Nepenthe

I was just thinking the same thing. More than the usual amount of love went into that one, and most people probably wouldn’t even stop to notice. The subtle fade-out at the top. That is some pleasing vomit.

Ok. Mini-rant because I can’t contain myself atm. Do you wanna know a badly-kept secret? I’ve been making art on and off for 29 years. My ass wishes I could draw too. A ton of artists wish they could draw.

Talent will only give you a leg up, and mainly just at the beginning. The rest, all of us have to struggle for and I’m quite sure very few of us appreciate having to do so. And no matter how good they get, there is always something they have no idea how to do yet or they have some idol whose style they envy more than their own. Or they’re the type that only hates what they make because they’re the one who made it.

Van Gogh had a painter friend named Gauguin, and they were both jealous of each other. There is no magical point that one hits where you feel like you’re Good Enough. The best you can aim for is the kind of steady improvement you don’t even notice happening except on a scale of years, and the confidence to acknowledge those improvements instead of hyper-focusing on every way it isn’t what you saw in your head (it never is).

Go get a pencil or your ipad or whatever. Youtube is by far your biggest friend. Go look up videos about how to actually see what’s in front of you instead of what your brain insists must logically be there. USE REFERENCE. Trace a photo over and over, then immediately try the same thing freehand – this one is super useful, because a lot of drawing is also muscle memory. Break things down into simple shapes and then build on those. Use the open space between objects if you need to, to trick yourself into drawing something complex without getting lost in intimidating structural details.

When you’ve got those down, move onto perspective and composition. Cry a little if you have to, then get back to it. Because now you’re able to do whole backgrounds. People? Do tons of deliberately imprecise gesture drawings. Give your OC a terrifying robot head, a pillow for a torso, and springs for limbs. But go get. Your pencil. And be ok with drawing at first like everyone thinks they draw.

Barring that, my second choice is singing.

It can be a little stressful even for me. And yes, the inventory management is atrocious btw, it’s a common complaint.

Like someone else mentioned, you can always pay a little to respec if you find out a character doesn’t have the stats to do what you’re wanting/what they’re built to do. That does require gold, and it is something that needs to be read up on and ultimately taken for a test ride to see if it’s even fun for you. That many options can feel really daunting.

But I think with enough cleverness, the game can be won with almost anything. Just last night, I watched a playthrough of a guy who had challenged himself to beat the game without killing anyone or manipulating anyone else to kill them for him, and he did it.

Whole game. The only NPC he had no way around personally harming could still be knocked out and left alive. He tricked the end boss into murdering itself through careful use of explosive barrels and he himself never fired a shot — a super cheesy fighting tactic common enough that the term “barrelmancy” is a thing.

I’m not gonna say there won’t be reloads, but there are a multitude of ways to handle most if not all altercations. Some things can be talked out of, or allies sought to help.

If not, it could be a huge, horrible fight taken head-on for the awful fun of it, or you could sneak up and thunderwave them into a hole and be done with it. Covertly poison the lot. Command them to drop their own weapon and then take it, and giggle while they flail their fists at you. Cast light on the guy with a sun sensitivity and laugh harder at their own personal hell.

You could sneak around back and take the high ground, triggering the battle by firing the first shot from a vantage point the enemy will take 4 rounds to reach through strategically placed magical spikes.

I passed one particularly worrying trial by just turning the most powerful opponent into a sheep until every other enemy was dead and I could gang up on them. Cleared another fight sitting entirely in the rafters where they had trouble hitting me, and shoved them to their death when one found a way up.

Going straight into a battle is the most expected way to do it, but there are usually shenanigans that can be played, is what I’m saying. Accept with grace the attempts that don’t work. If the rules of engagement seem unfair, change the rules.

If it helps any, the game does also reward xp fairly generously. Just reaching new/hidden areas grants a little bit, to say nothing of side quests.

That guy I was talking about, the one that finished with zero kills, ended the game at level 10. The level cap is 12. That was all just wandering around, doing stuff that didn’t require fighting.

Know which stat each class mainly uses and focus on that. Do not make the mages wear armor, it is not a happy fun experience. Beyond that, be clever and moderately lucky with your cleverness. You’ll be fine.

It’s a lot to get used to and does take time to be familiar with all your options, but I started out not very far above where you sound like you are. You do get used to it if you take your time, and I’m certain most people would be overjoyed to help.

I’m not so sure. I’ve not played the first two to be able to measure between them, but I do recall thinking that if I hadn’t been so into watching videos of other peoples’ dnd campaigns, I would be so helplessly far out of my depth.

As it was, I was already struggling a little bit with which class was best for my likely playstyle. Who can use what armor, why, and what happens when they don’t. What skills go with what stats. The general info they don’t have a need to go over when you’re not the one at the table.

Those aren’t things OP would know enough about to even know they don’t know, so I’m glad they have someone helping them. I don’t consider myself anything remotely resembling intelligent and they’re starting out with less. For being easily one of the best things I’ve played in years, it would feel impossibly daunting for a noob

When I get deeply emotionally attached to my data analyst, I might care if they’re moonlighting on the side. Sex, work or not, is still an emotional topic for most of the human race and it’s not new knowledge to anyone.

Enough that it would not naturally occur to me that “please do not engage in prostitution while we’re together” needs to be said out loud. I will casually ask if you’re monogamous and if you say yes, that’s how monogamy works.

Even aside from that, yeah, tbh, I would consider it good form to let your partner know you’re considering a new job regardless, just so they generally know what’s going on. If you have to hide it, maybe something is wrong.

How did I forget about that cloak!? I got that before reloading because I kept failing my attempts to steal all my money back. I didn’t expect all of those to be so addictive. I loved it.

My personal favorite was the boots that grant their wearer misty step for the tradeoff of leaving all your other clothes in a pile at your starting point. Still kinda sad I couldn’t snag those again.

Up til now, we’ve had:

• The sudden realization that you can bathe and don’t have to crunch around in weeks of dried gore

• The further realization that at least one npc mentions you stink and should probably do something about that

• Standing relatively close to a waterfall for a few minutes if you can find one, or perhaps walking at a normal pace through a really deep puddle.

• Sophisticated method — stealing a water bottle, throwing it really hard at the floor, and hoping the splashback is enough

After months of steady work, we can use the soap now, but you’re going to have to give your fellow gamers a minute to get used to things before you start making other suggestions

AI-generated maps and NPCs might be ok. Ditto fights, though there would have to be playtesters whose job it is to make sure the result is something winnable and acceptably fair.

The main issue there would be that there IS no continual certainty of that. You’d have to either be able to rerolled entire encounters — which would be jarring — or force the AI to DM what happens when you lose an impossible battle — far more rewarding, provided it doesn’t keep doing it. But it may keep doing it. This would be impossible to ever test adequately. Every game on the market may be a hard mode Bethesda game.

I personally really don’t think I’d enjoy something with a randomly generated cast/main story for the same reason I wouldn’t be interested in owning one singular book whose writing changes every time you read it. I don’t play to kill time; I play for the stories and I get attached like hell to the good ones. I replay them ad nauseam because I miss the characters.

I think it would be an intensely entertaining idea either as a New Game+ or for those games to have a wildcard setting that you could turn on and off. That way, there’s no lack of devs who get to tell the tale they wanted and players can mix it up when they’re bored. Otherwise, you’ve downgraded the job of the entire company to filling the AI in on background lore and nothing else.

Other aspects:

• for those that do get attached and wanna re-experience it, you’d need a way to save the information behind the game you just played. That file might be fairly gigantic?

• Would also lead to a weird market for other peoples’ saves. The way modders already make quests, but for an entire plot.

• NPCs and party members that all look like randomized sims.

If I understand, the argument is that someone who doesn’t want to be spoiled for endings should…look at a headline purported to be specifically about endings, and then read the article to see if it’s about endings, which they are not going to do because there is an extraordinarily high chance it’s exactly what it says it is in big letters, and any failure to voluntarily read spoilers they don’t want to be spoiled for is then a failure on the part of the player?

That feels like reaching. Would rather not be mean. I think people stranded on top of zombie infested buildings whose only method of escape is a single in-use helicopter have reached less.

This is just a justification to brush off anyone who opens their mouth at all, because were there a reader who did for some reason want to click on every headline they didn’t want to know about in order to make sure they shouldn’t have clicked on it, that would definitely still be something that is their fault once they saw anything they shouldn’t.

Even leaving aside why someone would do that, the OP made the conscious decision to post it like they did.

They could have tipped everyone off to the clickbait. They could have used a spoiler tag if they didn’t bother reading it or wanted to play into the clickbait. They chose to do neither. That has nothing to do with the journalistic integrity of online gaming mags. This was a personal mistake.

I have seen communities be shockingly good about respecting this. The Hades community especially is amazing and, though the game has been out now for so many years the sequel is nearing completion, they’d probably still just give you what bare advice they have to based on your current status and tell you to keep playing because “trust me.”

I don’t know why the bg3 community wants to pretend it’s impossible and out of their hands, while swearing it shouldn’t matter anyway. It very well is, and for a game this stunning, it absolutely does.

Unless you’ve forcibly seen most of them and you can pick out what moments go where because x action, or you have this one singular shred of information that happens to be the integral piece to draw together an entire arc.

Earlier this week, I was listening to music on YouTube and saw a thumbnail that told me exactly what was up with the tadpoles. Not even the title. I don’t remember what the title was. It was written on the thumbnail in giant glaring yellow letters.

If I am to play this game. I cannot have access to the internet in any conceivable way. I had thought this problem only extended to forums and news sights, places that were fairly obvious and thus easily avoided, but it’s the entire internet when you least expect it.

I’m a third of the way into act 2 and the only teammates whose important plot moments and/or multiple endings I don’t know are Wyll and Lae’zel, and that’s only because nobody likes them enough to be talking about them.

I have tried to avoid this shit at every turn. It’s still a great game. It’s fantastic. It would have been in my top 3 if I could have played the damn thing on my own. I fucking love picking things to shreds more than anything else and there are so many pressing unknowns and conflicting motivations that I’d be having the time of my life. You don’t understand. I could write a whole thesis on any one of them.

But I know the answers already. I’m kind of convinced the reason I’ve found myself so much more attached to side characters like Mol, Oliver, etc. over most of the main story npcs is because they weren’t important enough for anyone to ruin them for me.

Ok, explain. Link me. I’ve been turning this over in my head. I cannot fathom what “fabric artist trading card” could possibly be

This is acceptable. I love chicken and hate Ted Cruz

Exactly. I’ve only ever pirated things I couldn’t afford, and even then I kept a running list of the good ones in the hopes that one day I could pay them legitimately. When I can afford to buy them fairly, I don’t pirate.

I was a thief when I was starving and I’m a damn thief now.

I personally would love to do almost all of those things. I wouldn’t want to do them as a job. There is an ocean of difference between doing something because it’s enjoyable and doing it because if I ever stop for any reason, I will starve to death in a ditch. Tends to kill the fun.

My ideal job would be chilling out as a professional student, splitting my time between large amounts of socializing and various crafting hobbies that are not stressful because my ability to live does not depend on them. Might even take up an instrument. Wouldn’t play it for anyone, I just like learning things more than I like anything else. Which is not monetizable.

Barring that, whatever allows me the most time to do so without making me miserable. Beyond the basic amount required to survive, life isn’t about money. Life is life.

Thanks for single-handedly ruining my entire character 😭

She hadn’t even told me about the religious stuff yet when the option came up. Although if you read her mind about it as a woman, not only is she dead serious, she’s deeply confused and embarrassed to be realizing she’s bisexual.

No interest in doing a male file in order to find out whether Gale, Wyll, etc. would react with the same awkwardness, but I felt that. Normally, the devs just address it by making everyone openly bi from the get-go, and I appreciated the smallest shred of realism.

On one front, if not the other. I’m not really interested in a lot of her fighting style, so we’ve barely spoken.

Xenophobia isn’t really my bag. It comes off bordering vicious puritanism and I’m left wondering whether it’s the result of being ignored, or just the reason. I sat and did my work too, but goddamn.

I think the whole thing is fine, just…progressing way too fast to be believable, and hard to be “friends” without being cruel.

If we’re talking about the nudist option, I’ve been continually asking myself why that exists when we already know why. It’s eyebrow raising but if I wish it were the worst thing happening to me today. I can grumble and move on.

I find the writing for each more or less appreciable, but I do think they need to slow their damn roll, definitely. Not only do all but two of them want me, somehow I ended up reaching this point at the exact same time with all of them and we might as well have solved the whole thing by massive camp orgy and called it a day.

I’m quite sure some of this can be gated behind specific plot points so the progression makes sense. I’m over here completely ignoring the plot for the side quests in Act 1.

Asterion says he “knows a place,” which is predictable because Asterion would bang a tree if it weren’t for the cock splinters. But he also very specifically said that same day that he’s never been to the underdark before, and he literally can’t know a place. We just passed an NPC that told us not to make the slightest perceptible noise or we’d attract ravenous monsters and we’re going to be murdered.

Maybe we should wait to offend god until after we get outside, perhaps?

Now all your other comments make sense.

From an apparently uninformed discord user, deets? Granted, I’ve been annoyed at their insistence on monetizing via unasked-for “perks” I’ve absolutely never even thought to be interested in. But I’ve never felt like I was treated ill, and I assume there’s something I haven’t heard of