I can’t help myself and read the spoilers and it makes me realize how much I have missed! I haven’t seen many things that people are bringing up in my new playthrough.
I did go via the Underdark rather than Mountain Pass and I will say that this game does not hand hold you. It’s like having a 1E/2E DM who asks, “What do you want to do?” and then waits for me to respond. Then sighs bigly when I go to a place. Then later tells me I missed several things but not what. This is less frustrating because I might see it in another playthrough. ]
I’m curious how different Act 2 will be for me or not since I skipped the creche. However, I don’t have La’zel in my party as standard. I don’t have Gale in my party but for some reason still interact with him and give him items. I was also wanting to have Jaheira survive this time around so wonder if I will still see her or not.
It would be terrible but in a great, nostalgic way.
I played first edition quite a bit back in the day. There’s a very good reason it was changed a long time ago. It would sure be fun to experience it in a game like this, though
To capture the true spirit, saves would be disabled so that you’re committed when your attribute rolls defy the bell curve and your Magic User rolls a 1 on the d4 hit dice.
Reminds me of the Hackmaster game system. It’s possible if your character has a low enough Constitution to get a HP penalty, and you roll low enough on your hit die, your character can die during creation.
Rolling for stats seems so quaint now. In hindsight it seems like an unnecessarily poor game design choice, but at the time it seemed normal. The DM’s guide for AD&D offered 4 methods to roll up your character, but never thought of letting players assign a fixed number of stat points.
More roll playing than role playing, but what do expect from a rulebook that explains the bell curve on the second page?
Any stat uber low should have some sort of role playing addendum with it. A charisma of 3? You’re kept on a leash by one of the other characters, in fact once per day, you can remove your mask and have a chance to frighten humanoids.
Eh, just a different perspective. You rolled for stats and THEN decided what your character’s class and story would be. These days players say “I’m making a cleric” then start juggling math to make the bestest cleric possible at level 1. I could make an argument that improvising a good story and personality from random stats is more of a roleplaying challenge than having complete control over your build but, in the end, neither is really a “bad” choice.
I failed to be evil tonight in The House of Hope where I thought about ditching Hope but couldn’t do it. I justified it by knowing that rescuing Hope would piss Raphael off. But then Hope died in the final fight anyway so there ya go. On the plus side, I used her Divine Intervention to summon a nice mace which we took from her so a win for the team! My druid is wearing Raphael’s armor which is AC 21 heavy armor anyone is proficient in. I don’t remember this at all from last game and have no idea what I did with it that time.
As a long time player/DM of DND, I don’t really have a ton of nostalgia for the early games. I had a lot of rules lawyers and a lot of “discussions” back then. In this case, a mage didn’t feel like a mage to me because of exactly what you said there. I know some of the arguments made for why that was but they still didn’t feel magical.
Due to that, I don’t understand the OSR popularity. I liked 3E giving more player agency over their characters. I like wizards who didn’t have to rely on crossbows or daggers or quarterstaves.
BG3 is tolerable because I can see if my next run catches it. I do think there are some puzzles that challenge me more than the characters but again, that’s typical for the medium.
However. It throws me out of the game when it plays like Doom, where it’s expected that you play the levels many times to learn how to defeat it. I’m in Grymforge and fighting Grym. I somehow did damage to him in the first couple of rounds. I figured that for this run I will have to outlast his attacks but can slowly whittle away at him. Nope. I have to use their way of doing it as it’s the only way he can be damaged. I also don’t like their solution. As I’m using the forge when this happens, I think it would have been better if the adamantine weapon I made was the best way to damage him.
I just gave half my characters bludgeoning weapons and turned off attack of opportunity reactions and just kited him around with an archer while shadowheart sat by the lava gear. It was fairly easy and I didn’t realize there was another way to do it until the achievement popped up.
It was the opposite for me - I knew what I was supposed to do but couldn’t make it work, soon the next try I just gave everyone haste potions and we killed it in two rounds.
Any of you all in your playing days use supplements called The Arduin Grimoire? There were nine books and i ran campaigns pretty much out of that, ignoring most DnD rules.
Sorry, my first reaction is emotional. I have no idea how to hurt it. I spent four rounds trying to do so and nothing worked. I used the adamantine mace I created. Nothing seemed to work except the lava option, which is what they intended, I think. So, if there is another way with the group I have, I didn’t find it.
I used smites, reckless attack, spiritual weapon, eldritch blast, scrolls, command which did seem to halt it but not make it vulnerable to anything, psychic damage, different types of arrows, and with what I had, nothing worked. I’m going to try again but I was also frustrated and now want past this, so will probably just do the fast option with their way instead of experimenting more.
I tried bludgeoning but those also didn’t work for me. I went out of my way to try all weapon damage types. It could be I missed it when it did do damage.
I’m on record as not liking that fight much at all. Even the second time, when I knew One Weird Trick from the start I disliked it. Yeah, you can power through it but it just felt video gamey and didn’t land with me at all. Fortunately, it’s not very long and the rewards are very worthwhile.
I liked the Grym fight. His hit points and resistances are a pretty good clue that this stage is more of a puzzle than a fight. I can see why some may not like it for that reason.
The issue I had is that he starts off superheated automatically. I took the first chunk out of him with the anvil and thought I had the puzzle figured out. It took me a bit to figure out he needed to be superheated again.
That’s basically why I didn’t like it. Or, rather, because the puzzle was finicky on screen so it felt very gamey to me. At the table, it’d be easy to just say “I lure him to this spot then we pull the switch” but, in game, it was a matter of making sure he was physically in the radius (I missed more than once leading to several more rounds of set-up because of a foot of distance) and restarting the lava every two rounds, etc. Really brought the mechanics of it to the front rather than any RP-trickery aspect.