NWMMO guys apparently work in close cooperation with Wizards of the Coast and things in the game are at the very least semi-canon (definitely based on canonical progression of the setting, stuff like Tomb of Annihilation, not 100% sure if it goes the other way as well). So something like 2 or 3 years ago they were doings this Underdark module that culminated with effectively a small army of adventurers (a 10 person raid) fighting Demogorgon and Drizzt and company were involved in the storyline. Now, I’m going to overlook the fact that apparently hundreds of years into the future they are all around under various excuses (reincarnation, petrification and de-petrification, all sorts of “a wizard did it”) which I believe are canonical, and I don’t know how much Salvatore was actually involved with the writing but pretty much every time our character encountered Drizzt the dialogue borderline devolved into incoherent babbling about how awesome he is and I think the only reason we didn’t drop to kiss the ground he trod on is because it would require making a custom emote animation.
To give you some specifics, the final bossfight is divided into three waves, early on in the fight there’s an “oh noes we be doomed” as Drizzt gets sucked into a portal that all the demons are coming from. Then at the end there’s another “oh noes” because it’s one of those “failure is prohibited until it’s mandatory” situations: you have to fight him and beat his health bar to 0 only to be told in a cutscene that you’re not doing anything. But lo, Drizzt jumps out of the portal (on the other side of which is literal hell with a literal army of demons ready for an invasion I’ll point out) does some pirouetting or backflipping at Demogorgon and the hell lord is destroyed (well, banished but same difference). And then we have this patronizing dialogue where Drizzt himself tells the PC that they did well and what a challenge it is to face the likes of Demogorgon to which you can only reply (the game makes you click that) something along the lines of “Now I know what it means to fight alongside the true hero of the realms”. And seriously, F this, I get the idea that there have to be mid-tier adventurers that deal with stuff like “a threat to the city” rather than “a threat to the Realms” but if the game’s narrative is running on empowering the PC to fight ancient dragons, primal forces and demigods having your Gary Stu patronize me does leave a bad taste in the mouth.
Again, it’s certainly possible that it was the game writers who got so awestruck with the prospect of working with Salvatore that they went overboard, and it would definitely feel awkward to have Drizzt pay the player character lip service (which I think only furthers my point that injecting Drizzt into the story was an awkward idea in the first place) but assuming Salvatore had any actual creative input into the writing this is the stuff that he should really reign in if he had any self awareness.
Look… I like both, but (personally) I think it’s horrendously unfair to put Ursula le guin in the same league as R. A. Salvatore.
Salvatore’s writing is fun, and as a teenager/young adult I read a bunch of his stuff… However, there is rarely more to it than the surface layer and, inevitably, as I grew up I found his books a bit… Shallow? (I don’t like the word but I can’t think of a better one to express my feeling atm).
For me Salvatore is good as a “Friday night book” when I want to unwind, just get carried along…
Le Guin’s writing, on the other hand, has had a tendency to stay with me for years. The earthsea trilogy (because the fourth one imo isn’t canon XD) is still the yardstick for me on how “non Tolkien” and less “action oriented” fantasy can be done (in particular a certain fight with dragons always comes to mind). Her “paradises lost” is the best “generation ship” story for me to date…
So, in short, I think they are/were very different authors with very different quality writing. In my opinion, le guin is the more interesting and engaging author (and the one that I would recommend), more in the league of Tolkien than salvatore.
Is that not what he was saying? My understanding of the comment was “Le Guin is amazing, but sometimes I want something a big easier to digest”, not “these two are equal”.
Yeah, that was exactly my point, I was trying to pre-empt an argument that I’m demanding Salvatore be “high brow” because that wasn’t my problem.
Ah, I misunderstood… My apologies!
LeGuin was goddess of wisdom and insight; you can’t really hold everyone to her standard. Cheers was not Hamlet, but Norm was still funny. I will say that if any of the big names of science fiction today ever manage in their 3x 1000+ pages to even approach what she distilled into a couple hundred in the Dispossessed, or Left Hand, they should crown themselves God-Emperor and call it done.
But I’ve read the early Drizzle books, and I feel like this whole comparison is maybe giving Salvatore more credit than is strictly due. Salvatore’s take on “and then I rolled a 20” was pretty much “and then I rolled a 20”, and it’s down there in black-and-white if you don’t believe me. He did some good world-building, but he couldn’t write a fight scene to save his author-insertion straight-18s Epic Hero’s life, even if he didn’t fudge all his dice rolls.
Hehehe – Freudian slip there?
I’m sure I’ve read a R.A Salvatore book or two once, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what happened…
I might be prejudiced because I hate the concept of super-badass ‘He’s famous because he’s so great!!!!!’ characters like Drizzt. Almost everything about them irks me, right down to the named swords.
>> “right down to the named swords.”
Well, if you’re going to open THAT door: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I167m9bQpM&t=23m25s
Thankfully, you can kill him for that.
On the other hand, in a setting where you actively know there are sapient swords.. .. maybe naming them gives them a chance of turning into an awesome intelligent artifact. So.. y’know
Don’t Names have some sort of power in D&D too? The True Namer class being a rather extreme example, though I think that’s 3.5 only, and a pretty infamously weak class at that.
Know it popped up pretty heavily in part of NWN 2’s main story, at least.
Know those True Names are different and separate from just a regular Name, but still. Could see somebody in-universe with a laxer understanding of the rules of magic trying to nudge the proverbial dice like that by thinking up a Name for their weapon.
…Does imply that Drizzt is an idiot and fool either way, I guess? Can’t say I feel particularly hot and bothered by that idea, though.
Truenamers are…. broken. Not in the overpowered sense. There mechanics as written are actually just self-defeating nonsense requiring obscene amounts of skill check optimization to use consistently. If you climb that wall successfully you get…. like a tier 3-4 character.
Then level 20 happens and they get cost free Gate, otherwise known as one of the most powerful and versatile spells on the entire wizard list, and immediately jump to tier 1.
Ha. I hated earthsea. Like, completely. I couldn’t finish the wizard of earthsea, the tenses drove me up the wall. I felt like I was reading someone’s pretentious diary.
I remember liking Salvatore’s work, but I also haven’t read any FR books in a decade now. I always kinda liked Artemis more.
I dunno where Leguin’s rep comes from though. Is wizard just the one to skip and the rest are amazing?
If you didn’t get along with the wizard of earthsea… you may not get along with much else of her work. If you feel like giving Le Guin another shot your best bet may be to go onto her sci-fi (notably the Left hand of Darkness, which won a number of prestigious prizes) but don’t expect much deifference from earthsea.
I can’t speak for others but for me there are number of things that make le Guin’s prestige:
– the originality of her ideas or the implementation thereof (one of my favourite things about the Earthsea books is how they are very low key, not many characters and sparse action… a pleasant difference from the tolkien-esque fantasy that became the dominant current in the genre)
– The character developments (a lot of the time her books focus on few characters which means you spend a lot of time with them, their inner thoughts and musings, for me that’s a nice thing as i learn to understand and emphasise better with the different actors in the story. It also gives me the time to sit back and think about what’s going on and how i feel about it all… it’s really a different pace which i appreciate)
Not being someone who knows anything about writing i cannot comment on the quality or originality of her prose beyond that i find it engaging and interesting. In the end, for me the ideas and pace that le Guin brought to her stories make them stand out as a breath of fresh air comparatively to a lot of other sci-fi or fantasy writing.
that’s my 2c anyway
Just don’t watch the Gibli movie.
That one’s one of the more infamous wastes of a book license, to be fair…
But honestly I felt way, way~ more insulted by Howl’s Moving Castle, myself. Was a pretty decent fan of that book as a kid, and Gibli just turned that story outside in and sideways to push some anti-war bullshit.
Earth Sea at least tried to tell its own story in the author’s world, for all its other failings, but Howl’s Moving Castle just sorta… completely ignored the book outside of set-dressing and the characters having the same names. Pretty dang insulting to the source material.
Kinda the same thing as Shamus wrote about in that one Shadow of War article a billion years ago: Great bit of media, horrid adaption. That sort of thing.
Oh dear, i had forgotten about the ghibli movie!
It’s not “bad” per se, it’s just not the “wizard of earthsea”, that was such a disappointment back in the day. It is a decent film in it’s own but it never manages to capture the magic of it’s source material… pity really
I didn’t know howl’s moving castle was based off a book so i liked that adaptation just fine, slightly heavy handed on it’s message but the message isn’t a particularly bad one and the animation made up for the shortcomings.
as ghibli movies go, the one that disappointed me the most is probably still porco rosso, because it ends in a punch up rather than a dogfight…. ah well!
It’s an odd but enjoyable book. Very low key and laid back for fantasy.
You know the parts of Discword where the action stops for a bit, because the characters have their own priorities, and The Story be damned, right now they’re indulging in what they want or need for just a bit? Or how David Eddings kept somehow making ‘and then they rode/marched while talking’ compelling? Kinda like that, somehow stretched over a whole book and somehow kept genuinely interesting.
I’d recommend it. It’s not for everybody, but I found it deeply refreshing just when I was getting deeply tired of the trope-heavy nature of most high fantasy.
As for the movie… You know that scene where Howl is resting, and his bedroom is full of spinning gold doodads that are so very, very pretty, and was no doubt very challenging to animate right?
In the book, that ceiling is full of filth and spiders. Like, caked on, so that it’s a black, moving mass with even most of the webs obscured. Because book Howl is an utter slob, AND feels a special kinship with spiders he never really elaborates on. So it’s up to the readers imagination if he’s just THAT big a slob that he’d rather make up a reason that weird not to clean, or if he’s just that weird beyond the womanizing and magic.
So… yeah. That movie took liberties, to be blunt.
Well I’m a lit major and my thesis was primarily about how the progression of feminist thought affected sci-fi and fantasy, so you know, I’m one of “those people”. Generally speaking a lot of LeGuin’s work is high concept and it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. I’m not saying you have to have a specific ideological bent or academic inclination to enjoy her fiction (in fact I’d say that part of her strength is that you don’t have to) but it is usually slower, more thoughtful and in some cases written as part of certain discourse, which again, not everybody is going to enjoy and that’s fine.
On the other hand it’s possible that just the wizard didn’t sit well with you, for one it is perceived as (mostly but not exclusively) young adult or even children fiction with strong “coming of age” themes and a certain “it is an adventure but the lesson is things aren’t as clear cut as they are in adventures” idea. Personally I am particularly fond of The Left Hand of Darkness but, again, lit major with a gender studies bent so that is right up my alley, plus the book might read differently in the current ideological climate than when it was published and I’m not willing to start this discussion here. I think maybe Rocannon’s World is a bit more in line with general sci-fi themes? Generally though it’s perfectly possible LeGuin is just not your thing in terms of reading for entertainment.
Baldur’s Gate, the city of the thousand side quest… of which I did two or three before finishing the game.
I can’t help but imagine Beeker in the role of Khalid now-or maybe that Timmy-kid from the Dinosaurs series.
I feel like the players are missing the glory of Invisibility and Skull Trap. Why settle for a fireball when you have like 9 of them go off immediately upon combat starting?
Have your thief place all their traps, rest for 8 hours, lather, rinse, repeat; trigger the inevitable combat and watch the dragon explode into giblets.
I’m not entirely sure now, but I believe Skull Trap was not yet available in BG 1, was it?
Last version I played was BGTutu so I’m not sure if it’s in vanilla, the first expansion or the enhanced edition. The wiki seems to suggest you can get it from High Hedge though.
I think you’re probably right, but I’m sure I never found the scroll to learn the spell in BG1. I’d remember since I made at least 1 main char a wizard and would surely have used the spell if I had had it then. It did become part of my preferred arsenal in BG2 after all.
I really enjoyed this entry in the series. However, I do have one suggestion – can we get the images in a least “FullHD” quality when opened individually? I understand they’re coded in to display at the width of the blog but when you open the image by itself in its own browser window, there’s not much point in having that limitation – may as well let the browser do the scaling for the screen…
I don’t normally have an issue with this except that “look at khalid and the web spell” image is so dark because it’s happening at night, I just wanted to see what was going on without having to edit the source of the page.
Unless there’s something I’m missing here.
The lone tank strategy is probably going to fail once Achilles starts coming up against enemy squads with stealthed thieves (who are programmed to go after your spellcasters). XD
Nah, he just has to skip straight to the Web & Fireball stage. Web everything and you’ll catch the thieves, invisible or not!
You don’t have to worry about invisibility if you just blow up everything in the room!
Not true. Invisible corpses are a severe tripping hazard.
Now, I feel you’re just not using enough heat!
Piles of ashes are no problem at all!
.
.
.
OK, maybe some version of miner’s lung
Yeah, but if you burn them to ash, then how are you gonna collect their loot? It’s going to burn up as well!
Heh, speaking of which, that reason was why I never used any petrification spells and tried to avoid using Cold-based spells in battle; for fear of destroying loot!
I… don’t remember anything like that? It’s been a while since I played BG1, though.
They show up more in BG2, although if you’re playing BG:EE, I believe you’ll run into some enemy squads with backstabbing Thieves in some of the new content.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Salvatore specifically say in the intro to one of his books that his approach to the D&D rules when it comes to writing was to throw them out of the window?
I may well be misremembering, it’s been a long time since I actually read any of his books.
Salvatore was part of the dream team thing that worked on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. I don’t hold him personally responsible for all the lore of that game being a colossal fog of exposition, but I sure was relieved when I Played Dragon’s Dogma and Dark Souls afterward and both of them didn’t stuff their world with several novels worth of historical anecdotes.
Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it… I really was looking forward to KoA but basically couldn’t stomach the soulless combat and associated grinding along with the exposition dumps. That game really made me appreciate movie directors… (and, I guess, whatever equivalent they have in games – lead designer?).
The problem isn’t that a world has several novels of historical anecdotes.
The problem is when a devteam says ‘Stuff whatever you’re doing! We wrote this backstory, and now we’re going to smear it all over your screen despite its lack of relevance to your story!”
Every guide to worldbuilding will tell you that most of that worldbuilding will never be directly experienced by your audience, whether it’s writing a novel or running an RPG, but that doesn’t stop people from ruining the experience they’re trying to create because they want to show off all the work they did (or paid for, as the case may be.)
“Achilles: No amount of imagination can make “and then Top Hat Guy and his opponent failed to make their attack rolls, missing each other for the fourth consecutive time” into something exciting.”
4th Edition developed the concept of abstraction for HP (3rd Edition kinda started it, but only partially as it assumes you’re still taking a wound, just “rolling with the punch” better if you’re higher level). The weird thing with the abstraction is the Retcon nature of damage depending upon how you heal it. Your Cleric casts Cure Light Wounds? I guess you had a nasty arrow wound. You take a Second Wind? Well, I guess you just had the breath knocked out of you with a close call.
5th Edition is when they decided to minimize the “X & Y miss each other for 4 consecutive rounds issue, by lowering the chances of outright missing the higher level the game gets. At that point, there’s probably on average a 75% chance one combatant is hitting another, and it’s just a matter of HP and skills used from that point on, to minimize battles that go on for eternity.
Interestingly enough, I never felt like AD&D combat represented the book descriptions that well. I remember reading the Dragonlance books back in the 80s and then learning the game, wondering why the party members weren’t taking horrible wounds left and right like in gameplay. The later abstraction of HP as plot armor, luck, parrying, etc. represented a better analogue for how combat was working in those novels.
HP was always an abstraction; it’s one of the reason there are instant death effects. Some without saves; hitting the ground while falling at terminal velocity was explicitly called out as fatal, despite the rules* making it clear that, going by damage numbers, a high-level fighter had a decent shot at walking it off.
Cure light wounds is just a divine blessing, and it makes at least as much sense for the divine to restore plot armor/luck/fatigue/morale as it does to actually heal wounds.
*This was 2nd Edition, and the instance I recall, not actually in the core books, admittedly.
Fun Fact: R.A. Salvatore wrote a story about Drizzt falling into a hole, breaking both of his legs and starving to death… The end.
It was during contract negotiations with TSR/Wizards. They wanted to have other authors write stories using his characters. Salvatore was extremely unhappy with this. Drizzt dying in a hole was his out. Cooler heads prevailed (obviously.)
BTW I’m not joking. This actually happened.
I mean, yeah. I wouldn’t let the suits write for any of my characters if i could get away with it either.
Good on him. If WOTC handed Drizzt over to a useless hack, it’s Salvatore who might get the blame for ‘when Drizzt stories got REALLY shit’.
A hell of a lot of TV shows, characters and other stories have died and continued on as zombie parodies of themselves after a change of writers.
(Not that I particularly care for Drizzt, but the principle still applies…)
Indeed. I’ve gone on record as saying every character in the series is an idiot. That said the author still has a certain amount of right to prevent things from getting worse.
What’s particularly funny is that in a conversation Salvatore had at a convention once, he specifically mentioned that when he encountered Drizzt in his own play through of the Baldur’s Gate series, he definitely, absolutely, cheesed him to death just like everyone else did.
Between this and that story, he seems to have a pretty good sense of humour about his own creations that way.
The addition of R.A Salvatore made for some highly entertaining writing in this article, Bob. If only you too had a patreon to donate to ;) :)
And thank you for letting me experience Baldur’s Gate through Achilles and the Grognard, without actually devoting dozens of hours to the game. Not that I’d bother at this point anyway.
Since for some reason RA Salvatore wasn’t psyched about his pet character being cheesed to death, allow me to try and contribute :
I laughed. Well done! :D
yup, same here!
I wonder if his friends have copies of his armor and named swords on hand for this kind of scenario…
I did enjoy the sweetened up combat style.
I played a fair amount of Icewind Dale but I hit a point I start having trouble with the combat in a way I never really manage to have in the NWN2 system.
With the appearance of R.A. Salvatore this article turned into an RedLetterMedia sketch.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
This was the best article in this series so far. The description of how combat is being cheesed cracked me up multiple times. The addition of Salvatore took it over the top. Great job!
I only just started the game for the first time, and I’m shocked at “The combat is said to be a strong point of the series.”.
I rolled a wild mage, which, I know is going to be a harder start, so I rolled a party, it’s my first time, and I’m leaving permadeath on.
Every fight becomes the same: if your enemy is actually dangerous: cast, if they’re not, just use ranged and a tank, because you don’t want to rest more than needed. At first, it could be cool.
A bunch of the mercenaries mistook me for bandits, and I reacted aggressively. They were in plate and only Kalid was in armor for me, splints. Whoever drew aggro, I started running away and around them, while the others used ranged. I killed them all for a free plate upgrade, 2100 gp saved, awesome.
That is cool, I do not mind that.
What I do mind is every other fight getting like this, my party formation breaking up and aggro getting set on mages, that I will spend entire fights trying to dispel, these guys won’t even be doing DPS, but some spearman will follow them around the entire time, outpacing the tanks I try to get to draw aggro. Or that some enemies, the red wizard after Neera in particular, are brutally difficult, and they destroy any strategic setup you can do, and they’re just level gated off from you: can’t use any of my debuffs or disable spells, he’ll resist magic, and my only option then is ranged and melee, and he has a wave blast in melee that OHKs all but one of my tanks, so I can send that tank in and hope he can do some damage, and pray that my ranged will deal with his mooks quick enough to take him out. Choosing to use even minor heal potions is a choice, like, they are expensive and don’t come back, and most vendors do not stock them. I just ran out of antidotes, now I need to find them, because I am not fighting another Sirine or blackguard half orc, half ogre, or whatever it is that keeps poisoning me, without one, it is just brutal.
It’s a lot of stress, fights take half an hour, and are over in seconds, often, they are over from the minute aggro is pulled the wrong way at the start, and it’s all to kill some guys who’s posessions are worth about 12 bucks each, and I will have to sort those posessions to best carry them, because I need that 12 bucks per idiot killed. One bad roll can poison someone, and make a good run a mediocre one you lose money on, but at least you “passed” the check.
Combat is my biggest dislike about BG, I would cut out 3/4s of it and be happy. I don’t want to run into another group of mobs I will steamroll without damage but still have to micro to avoid losing anyone-I want meaningful choices. Fights that are all threats, require thinking to get around, and make me feel like I’ve achieved something winning. Baldur’s Gate is so often “Woo, you survived”, that is your reward for success and “have this garbage that you now have to sell, which will mean you need to go to an inn first and rest/set charisma spells, so you can sell it for 2x it’s worth! (1gp)”. Yes, I know I can leave trash behind, but the only thing worse than inventory management to work out how to carry everything is invent management to work out whether something is WORTH carrying.
But I’m completely and obsessively hooked and have probably played like 34 hours in 3 days of owning it, so it’s just a frustrating thing in between me and something I love.
“Apprehensive, his shield at the ready, Khalid advanced alone on the Hobgoblins. “My heart’s really not in this,” he thought to himself ruefully. He was heartened by the sound of a voice from behind him. “Steel thy courage, husband!” Jaheira cried out. “We will fight alongside you, from over here on this ridge, attacking the fiends from a distance!””
Seriously, if this (or the other examples) is what you consider an engaging flavor narration that spices up combat with imagination, I can assure you that you are making a strong disservice to the cause of making those uncultured casuals appreciate Baldur’s Gate.