“Listen Rafael, I don’t do deals with Devils. But… if you put the Mass Effect party select screen in here on a Hotkey… I’ll be your bitch for life.”

I heard about that, and then you get to do a collaborative art project. This game truly is amazing.

Alfira is such a big one. I know it’s an easy choice because of her Weeping Dawn scene early on, but this girl has “Get in the Party” written all over her. Tragic backstory! Thirst for Adventure! She’s a Bard; I need a Bard!

I’m only to Moonrise Towers so far; there may be more I’ve yet to encounter. Wulbren was a big letdown, I’ve been looking for him since I accidentally flung his friend off a windmill. I was hoping to find a fun gnome inventor, instead, he’s just kind of a prick who doesn’t even care I helped all his friends in the Underdark!

I think it’s just all a bit antithetical to how I run my games. I’ve really only used random encounters one time, and that was when I wanted to make a “classic dungeon crawl” and created an encounter chart to roll on when the PCs backtracked. That way, it would feel like the dungeon denizens were looking for them more the longer they were in the dungeon.

If they’re picking a path to get to an objective, then I want to reflect the flavor of that choice. If they’ve decided to cross a swamp, then I might have them run into another boat being attacked by a strange tentacle monster. Or, if they’ve decided to trek through the forest, a group of fey who are sick of the mortals encroaching on their land. Preferably, this ties back into the central story: the other boat in the swamp is carrying a rival adventuring party after the same treasure as them. The fey have been enlisted by the big bad who stole the treasure in the first place.

And if they miss either of these, they’ll run into them inside the dungeon eventually. These encounters are just a chance to foreshadow those things and don’t feel ‘wasted’ to me.

My only problem with the quantum ogre is that if you’re determined to have your players face a certain encounter, why even bother with the illusion of choice? Why have the left door and the right door? Why not just have a straight hallway?

Players already tend towards analysis paralysis for any choice you present, so if you’re going to give them a decision, then you can at least have that decision have an impact or clear consequences. No one wants to do a bunch of prep for content the players will never touch, but part of the magic of TTRPGs is having a world that feels alive and that you can influence.

One of my favorite GMing terms I learned about recently is “showing the barrel of the gun.” If you don’t want to come up with two encounters - one that the players will never see and one that they will - then a much more manageable alternative is to have one option that reveals the imminent threat to the players and one that does not. And if they then bypass your planned encounter? Well, great, you showed them the threat, and they got around it.

As a programmer, the idea of replicating the randomness of dice in a game is… tricky. Simply: computers don’t do random, so we must do our best to imitate randomness. So then attempting to ‘curve’ that artificial randomness also makes me feel weird.

I turned it off myself, though, now I can tell myself that my improbable high rolls are ‘earned’… and using 3 inspiration points to only keep rolling 2s and 3s are also ‘earned.’

Yeah, the amount of “it’s supposed to be that way” I see is crazy. It’s fine if it’s supposed to be like that, but it doesn’t mean people are wrong for not liking it.

That’s a bummer. I like to use the entire buffalo of the long rest, and completed the goblin/druid conflict in 4 days. Part of me is tempted to go back and load an earlier save, but I’ll probably just have to keep this in mind and try to rest more on my next playthrough.

I don’t mind the content of the review, it’s a fine opinion to have. But, what boggles my mind is the “Polygon Recommends” badge. The tone of the review is so dismissive and negative, I would never have guessed the reviewer enjoyed the game. It’s like the writer assumed you read all the site’s positive coverage and didn’t feel the need to mention the game’s best qualities.

It is wild/infuriating how difficult it is to avoid Reddit in search results. It feels like we’ve really let the value of the internet just accrue in one place.