Like I said before, I have started my second playthrough of Balfur’s Gate 3.
This time I am a ranger named Illit. No reason or meaning for the name, I was eager to get started and it was literally the first thing that popped into my head.
Not sure how I ended up with a ranger. I thought I was making a rogue who was good at archery. Apparently, to the game, that means “ranger”.
Not that I mind. Rangers are cool. And I get to have an in-game pet. I chose a wolf. But not an ordinary wolf, oh no. Not in a fantasy universe.
He’s a fluffy, shaggy wolf. Who is the size of a cow.
He came to me with the name Lupus, which is laaaaame. That’s just a step a way from having a dog named Dog.
Oh sorry, a dog named Canis. Yeesh. Boring AND pretentious.
It’s a bit of an adjustment to get used to not being a heavy duty spellcaster any more. Especially when combined with the usual second playthrough shock of going from my mega powerful first incarnation to my wimpy low level second one.
The urge to wipe out a band of goblins with a lighting strike lingers within me.
But filling them with arrows will have to do. If I really get desperate to fling spells again, I could always start over as a Necromancer.
That’s an actual subclass of Wizard in BG3, which is cool. I have played a Necromancer in other games, and what I love most about them is having minions to send into battle so they can get beat up instead of me.
It’s even better when you’re a Summoner because then you don’t have to find a dead person before making a new minion.
Sadly, there is no Summoner class or subclass in BG3. And being a Necromancer sucks at first because you don’t actually get the spell to raised the dead as your mindless thrall until you’re level 5.
Maybe someone out there made a Summoner mod.
Speaking of which, I have started the process of modding my BG3. I don’t usually mod games on the first playthrough except if there is a fix for a really annoying interface issue or something else that makes things a lot easier to deal with.
But now that the game doesn’t hold a lot of surprises for me any more, I feel free to mess around with it in order to spice things up.
Kind of like buying a sex manual to spice up your marriage. But nerdier.
My main concern with modding BG3 is that I have not exactly been playing the game the normal way, through Steam.
Way way back when I first got the game and it was crashing all the time, I did everything I could to minimize resource usage, and that included running the game directly from its directory instead of going through Steam.
That means I have to shut down Steam every time I play.
If I forget to do that, a “data mismatch error” pops up, and that is what makes me concerned about mods not working right.
Oh well. I can always uninstall and reinstall the game and hope I can find a way to stop the crashing while still using the Steam version.
Who knows, maybe there has been a patch since then that fixed the whole thing.
More after the break.
God damned Monopoly
McDonalds Monopoly, that is.
I was so excited when Felicity kindly gave me the $20 gift code for Skip the Dishes she won as an instant prize from this round of the McDonald’s Monopoly game.
Not only was that a lovely and generous gift, but it came at just the right time because I am out of money on my credit card and was therefore not going to be able to order in tonight, and Tuesday is one of the nights I order in.
And that would make me sad.
But with $20 from Felicity’s Monopoly win, I could still order in! Yay!
And that was the plan, but god damn it, for some damned reason the code on the playing piece does not work.
I had to get Julian to read the code off to me because the letters and numbers are way too small for my weak old eyes and my glasses make me farsighted so they’re no help.
And we went over that code a zillion times and the code we were entering was definitely the code on the playing piece, so we have no idea WTF.
I even tried entering the code into the McD’s app on the weird off chance that
And it really pisses me off and makes my mood foul because it’s two things I can’t stand : a disappointment, and something that makes no sense.
Patient readers know that I do not handle disappointment well. It tends to completely wreck my mood. Just throws into right down into the basement with all the mildew and dust and centipedes big enough to be audible.
God that thing scared the crap out of me.
And it doesn’t make any fucking sense. What series of events could possibly lead to an incorrect code ending up on a Monopoly piece?
On the other paw, I am sure Julian got the code right. He is very conscientious, and so he checked it a bunch of times to be absolutely sure.
So I dunno. None of it makes any sense. I have no choice but to suck it up and move on, because short of buying a big ol magnifying glass so I can read the damned thing myself, I can’t think of a way to fix it.
In retrospect, I could have ordered from Pizza Hut instead, because as long as you are ordering from their website, they still take cash.
And I have cash. Just not in a “spendable online” form.
I really need to get myself some kind of virtual credit card that can take direct deposit so I can point my monthly check to it and have it ALL be spendable online right away.
And to hell with PayPower AND Vancity!
I will talk to you nice people again tmorrow.