Anomander

My biggest complaint is that we can’t just let a more appropriate character take over a conversation. One of my clumsy, dim-witted brawler friends runs ahead by one pixel triggering a cutscene, and I can’t jump in mid-conversation to smooth things over with my bardic talent. This is our most common reason for loading a previous save.

Yeah, we were running into this in my game with my buddy; I’m definitely the dumbass running ahead because I’ve got stealth and dex for scouting, but invisible cutscene/conversation triggers keep catching us and my dunce of a character gets stuck talking to the punters. It’s kind of frustrating that the game encourages players to specialize in that way, but then makes it rather hard to take full advantage of that specialization if you don’t set up the encounter absolutely perfectly.

The other one where that happens is that when a combat encounter ends with dialogue - first Auntie Ethel fight, say - the game picks the character who had the last turn as who Auntie is talking to when the conversation starts. In that case, it’s almost always the party member doing big damage that pushed her past the damage threshold, and they’re generally not built for talking to people.

Those get even more frustrating because there’s an interface option to swap who’s talking, but it doesn’t seem to actually work in the majority of important conversations. It’s only when talking to filler characters that I can hot-swap who’s talking. I’d also love if, in addition to that button working more consistently - it’d tell you if someone in the party has ‘unique’ dialogue options for that moment. I think that having the whole party participate in conversations is chaotic and hard to implement in multiplayer - but a better capture of how those same interactions ‘would’ play out in a D&D game.

Second biggest complaint is the number of things that you can mis-click to destroy your character’s reputation. I’d love to be able to opt-in to an “are you sure” dialog when you accidentally click a random item on the floor while moving around.

It’s very frustrating to get a whole faction pissed at you due to misclicking some ‘owned’ container or accidentally dragging a barrel. Gith creche was a nightmare for that, because every room and hallway is decorated with owned containers. Some measure to make it harder to accidentally loot someone’s mold cheese while they’re standing right in front of you would be really valuable.

Just 2 of those would be fine, maybe 3, but 4 really pushes it.

Yeah. Like, I get that having a little harem of named followers all lusting after the MC slightly is … the sort of RP fantasy that some people want. I appreciate that Larian put that option in the game - and the ol’ “horny bard” trope absolutely comes from very real players wanting to be sexually attractive and competent in their escapist fantasy game. I get that. It’s just not my vibe.

As someone who doesn’t play games for romantic fantasy fulfillment - my biggest gripe with BG3 is that it feels like characters I like hanging out with have no concept of “we are friends” without suggesting romance is a logical next step, and are at incel levels of checking if maybe I’ve reconsidered and we can bang now?

Which also makes the fact that a lot of companion conversations feel like a minefield of “oops actually romance” dialogue options even more frustrating. I’m having a blast RPing an older dude who had a nice settled life prior to the Leech and just wants to get back home and put his feet up, but I’ve chosen a few response options I thought were just snarky or jokes and … oh wait, we’re being romantic now. Goddamn it, F8.

Yeah, I had to un-quit Whatsapp when my siblings-in-law moved to Argentina - because Whatsapp is the main communication platform for a lot of Argentina and that’s where all the various family chats moved to once the in-laws no longer had local phone numbers or reliable SMS service.

If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn’t risk teleportation.

Which, conversely, is also why I don’t care about teleportation. If I have no idea before and I have no idea after and for all intents and purposes I am still me in the new location … all the parts that I can engage with, all the parts I care about - they’re all coming up fine. I might as well have fallen asleep on a plane, or blacked out after a few too many at the pub. When consciousness returns, I am in a new location.

In that explanation you quoted, I fall firmly into the former camp. I don’t think we have special-ness that transcends the meat, but that the consciousness is wholly rooted in it - and so I think that moving the meat from one place to another achieves the result of moving the consciousness from one place to another.

My main difference is that I don’t believe a “soul” transported or transplanted - or exists to be lost. The consciousness that is my sense of ‘self’ is the sum of my meat and my memories, and those are preserved.

But trying to make you understand.

Yeah, there’s your problem. You’re trying to make me understand it your way and criticizing me for not doing so, instead of trying to persuasively state your own viewpoints standing on their own.

It’s an approach that I can imagine would feel frustrating when I already understand your views and am talking about them.

To me it has nothing to do with souls, it’s about continuity of experience. […] If I don’t get to continue to experience life because I’m dead and some clone with my exact thoughts etc is now me, it’s only the rest of the world who experiences that as me continuing to live. But I don’t get to.

I think that distinction is artificial.

My continuity of experience is interrupted every night, among others - and I don’t worry that my experience as being me is somehow invalid now, or fear sleeping lest a doppelganger take my body overnight and wake up ‘as me’ the next morning. The idea that this would be different is resting on the notion that there is something other than mere meat and electricity that would be lost when the teleport interrupts consciousness, and I think that assumption is something that needs direct challenge.

I think you would experience life continuing from the moment consciousness resumes in the new location, the exact same as how you experience life ‘continuing’ when you wake up each day. All the ways that you experience your own consciousness would simply have relocated. Without assuming a soul, there is no subjective distinction between pre/post teleporter any more than there’s a distinction between pre/post nap.

This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”.

That is ridiculous.

So you do see my point.

People aren’t computers, so getting all worked up about how software models instances still isn’t a valid modelling for human consciousness.

When you kill a process and you re-run a program, even if you saved the full state of the memory elsewhere, you don’t say that it’s the same process. Is another process with identical content. There’s no need of a metaphysical entity. It’s another instance.

But this is so hair-splittingly pedantic it’s almost doubled back to be incorrect. If you ask 99.999% of the world, they’ll be like “yeah I closed outlook and then I opened outlook” - to them, it’s still the same program. They’re launching the same software again. No one is like “oh well once you quit Skyrim it’s all over because even if you reopen it later, it’s a new instance and the old one is dead” … no. That’s ridiculous. It’s the same program, the same save file, resumed from save at a later date.

Your focus on “Process” instead of “Program” is making the soul argument. The “process” you’re arguing for is a soul. Something intangible and irrelevant to the end user, that does get terminated on shutdown, that cannot be restored from save. Consciousness is the software, not the process itself. Memories are the save file. There is nothing in OP’s model of teleporting that suggests “process” itself is the sacred portion - when the hardware & software of “Dave” gets paused and resumed flawlessly.

You’re deeply, sorely mistaken. Even in a deep, unconscious state, the mind keeps working, even if the degree of consciousness is different. That we’re not 100% certain of what the brain does in those moments doesn’t mean that it stops working.

Not at all. Consciousness is interrupted. Unless we’re assuming that the “process” itself is sacred - what happens to consciousness is all that matters in either case. If your ability to perceive yourself as a conscious being stops - it doesn’t matter to your experience of your own consciousness if the ‘process’ stopped or went to sleep during the gap.

That’s absolutely the issue.

Your body is copied as a file.

Your mind is a process running in a body created from that file.

When the process stops, you are effectively dead. Another copy of your body runs another process with an identical content. He has your body, but he’s not you.

This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”. The idea that an identical consciousness in an identical body is “not you” is based wholly on the assumption that “you” is something other than the consciousness.

And your mind, or my mind, are both “processes” that stop regularly already - are you claiming that old you dies each night and a completely new but otherwise identical person lives each morning?

or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you’re gone the moment

I love how this was said completely unironically.

We’re talking about something that only exists in sci-fi stories and you’re trying to argue about souls as if one outcome of teleports is clearly more real than another.

you’re gone the moment you teleport and the “you” that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc

Ship of Thesius, though. If it’s exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, exactly my motivations, my memories, my body … That’s me. There’s no other parts that got left out.

But consciousness was interrupted briefly when the transport happened? That happens to me every night - except in the morning I wake up in the same place instead of a different one. For all worthwhile intents and purposes, everything tangible and real that makes a person a person is relocated and the person remains. Getting lost in whether or not “you” “survive” is wasting angst on the existence of a soul.

You’re repeating what OP said.

Thing is, the idea that an “old you” has “died” is a modern soul conceit. If “me” is just the combination of meat, electricity, and memories - then for all intents and purposes I was simply taken apart in one place and reassembled in another. Continuity of all three is maintained when I am reassembled on Mars with my body and memories intact. There is no “old” and “new” me - because what you or OP think defines “me” isn’t something that dies when the meat stops working briefly.

Absolutely this.

Someone else can be the guinea pig, but if it’s been tested and everyone came out fine? Yeah. I’ll absolutely take advantage.

Very much so.

If this coin’s math and mechanics actually work in transferring wealth from rich to poor … it’ll be swamped in poor people wanting their cut, and rich people will want nothing to do with a shitcoin that’s explicitly going to take their money and give it to other people.

Back as a young fella, striking out in the dating market a bunch …

“Just be yourself!”

No, honestly, that was the problem last time - I was looking for something a little more granular and actionable.

This is one of those helpful and encouraging things that people say without necessarily really thinking it through. Deep down in intent, they’re right - you can’t fake your way to healthy relationships, being insincere or putting on a performance of being someone you’re not isn’t going anywhere genuine down the road. Absolutely correct, absolutely great advice - but it’s never given in sufficient complexity and depth to be useful.

None of those grown-ups were like “Ah yes, definitely be sincere about who you are - but also don’t spend a whole date monologuing about the book you just read or your favourite video game.”

That you can be genuine and sincere about who you are, while still using your social skills and putting your best foot forward socially just … didn’t occur. At the time, my understanding was that it was a hard binary - either I was 100% me at 100% volume and whatever came out of my mouth was definitely the best thing I could say, or I was stifling myself and being ‘fake’ in order to build an equally-fake relationship.

It took a friend’s brother taking me aside to make it ‘click’ - he was holding a can or a bottle and was like “So the whole object is all ‘real you’ yeah? But any time you’re talking to someone is like right now - you can only see the side that’s facing you. It’s all you, it’s all honest, but you still want to show them the best side, the best angle, of the whole thing. Don’t sprint straight to showing them all of your worst angle just because that’s what’s on your mind that day.”

“We’re getting paid to put paint on the wall.”

I was like 17 or so and had a temp job as a housepainter for a couple weeks, and I was sinking time and energy into doing an excellent job and being really efficient with paint and … kind of missing the forest for the trees. I was putting unnecessary care & excellence into a back wall and the wall was taking longer to prep than the whole-house job could afford. One of the old guys on site pulled me aside me and, in the eloquent terms above, pointed out that … the real goal here is paint on the wall. We’re doing a good job because we take pride in our work, but the outcome is significantly more important than the journey to everyone else. Doing a “good job” can’t wind up as an obstacle to the job itself.

I was always a details person and perfectionist, and that one clear lesson about taking a step back from the details of a task to double-check what the actual goal is … has always stuck with me.

Please, tell me what I think some more. It went so well here.

You’re falling into the trap that 5e sets of assuming what is on the character sheet it’s all that’s available to the characters. By forcing players into subclasses that are all just cookie cutter variations of each others, you’re encouraging players to stay entirely in their sheet. To approach every problem by first looking to their sheet and trying to find the right number instead of creatively looking at the narrative we’re building together and finding a unique solution.

None of this is true. It’s a weird strawman that you’ve made up, that would make absolutely no sense to any real person’s opinion - if you weren’t trying to create a fictional scenario where having more diversity of choice and options was somehow bad.

It’s not a “me” problem to acknowledge that 5e subclasses and races are incredibly samey mechanically,

It’s absolutely a ‘you’ problem to see a wide variety of options with very few mechanical constraints, and go “yeah, that limits creativity” - if you feel your creativity is somehow enhanced by having hard mechanical limits on which races and classes can do what tasks in a TTRPG … you can still create that experience for yourself in 5E. Like, having more options doesn’t prevent you from playing however confined and restricted you want - so making all of these points about me, about other people is just projecting your own limitations on the rest of the world and then criticizing them for a problem only you seem to have.

and if you can’te see past the matrix and pretty illustrations WOTC uses to distract from that, that’s a you problem, for not really getting how this game works at the fundamentals.

Like that. That’s not my opinion, “pictures” aren’t why I have my opinion or why I might have the opinion I don’t, and I definitely understand the mechanics more than fine. You just made up an opinion for me, made up an explanation why I might have that fictional opinion, and then got snide with me about an entirely fictional scenario you put on me.

You can just not use Tashas if you want. Imagining that other people need hard-coded stat penalties just to “be creative” and that’s somehow impossible in a system where you, or they, can still choose to have hard-coded stat penalties is just the wildest thing to pretend is ‘wrong’ with D&D.

It’s like the custom stat benefits rule from Tasha’s. On its face, seems like a good idea. But now you just have every race being a reskin of each other. Kill the subclass. Embrace class differences. Let players make their characters unique based on the stories we make together, not trying to fit them into a predefined cookie cutter box.

This is so bizarrely self-contradictory.

Force players to only play the nine classes with no subclasses or features, force species into hard-locked stat differences … to avoid them being cookie-cutter? Like forcing anyone who wants to play a reasonably-optimized STR character to play a species with inherent STR bonus increases creativity somehow? As if using Tasha’s rule to play an unconventional species as a STR class means that player somehow cannot possibly also give their character a unique and interesting story as well as a slightly unconventional class/species combo? Make it make sense.

If you think that having more tools to customize and differentiate species and classes reduces creativity, that’s a you problem and not a rules problem.

Effectively, what Spellblade is to Fighter, Dance Bard is to Monk. Plus buff sharing.

Ocean Druid has some cool stuff, but I always feel like “of the sea” or similar classes wind up kind of wasted. I don’t think I’ve ever had a campaign spend enough time in or around large amounts of water to make a water-specialist class worthwhile. You can like, bypass the random swimming puzzle at the bottom of a dungeon somewhere, and the sidequest to magic pirate island has some nice utility - and then for the entire rest of the campaign you’re on dry land, fighting land-based enemies, and the sea-themed subclass is mostly just flavour rather than mechanically useful.

That or lost connection/battery.

The only wireless controller I ever owned would continue any repeating input active when connection dropped, if batteries or wifi died; they could just be cruising at max speed off in whatever direction they were facing, until the motor batteries run dry.

You’d like to think they’d carry backup interface, or even just use a wired controller, but this whole op sounds pretty McGuyver top to bottom.