From what I understood A corpse can start a cutscene, so he puts shadowheart in the chest then sets it on fire, then tosses her right to the end of act 2, which triggers the cutscene but due to her being dead he is the one doing the talking which allows him to blow himself up and end the game.
It’s… very weird.
A really interesting interview with Swen Vincke (owner of Larian and prime driver behind BG3). Interesting to hear his thoughts on creating this game. 50 minutes:
I am the King of Cheesing It
Steel Watch Foundry
Very bottom…those guys are too hard. So I’ll have a mage be invisible by the Neurocitor thingie while everyone else fights far enough away to disengage me from the fight.
Which is fine but then it shows me and my dead teammates hoofing it out of the building…how we got past the guys fighting in the doorway I dont know.
But whatever works. Its a fairly viable suicide strategy in a tabletop game I guess. In fact I kinda thought that was what was happening since Gale got this look on his face like ‘this is it’.
That would have been cool if he died doing that and was unressurectable.
That video was like a really stupid acid trip.
Stupid stuff thats happened so far:
Theres really only oneish way to do steel foundry, but if that were a tabletop adventure, my PCs would kill me if I designed that dungeon.
"“You see a railroad track and a pushcart that leads to the foundry…no you cant load it up with bombs, its just for show. A book says the watchers are controlled by extracted brains. You see a bunch of brains on a wall in the boss fight. There’s a wheel that if you turn it, it destroys half the brains…”
“We destroy the brains!!”
“Nothing happens.”
Also, I picked up a gold piece laying on the ground and a dozen city watch attacked me. A little girl ran through my whirling blades spell…city watch attacks me.
I have deeper more fundamental rants but I’ll hold onto those. I dont want to give the impression I dont love the game cause I do.
*I wonder if running into a railroad that does nothing is a deep joke about being railroaded.
Oh god I spent WAY too much time trying to figure out what that track was about.
Some evilness on my latest playthrough: I joined the amoral trader group Zhentarim, by sweet-talking the guy with the special chest into betraying the group by splitting the profits between ourselves, and then double-crossing him with the local leader by promising to deliver the chest myself and sealing the deal by murdering in cold blood my former co-conspirator.
There are several pieces of gear that only work if you have the Absolute brand. You don’t specifically have to be evil to get the brand but I think that’s good enough for government work.
Anyway, the Dark Urge origin is absolutely an evil playthrough vehicle. It adds narration and dialogue options that make you unambiguously a monster if you choose them (and sharpens the internal motivation for existing bad guy choices). The only way to make it more “evil” would be to create a game I wouldn’t want to spend money on.
I took my break at the beginning of Act 2 , but there’s definitely less mandatory content for an evil playthrough since you can skip a number of fights. That still leaves an enormous amount of gameplay and an enormous number of ways things will play out differently if you go that route.
For a game that’s an easy hundred hours on a lawful good run, it’s frankly astonishing how much alternate content exists when you make bad guy choices.
One of the best parts of the game for me is that there’s no alignment “score”. There’s consequences for your actions, of course. But you can choose your actions at each encounter more or less independently. Act the hero here, be a villain there, and get results based on each. I haven’t tried a paladin yet, but that is consequence-based not alignment score, as well.
That’s more a problem with poor NPC pathing. If you injure non-combatants, of course the local law will react to you. Your other examples are good ones.
One thing that bothers me: the Greater Restoration spell doesn’t cure the conditions that the Lesser Restoration spell does. The Greater should do everything the Lesser does, plus more.
One of the interesting tid bits in the interview linked above was that they had consciously left out Dispel Magic because to implement it the way they would want would be too disruptive. As an old school D&D player (first and second editions were my jam), that was a spell that was noticeably absent to me and I assumed 5e no longer had it.
I clicked on one BG video on youtube and now I get millions of them in my feed and people are not great about keeping spoilers out of their titles or thumbnails. Gah. Nothing huge, but still annoying.
To be honest, Dispel Magic was always one of my “I must always have this spell” things back in the day, it was probably too good. I don’t mind its absence.
Well, so was “Detect Magic” but honestly that’s different. It’s difficult to get through the game without it. It should have been a class feature for wizards and not a spell.
Curiously, I never see anyone use it in my tabletop games. I think that Counterspell took most of its combat application away and players assume magical plot armor on anything like “The door has a mysterious aura preventing passage…” that isn’t a clear application of an existing Player’s Handbook spell. And, since most combats are fairly brief (I believe the average is three rounds), using a 3rd level slot is a bit much to just remove a Slow or other in-combat debuff that got past being Counterspelled (plus CS means stopping everyone from being slowed, Dispel is a single target application).
In a game like this, though, I could easily see people trying it with abandon.
Hooray, Minthara fix is finally implemented.
Minthara lovers, your ship has come in. This hotfix takes care of a bug that blocked access to some of Minthara’s lines of dialogue, including some hot takes from your companions about your decision to date the ruthless Oath of Vengeance Paladin.
If approval is high enough, your romance with Minthara will progress in Act 3. This unlocks several new dialogues allowing you to explore and deepen the relationship, and discover more details of Minthara’s backstory. Alongside many lines of interactive dialogue, many more non-interactive voiced lines are available with Minthara as a romantic partner.
Minthara isn’t the only one who has new things to say though. Other companions in the party will comment on the relationship and may even find themselves on Minthara’s bad side (there is no good side; we’ve looked really hard for it) should they have their own romantic entanglements with you. And Minthara won’t watch silently if you stray from her side, whether your dalliance is with another member of the party, or [redacted].
Happily, I just busted her out yesterday and haven’t done a ton since so hopefully most of the intended experience awaits. I’m currently in that sorta-state with Shadowheart that doesn’t get resolved until Act 3. Also, I’m not sure how being totally supportive of her career goals of being a Dark Justiciar affects her romance down the line so maybe I’ll have some dalliance with Mindy and see what transpires.
I think it’s fair to say dispel magic (and other similar spells) did become wizard class features with the implementation of rituals in 4e. They still need to be learned but wizards don’t have to waste spell/prep slots to make use of them.
That’s such a sensible way to do it IMO. Any spell that seems ubiquitous should just be a class feature.
In 5e, it’s not a ritual.
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Dispel%20Magic#content
Detect magic is, though.
I do like the idea of turning counterspell into a class feature, given first to wizards and then to bards at a higher level. I’d word it something like this:
It trades a reaction and a spell slot for an action, which seems to me like a pretty good trade.
BG3 Counterspell is much better than official 5e Counterspell. BG3 says “Hey, someone is casting [whatever], you want to CS it?”. 5e technically makes you use your reaction to make an Arcana check to identify the spell… the same reaction you’d need to cast Counterspell. So you actually need someone else to use THEIR reaction, hope they make the Arcana check, tell you “He’s casting [spell]”, then you decide if you want to CS it. It’s a stupid system and I assume most tables just run it like BG3 does.
“The evil cleric casts Animate Undead”
“Ok, I Counterspell it”
The other option is to blindly CS stuff and have the DM chortle that you just blew a level three slot on blocking a cantrip.
There really should be a way to recruit her without giving up three companions and the tons of content the tieflings are part of in acts 2 and 3. I don’t mind some tit for tat, but that’s a whole lot of tat for not enough tit.
I find that if I click “not interested” on every video I see on a topic I wish to avoid spoilers on, they stop showing up almost completely after a while. You’ll start getting them in recommendations if you watch even a single video on that topic again, though.