Thanks for the kind words, I don't doubt your sincerity, not at all ^.^ Just different experiences, and a lot of reading of people extrapolating ideas out of things that weren't actually said, or missing other lines can lead to very different impressions. What we specifically take note of or hang on varies by player, especially in dialogues, after all. I intended no sarcasm or mocking, I assure.
I am curious about your experience with Gale... The way the game works it, you need to have viewed a specific set of scenes, and you need to have seen all of them, before party night, for him to proposition you. If you haven't triggered these scenes, he'll just treat you as a friend, no matter how high his approval or anything else you've said and done.
Getting all of the scenes to trigger is a circus act at the moment, and you've basically got to rest after every little event, and every approval change, just in case you miss one – if your approval goes up too much between long rests, you'll skip over one and be locked out, because they can't be made up later. It took me three plays with different characters to lock down triggering all of Gale's scenes reliably every time I want to.
It sounds like, with your character that was propositioned, you triggered all of the scenes – including the weave scene, where you do magic with him (and must then pass all three checks to finish the scene properly), and the one that follows that one. I don't know how those scenes play out if you are also a wizard – I've not done it that way, so that may alter or soften the path possibly.
If you give Gale a positive image that involves you and him at the end of that scene – regardless of which one, then the game interprets that as flirting, and Gale is put solidly on the romance line.
From what I hear, if he is in that position at the party, but you rebuff him, he may come to you later on to see if you might reconsider, since the previous magical nights meant a lot to him, but I've not actually done that part myself. I find Gale more palatable than pretty much ANY of the other characters, and usually choose him when he's available, depending on which character I'm playing.
It sounds as though, with your other character,s you missed out on one of the key scenes, and so the romance refused to trigger. There have been a lot of complaints about Gale's path being very fiddly...
If you had a case where Gale actually attempted to progress a romance with your male character, and that character had NOT done the weave scene, and given him a positive image response, then that's something that should probably get sent in as a bug – include the save file, if the result can be replicated.
I can't agree that his 'issue' should be thought of as unnecessary – I think it likely feels that way right now because it's just been placed on us without any kind of boon or benefit, or any real progress at all, and it also doesn't, currently, have any downside if you refuse him, so it comes across as seemingly without point or purpose. It's a bad place to leave it, but I think a lot of things can be considered 'unnecessary', that still ultimately add to the game in a positive way. This need is part of Gale's personal story – it's a tool that is put there as a means of suggesting that his situation is genuinely cursed and dangerous. Yes, they probably could have done that a number of other ways, but they clearly wanted to put you in a position of having the option to tangibly give something up to assist him. It may not be handled very well, all told, but I'm giving it the leeway of being just a 'hook' at this stage, and going to be a part of his greater personal quest as we go.
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For Wyll, I'm not sure what dialogue lines you're referring to, honestly; they clearly dind't stay with me or have any large impact. I've tried pretty much all dialogue choices (with the exception of a few event-chain triggered ones) with the companions at this stage of my play-throughs, and these ones are only ringing the very faintest of indistinct bells for me... I feel like this one might have been in the initial slew of dialogues you have when you first add him to your party? If you ask them initially, he'll give you a little, but most of them are brush-offs and he tells you that some stories the blade only shares with his close friends... but the options disappear after you ask them, and don't come back.. and if you simply Don't ask them, with the intention of leaning them there to ask him alter, when he is at higher approval, they simply disappear as soon as his approval value changes.
If I'm mistaken here and this came out during one of his fireside chats, and I'm not remembering rightly, then I'd probably chalk it up to him outright lying to you, or mixing up his persona's origin story and his real one... of course, we're never allowed to know when our mary-sue origin npcs are lying to us or being deceitful – we don't get those checks, they're just allowed to lie to us as much as they like with no consequence, so it's hard to be sure. Thanks Larian. If you do have a genuine conflict of information that doesn't seem like an in-game fib, then probably consider sending it along to their bug form, or their feedback form.
As an aside – Wyll approves of you taking the hag's side in the initial conflict with the brothers, because you're 'saving an old lady from some boorish miscreants'. But if you got a negative for mistrusting her, you don't get that back when she's revealed to be the villain later, it's a problem with the system, but also with Larian's placement of the markers, you're correct – ideally, you should get your approval values at the end of events, based on your intentions and choices... the other big issue is when you hit one of Larian's collapsing dialogue railroads, where you have two outcomes, but one requires four or five successful checks, and any failure diverts you back to the 'never tried' outcome... anyone who disapproves of the failure path being taken voluntarily also heaps that on you, regardless of the fact that you *tried your best* to do otherwise.
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Are you talking about the argument between the human and the tifling (sorry, can't remember their names) after the siege of the Grove?
That, and others. Halflings get a line there that allows them to diffuse the situation so no-one leaves the grove, *and* no-one gets punched – they're the only ones who can do that without causing further bad blood. They also get a line a little further in that let's them be polite to the stew lady... no-one else would ever even conceive of being polite to her, apparently... My main compliant is that race dialogue flag lines literally never have anything in them that is actually relevant or dependant on your race – just on playing to racial stereotypes, which is vile. They contain things that literally anyone should be allowed to say, but we're instead told than only someone of 'this' race would ever even contemplate of saying this thing... which is ridiculous in every case that it shows up.
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Combat and initiating it from dialogue; I agree that in many of the cases where you can do this, you should arguably get the benefit of surprise, but in a lot of cases, where it's a tense or alert situation anyway, someone suddenly drawing and attacking is not off-guard enough to warrant surprise. I agree there should be many places where it is, but certainly not everywhere. If surprise isn't granted (as it's not, in any situation of attacking from dialogue currently), then initiative is rolled as normal. In the case of you being slower, think of it this way – yes you initiated by drawing your weapon and going for them, but that act itself could have been quicker, or smoother than it was this particular time, and the other person had a faster reaction time, this time around – perhaps they're able to jump back and ready their own weapons, and potentially act, before you manage to do what you're trying to.
Would it be nice if they could wrangle it to allow you to take one action of your choice, and then roll initiative as normal? Yes it would.. but I sadly don't see BG3's Larian engine being up to the task of managing something like that. We can hope I suppose.
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Regarding hitting... If you hit, you'll never do zero damage, expect in particularly extenuating circumstances. The rule system doesn't have grazing blows, or anything of that nature... and if it did it would certainly be beyond Larian's ken, at the moment... If you meet the target's AC, then you've scored a hit that deals useful damage, while if you fail to meet the AC, then you haven't managed to do useful damage. That can be understood in
any number of aesthetic ways, but that's the baseline of it.
Are you meaning that you'd prefer it if you
visually always 'hit' what you aim for, and just dealt zero damage if you failed to actually meet its AC? That could work, after a fashion, but it would cause other problems and other confusions, since a lot of abilities are based around when you hit a target.
Either way, Orges should not be limbo break-dance dodging your shots.
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For goblins, they have a base Intelligence of 10 – which means they fall into exactly the same intelligence average bracket as humans, no more,
no less; so if human villages can have a town apothecary or alchemist, then so can goblin tribes. Goblins may be depicted as dirty and stupid by other races, and they may be pitched as such in other media, but in D&D they are (as a species at least) perfectly capable of all intelligent higher pursuits to the exact same degree that humans are. For comparison, the kobold inventor – who makes and uses alchemist's fire among other 'inventions' – has an Intelligence of 8. (That said: human villages aren't stuffed full of guards carrying explosives and acid arrows and dark cloud shots and roaring knock-back arrows... so neither should goblin camps be)
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For magic... It seems to me that you just have a very laid back idea of how 'easy' spellcasting is for someone who doesn't have an innate magical ability (and remember, wizards don't; that's why they're wizards). These are meticulous, precise things, every minute detail of which matters, and which must be executed with exacting specificity. Can you
Remember well enough to quote flawlessly, every letter, word and punctuation mark of a 100 page technical thesis? No, you can't. Nor can Wizards. Each spell, formally speaking, takes up a umber of pages in your spell book, full of text, descriptions, diagrams and other necessary information, equal to the level of a spell; can you imagine having perfect, quotable, precise-to-the-letter recall of even the six pages of complex spell text required to cast disintegrate without turning yourself to dust?
If you want someone who learns a spell and then innately knows it and can choose to cast it whenever they want, so long as they've got the energy for it, then that's a sorcerer you're thinking of, or possibly a bard... it's not a wizard.
Wizards don't have an innate connection to the weave as sorcerers do; they don't have a powerful mediator serving as their connection and conduit as clerics do with their deities, or warlocks do with their patrons. Wizards don't have any help whatsoever, and they don't have even the faintest hint of a natural or innate connection. They do magic functionally blind – they cannot feel the flow of the weave itself, not in the way that sorcerers do. They create the magical constructs and shapes, forging the the forms that cause weave energy to flow in defined ways to evoke the effects that they want, but those formulae are laboriously worked out, and what they feel when they cast a spell is not raw weave flowing through them, but rather, they feel its passage passing through them in the same way that you feel vibrations and coolness when you put your hand to a water pipe – you feel its presence and passage, but you don't feel the water itself, and you can't
actually see it; you just trust that it's there because you know you built the pipes correctly.
(And if you wonder why Gale is so completely gaga over his magic it's potentially because his experience with Mystra allowed him to feel – and really feel – something that few wizards ever do, and which made every other act of wizardry, ever other magic, every other part of life, feel bland and washed out by comparison... and knowing that that's what sorcerers feel every day probably eats him alive...)
The execution might take only a few seconds, but that doesn't mean that the act isn't phenomenally complex. ANYONE can become a wizard – unlike sorcerers and such... anyone can. The reason few DO is because it's HARD.
A wizards can keep a certain number of spell meticulously memorised for immediate execution. The amount that she can keep perfectly fresh in her mind is based on her memory retention and ability to order information and retrieve it in her mind – that's her Intelligence ability score. A wizard might know sixty spells, while a sorcerer only knows nine... but that wizard can't keep all of those spells perfectly formalised and meticulously recalled
well enough to cast reliably at a moment's notice. They can do that with a handful of them, by revising them thoroughly each morning.... maybe late game as many as twenty... which might account to a little over 100 pages of technical text, depending on which spells. That's a feat beyond any of our comprehension... expecting that wizard to know the other four spellbooks that contain their other eighty known spells (spells they know and can cast accurately reading the book, or can cast reliably with a few minutes of revision in the morning, mind you) by that point is not really a reasonable assumption.
(Sorry if that became a tangent...)
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Weapons!
By 'physically play it out' I meant just that. Get a friend, mark out some five foot squares, and get a two metre length of broom handle for the spear and a 30cm ruler or two for the daggers. Play about with it in real time (safety first of course); you might be surprised. I'll say for certain that if you give me a chain glove for my right hand and 16cm blade for my left, and I can absolutely show you how to put it in a trained spear-wielding person in a head-on encounter without exposing myself to the pointy end. ^.^ (What... I do fencing...)
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Quests!
Thanks for the kind words... I think this is where different elements of the conversations resonate and stay with different people. The detail I remember most clearly about the paladins is that when they were at their lowest, they asked their gods for help and none answered, and then they asked
Anyone for help... and Zariel answered, and they
Accepted. She wouldn't have killed them if they refused, or damned them... just left them to die in misery. (Though it's likely that she engineered a lot of the tragedy that befell them between their rejection of her first offer and their acceptance of her second)
They are definitely in a similar position to Wyll, though in many ways even more sympathetic than him, especially if Zariel engineered their misery in order to get them to break oath... but they did still break an oath they'd taken to a deity, and they are willing to condemn any soul Zariel tells them to to save their own, even if they want to do good acts in between. That said, I don't wish them ill. I don't think they deserve a death that also bears eternal souls damnation with it.
They owe Zariel a soul (each, I presume... but Larian has a blind spot for remembering that more than one person is involved, all over the place); that should be a route we can pursue.
Karlach didn't ask for it at all – she was enslaved, and compelled after being caught up in the war, or so the vision implies. She wasn't given a choice in the same way, because when Zariel claimed her, it was to accept, or to be eternally destroyed on the spot; she was damned either way, while the paladins were not, and had even sworn oaths that they forsook in accepting Zariel's help.
I find Karlach more sympathetic than the paladins, even if her personality is more abrasive. She's on the run and she wants out of it. She's scared and cautious, and doesn't trust random strangers that she doesn't recognise... perfectly legitimate reaction in my book. If you do her a kindness, she fears drawing targets on the rest of you as her reason for continuing alone. Where you find her depiction to be like a rabid, dangerous dog, she struck me as simply someone serious, war-worn and jaded, untrusting and cautious, and on the run. I don't think she's dangerous at all, at least not to anyone who doesn't attack her first. She also owes Zariel a soul, and we should be able to pursue that as well. I don't think she deserves a death that also bears eternal soul damnation with it.
But walking away from the quest is not progress – it's just 'not playing the game'. It's 'skipping content'. It's utterly unsatisfying, and as per larian's normal way of writing things, it will almost definitely just lead to a default outcome that will be one of our two presented options.
