Rexxitor. Biology nerd. Roguelites, indie games, and TRPGs. Drowning in unused yarn, unread books, and mandatory cat hair.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Reduced the size of save files by removing summons that don’t exist in the game anymore.

    Well, that seems like something that should have been done a long time ago, lmao. Good thing I went with druid first over ranger, it seems.

    Fixed Thieves’ Tools in the camp chest or inventory of a companion who is waiting at camp not being accessible when lockpicking.

    Ok, taking items from camp, I could see. Talk about useful, and I believe they recently did the same thing with quest items? Which I very much appreciate. Being able to leave that behind should clear up my inventory considerably when I get back to playing.

    But…taking things from a non-present companion feels weird in my head. I’m sure I wouldn’t notice it; I give everything to the resident lockpick anyway, so it would just be clearing up stuff I misplaced in the impossible event that they ever run out.

    But picturing it does break immersion a little bit. It’s fine, it wouldn’t have any real effect in the moment, it’s just…what an odd choice.

    Poor Gale - we know your pain, sometimes it’s easy to read something into a situation that wasn’t there. We’ve sat him down and explained that if someone doesn’t offer him a shoe to eat every time, that doesn’t mean they never will. You’ll find him more likely to stick around now.
    . . . .
    Gale will no longer permanently leave the party if you don’t offer him any magic items while talking to him – unless you’re abundantly clear that you don’t plan on ever doing so.

    Ok, this one I honestly do dislike. I’ve been mildly bothered by every change they’ve made to Gale’s personality, even though I know the one he started out with on release was literally bugged and was never intended to be like that. Because it was also unexpectedly convincing. There weren’t other characters I could think of that were genuinely likable people while also simultaneously being socially inept, grandiose little incels.

    I didn’t even notice it until it was talked about online, because how Gale acted in his glitched romance was just how guys always act towards me irl. For the first time, every male gamer had to put up with everything *I* had to put up with, and they hated it, and I loved it. It felt believable. It was hilarious. I felt seen. And then they toned him down because he was bothering the playerbase.

    This now, with the items and increasing his hesitation to leave in response to a situation you’re not taking as seriously as he needs it to be taken, this feels like more dumbing down.

    This feels an awful lot like avoiding any player unhappiness by making sure it is impossible for anyone to experience a consequence unless they’re dedicated enough to manually and knowingly force it to happen. And that’s not what they initially wanted the game to be.

    It still has hundreds upon hundreds of permutations, right down to differences in the inflection of a sentence, and the sheer dedication is boggling. But then they did things like remove any actual drawback to the tadpoles, of all things, because of the idea of unpleasant consequences that players would bitch about.

    It is ok to have a character that’s rash and presumptuous because his natural ability has given him an ego that far eclipses his social experience. It’s ok to have a character under such duress that they will make questionable, desperate decisions without consulting anyone, based on their presumptions about the player, whether or not those assumptions are correct.

    That is an extremely realistic personality. And one that doesn’t tend to exist, because what if something happens that the player doesn’t like. Real people make choices. Let him have the ability to make stupid ones.



  • I’ve never figured out quite how to get the spoiler tags working on kbin and, even if I had, there seems like there may be some jank between mine and other instances regarding that. An attempt was made, anyway, and at least that one seems like it would be easy-ish to forget until my long-awaited Durge run.

    But I can’t even be mad about it because of your name. My liege.








  • For context, earlier this week Hasbro (owner of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering) announced that it would be laying off 1,100 employees as a way to “modernize our organization and get even leaner”. Not soon after, it was revealed that an avalanche of employees from both D&D and MTG had been laid off.

    In an investor meeting in October this year, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks specifically mentions Baldur’s Gate 3 as a contributing factor for a 40% increase in digital gaming revenue, alongside Monopoly Go! and Magic: The Gathering.

    Well yeah, obviously you gotta fire whoever was the cause of a 40% increase in revenue, otherwise that could even raise to 50%. Where would it end?

    Always safer to go with what you know: letting the ravenous mob desperate to throw money at you know just as soon as possible that you’re taking steps to remove anything they liked about your product.

    Do you think they can get lean enough to break even in their future?



  • 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 doesn’t, but I’ve wished it did. Probably as a toggled option, since I know it would aggravate others.

    It would require a couple more Act 2 safe zones scattered about for the player to keep track of, but it makes more sense than the ability to just chill for a while in what can be some incredibly unsafe territory. Sneaking off to bang in the underdark? Sure. Fine. I’m certain that won’t cause any undue noise.

    There are only 1-2 battles I’m aware of that can or absolutely will happen, and neither are randomized encounters in the same vein. Areas it notes are dangerous, it won’t allow you to rest at all.


  • Can happen just the same with Astarion. He’s perfectly fine being in a relationship with you if you never turn him down, but
    [SPOILER paragraph because the tag won’t work]:

    whether he means a damn thing he says is completely dependent on one single camp scene. If you rest enough with a sufficiently progressed relationship, he’ll confess that he meant to use you as a shield and accidentally fell in love. If you progress to Act 3 without the confession, you get a cruel speech about how easy it was, and he doesn’t know why you’re so shocked (“It’s what I DO.”)

    …end spoiler. Someone needs to explain the hieroglyphics of that tag to me.

    It’s a pitfall of theirs, and as intrusive as it would have been to keep the exhaustion meter they originally had, removing the mechanic entirely is too destructive. It makes hoarding camp supplies laughably easy and results in too much missed content.

    Maybe a notification marker of some sort reminding the player would be enough. Maybe it wouldn’t, because “Boy am I tired” is just something my party members say sometimes and it was easy enough to ignore without any clear punishment for doing so.

    But they really need to reinstate something.




  • The post can, yeah. The predictability with which all posts or comments containing the word “Google” will have several responses underneath evangelizing Firefox almost certainly will not, after it exceeds a point it very clearly routinely exceeds.

    Not because you guys are wrong, (you’re not), but because you’re annoying, which is almost as bad. There is something in psychology called reactance theory, and it’s the reason why, when you’re just about to do the dishes and then someone else tells you to do them, it’s suddenly the last thing on earth you want to do.

    It is a choice so small it isn’t worth arguing over, but it’s no longer your choice born out of your own free will, and now you feel cheated and resentful and you are not doing it, both out of spite and more truthfully to regain your sense of choice.

    This is the same reason everyone hates vegans so much. They’re not wrong. They’re annoying. Firefox has vegan PR.

    I held off listening to Hamilton for three years for no other reason than nobody else I met would shut the goddamn fuck up about Hamilton. Same with the TV version of Good Omens, whatever stupid cartoon jester thing has been in a third of the memes lately, and a hundred other things.

    I am very likely to switch over to Firefox myself in the ever-nearing future. That ice is breaking. But it will not be because a bunch of strangers whined at me over my own choices for over a decade. It will be because the cons of whatever Google, Windows, etc. have done finally outweigh the pros of not having to exert effort to maintain my experience.

    It bears consideration that in the meantime, Firefox users have a tendency not to even read the several duplicate comments before they start jacking off into them, not uncommonly in a way that’s loudly judgemental towards their own target audience.

    The resultant spam cements a mental association between Firefox, the brand and the feeling of being annoyed and insulted. Don’t be those vegans. If I had to think, be like the art community treats Adobe. Fuck Adobe, but I’m not just gonna overload someone with aggressive pompousity who’s only using the industry default.