Faerun (pretentiously pronounced fay-ROON) being the fictional setting of that game, Baldur’s Gate 3, that I’ve been playing.
Both things happened today, and both were surreal.
First, I was stuck for a while on a particular battle. It involved the denoument of my party member and all around awesome cleric and friend Shadowheart[1]‘s plotine and that involves a confrontation with the Mother Superior of a large cloister of worshippers of the goddess of darkness, Shar.
Who, as it sadly turned out, is pretty evil. And corny! I mean, she wants to plunge the world into eternal unbroken darkness.
Right, you and every other major vampire villain.[2]
So what would happen is that I would go confront this Mother Inferior bitch, she would say, “Hand over Shadowheart or else!”, I’d tell her to go fuck herself sideways, and she would sic all her followers on me.
And hoo boy, were there a lot of them. Which is why I kept losing. I would be throwing my big spells around and taking them out in droves but they would just keep coming.
Plus they would cast this goddamn darkness spell (to which they are immune, of course) that really made life difficult.
I had the bright idea to position my party members and their summoned creatures up the staircase leading to the location of the fight in hope of forcing the horse of enemies to be forced to pool at the base of the stairs where they would be easier to blast with my big bad area of effect spells.
Eat hot electric death from the Mistress of Storms, bitch!
The weirdness began when I re-did the conversation with the Bitchiest Witch but instead of replying to “Give me Shadowheart!” with “Go eat a bag of expired dicks, you demented whore!”, I replied, “Um, sure, let me go get her. ”
And she believed me!
I guess it’s no surprise that the queen of darkness isn’t very bright. *zing!*
So I got my people set up on the staircase just so and I was ready for the fight. Al;l I needed to do was send my warrior queen Karlach out to start the fight.
But because I had told the Dame of Dimness I was going to go get Shadowheart so telling her to go French kiss a camel with AIDS was no longer an option.
Easy fix : I’ll just have Karlach attack her. That’s sure to set things off.
But it didn’t. I attacked her, did a lot of damage, and she just stood there still glaring imperiously at me. Her audience didn’t react either. Weird.
So I attacked her again. Still nothing. And again. Nothing.
Well surely she would try to stop me from actually killing her, right?
Nope. Killed her right there in front of a sea of her adherents.
Who did react to her death…. by breaking into small groups for discussion.
“Wow, can you believe the Mother Superior was never worthy?” one said.
Maybe they weren’t so much devoted to her as scared of her?
It was all creepy as concentrated fuck.
I mean, I took it because it got me past that tricky fight. But part of me really wanted to load a previous save and do the fight anyway just to restore a sense of normalcy.
More after the break.
Well it’s that time of the year again.
Time for me to get this dang song stuck in my head until Halloween.
I know I watched the special when I was a kid.
And I remember thinking it was really terrible. Awful, in fact.
I wonder if I would feel the same today?
After all, it has the voices of Gilda Radner and Catherine O’Hara!
The other thing
Oh yeah, the other weird event in Faerun.
This one is much shorter. I had a quest to see what became of an artist friend named Oskar after he moved to the titular Baldur’s Gate.
Turns out he married the rich lady who was his primary patron. Unfortunately, immediately after that, he become sullen and withdrawn, and that worsened to being violent and verbally abusive.
Really, really verbally abusive.
Now if this was the real world, I’d be asking Oskar what marriage meant to him, what his parents’ marriage was like, and in general assuming the problem was that dear Oskar had a lot of metaphorical demons rise up once he was married. Ones he probably had no idea were even there.
But this is a fantasy RPG, so ir was very literal demons. Poltergeists, even.
And that meant that first I had to knock poor Oskar out so he would stop menacing his long suffering and remarkably patient wife and then go through her entire mansion looking for the damned poltergeists and destroying them.
Which was made tricky by the fact that they are invisible. But I am a clever sorcerer, so I just waited for them to attack me then hit that general area with an area of attack spell (Turn Undead worked well) which hurt them and made them visible for long enough for me to finish them off the old-fashioned way.
And when I had destroyed them all, I went blank for a moment, then said this :
And that made me extremely happy.
And now the bad news : the goddamned game has a level cap, and I’ve hit it.
It’s level 12, and apparently they said they had to put that in there or people would get too powerful for the bosses in the game.
Bullshit. You just make the enemies stronger when the heroes get stronger. That’s what every other god damned game does.
Words cannot describe how pissed off I am by this. I have done a whole lot of adventuring after hitting level 12 and none of it fucking counted.
Now I am just going to hurry through to the end because what is the point in doing the side quests when it won’t advance my character?
I feel like this really breaks the relationship between an RPG and its players. Victory equals advancement. That’s how it is supposed to work.
And what’s worse is that it doesn’t even tell you that you hit a level cap.
It even still awards the XP, it just doesn’t count it.
I feel violated.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.