I finished up
Planescape: Torment, and wow. Step back, every other RPG with aspirations of good writing; daddy's home.
Easily the best book I've ever played, and quite possibly the best I've ever read as well. I'm glad to have missed out on it for so long, as the extra years of storytelling knowledge only served to elevate the first-play experience.
The text is only the tip of the iceberg; the whole design is so thoroughly holistic in its upending of traditional fantasy ideas that it would take a dissertation to count the ways, and manages to make it all work despite being completely against the grain.
I suppose one of the best examples is the party composition; the fighter is a hard-to-hit disembodied head with heavyweight shit talking skills, the cleric is a chaste and intellectual succubus, the mage is a clinically insane cosmic hazard, and the paladin is a terrifying death knight who makes Judge Dredd look like a mall cop.
Weird and wild to a man, but right at home in the kitchen sink fantasy of Sigil and the planes that intersect it.
Narrative-wise, it's a masterful implementation of the fork-join diamond structure that allows many story threads to exist independently before being tied together comfortably at the conclusion.
Looking back, it still railroads you BG-style on a couple of occasions, but pulls it off so subtly as to be unnoticeable, often keeping you guessing whether you made the right choice even on a textbook run.
That's a powerful device for maintaining the illusion, and something many other "choices matter" games miss by making their outcomes too explicit.
As for the ending...
I was nonplussed at first, thinking that I'd gotten the bad outcome by resurrecting my whole party for the final battle; perhaps in punishment for making them suffer for me one last time.
But no! True to form, that's another turnabout of the traditional formula: the good ending does not have to be ideal or happy. Going back to watch the slightly extended fusion path gave me time to ruminate on the larger context, and that subtle expression as TNO sets off to fight for eternity in the Blood War ended up hitting like a freight train on the second watch.
A bittersweet understanding that, despite his grim and unavoidable fate, things have finally been put to rights. Bloody fantastic for late 90s uncanny valley CGI, and something that'll stick with me for a long time to come.
...And Vhailor hulking out into the ultimate 25STR / 25DEX / 25CON avatar of judgment after learning of the sheer injustice behind TNO's immortality - as foreshadowed by his party dialogue tree about reactive magic - has to rank up there with the greatest RPG powerup moments ever
what an absolute beast!
On the big question, I chose "Nothing can change the nature of a man" during the dialogue with Ravel.
Philosophically speaking I believe man's disposition is fundamental, but is molded by nurture and environment. The nature itself is not mutable, instead being overridden or biased by an individual's path through life. TNO's ongoing immortality speaks to this, as one of man's base facets is survival, and each of his incarnations is representative of a different path and its outcome.
However, come the end and the additional context available at that point, the game makes a strong case for regret being the true answer.
I suppose that may depend on how you play (Chaotic Good this time), but ultimately I think there is no absolute correct choice: The question exists as a philosophical prompt to make the reader think and come to their own conclusion, and fulfils that role admirably.
Next, I'm jumping to the other end of the Infinity Engine spectrum with
Icewind Dale.
So far I'm having fun with its mechanics-first dungeon crawling, and was pleasantly surprised at being able to gear my party to ~AC0 without leaving the first town, but it clearly suffers from a certain maximalism in combat and encounter design.
Of the two major dungeons I've run, both have been exhaustive multi-floor affairs packed with mobs, with the second one almost reaching parody by giving each floor its own independent form of elemental evil.
"Surely this must be it", I said after vanquishing the snake king's minions on floor one, and the death cult on floor two, only to walk into floor three and immediately get accosted by a necromancer and his undead army. I only came in to rescue some villagers for fuck's sake
Sima Tuna wrote:I hated Siege of Dragonspear. It combines the worst aspects of Icewind Dale (huge mobs of damage sponge enemies combined with strictly linear level design) with the worst of modern "fantasy game" writing.
...And now I understand
Ah, you like trolls? Then surely you'll love ten more, and perhaps some mages with Hold Person to really round out the gank.
IWD's writing seems decent, but I think full voice acting for quest givers might have been a bit of a footgun - the guy in the tree town could put a party to sleep with all that rambling about balance.
Sima Tuna wrote:I play Evil most of the time when I play BG1 and 2. My go-to play style is the Selfish Evil looter/mercenary type of character.
I think I ended up a bit more boyscout than I'd have liked, since a few of the more confrontational sidequest dialogs I dabbled with went something like:
"Hail, adventurer! I have dire need of help!"
"Fuck off, peasant."
(Peasant initiates combat)
Though I don't regret it for a first run, since the story framing seems to favour Good / Human / Fighter at the outset.
Sima Tuna wrote:The major version difference is BG1 runs in BG2's engine, so certain spells don't work the same way they did in original BG1. Entangle used to only affect enemies, but the BG2 engine makes it affect all parties. There are a few spells like this which were nerfed by the change in engine.
Jaheira's starting kit makes a lot more sense in that context. I took it off right quick - the Cloakwood has more than enough horrifying AoE paralysis for one game!
Air Master Burst wrote:This isn't even a new phenomenon, BG2 pulled all this same stupid bullshit. I've never even made it past the initial Thieves' Guild encounter! I always try to refuse the blackmail since I don't give a fuck about Imoen, but the game literally cheats real hard to railroad you into their storyline. That's shitty DMing 101 stuff.
Bah, I was assuming BG2 would handwave it away as spent or lost before the party gets thrown into the intro dungeon. I expect I'll be more forgiving than with SoD since there's some precedent for a new game bringing a new economy, but it still sounds forced.
And from the thieves' guild too - mercenary bastards. So much for helping them out with those three sweet heists.
As an aside, I find it quite interesting to look at each game through a DM lens; BG1's is a confident adventure-spinner who can adlib wandering until the cows come home but stumbles when pressed for plot, IWD's is still learning and wrote the whole script beforehand, and Planescape's is a renaissance loremaster who must have a hell of a time finding a group that can appreciate their work
Sumez wrote:I retried it years later, and didn't even have the patience to move all the way out of the starting area
You don't know pain until you've had to do a three-point-turn to reorient a full party without causing a traffic jam!
