Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous vs BG3

I wonder, do they use the term species in universe? It seems odd playing a game of Lord of the Rings, and having them talk about all the species of Elfkind.

Thats dangerous terrain. Think about "Human Rights".
Means i cant be racist because the drow is another species but slaughter him like a chicken because he is another species.
Much better

Actually, the Drow are both a race and a species. They are elves, and thus a species, but they are also Drow Elves, and thus a race of elves. So, unless they're planning to make all elves the same...

Means i can gather elfs as livestock?

I'm not sure it's so simple to graft such biological hierarchies into a setting that doesn't necessarily follow those rules.

I think it's actually a bit ridiculous to change race and species.

Species = A group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding.

In other words, if you mate members of two different species, they don't have offspring.

Race = A concept used to describe a group of people who share physical characteristics, such as skin color and facial features. They may also share similar social or cultural identities and ancestral backgrounds. There are many racial groups, and a person may belong to or identify with more than one group.

In other words, if you mate members of two different races of the same species, they produce offspring.

GM4Him.

That's what race has come to mean - while race has always been a social construction the original racists, the race scientists, believed that the human race* was divided into different species or breeds.

https://archive.org/details/racesofmenfragme00knox

Some kennel clubs still use race in the original sense - 'races' of dogs instead of breeds of dogs.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00222938609460147?journalCode=tnah11

Race scientists tried to categorize the difference 'races' of humanity and give them grades:

https://galton.org/books/hereditary-genius/

But this turned out to be false - all homo sapiens are the same species and there is no other extant homo species.

Gygax and Tolkein used race in it's original sense - race may have been an illusion the *real* world but in the fantasy worlds of Oerth and Middle Earth race was real. Dwarves and Humans were written to be different species (races) that cannot interbreed.

Unfortunately, people tend to confuse the fantasy meaning and the real world meaning and thus believe that every fantasy race is an analogue to a real world 'race'. Which is why I think this is a good move on WotC's part. I do think allowing *every* species to interbreed causes problems (as we've just seen in this discussion) and I think that was a bad move by WotC.

I also wish we, as a culture, had been more careful with our language and had not started using 'racism' as a catch all for prejudice and discrimination - because it makes us less aware of attempt to bring back racism 1.0 by which I mean attempt to show that the humans are indeed divided into different breeds or species.

*(one of the few instances in which we use the original form)

"Unfortunately, people tend to confuse the fantasy meaning and the real world meaning and thus believe that every fantasy race is an analogue to a real world 'race'. Which is why I think this is a good move on WotC's part. I do think allowing *every* species to interbreed causes problems (as we've just seen in this discussion) and I think that was a bad move by WotC."

Exactly my point, and One D&D makes it worse. Now, there are no half elves or half orca and such, as if only elves and humans and orcs might be of the same species but other "races" aren't. You can be half whatever you want, implying that all races are a part of the same species, able to cross breed. Devil's, demons, gnomes, dwarves... You can mix and match however you want, implying they are all one species but various races within the same species.

The main problem is whats the difference between a elf and a chicken for a human?

The fantasy standpoint was every intelligent humanoid share the same species.
Some races have in general no "human rights" because labeled as evil races.
Without races no racism. But from denied "human rights" to have no "human rights" sounds a bit harsher.
From Race to what? Livestock? Monster? Wild animal?

Its not about logic, its about virtue signalling for twitter NPCs.

About all of the above - wasn't Pathfinder 2E just doing all of it from the get-go? At least, from my limited knowledge of it.

Outright revoking OGL 1.0 seems like an utterly idiotic move on their part, though - wasn't its purpose specifically raising awareness of the system and encouraging people to try the real thing after having played around with a homebrew variation? Not to mention that there was stuff like KotOR which uses d20 but is heavily altered. How is that going to work legally, considering it's Disney property? Not 15 years pass since 4e flopped and they seem to be doing something rather... strange again.

Is there an example of a middle ground between something like this and GW tossing WH license around without much regard for the quality of the end product (Darktide sure came out... rough, for one, and we've had numerous examples of very bad WH40k games over the last decade, plus Sega having Creative Assembly pump out one TW: Warhammer after another even after the setting was scrapped and turned into Age of Sigmar.

IMO Warhammer Fantasy >>> Age of Sigmar, so I am glad that Creative Assembly kept at it.

Eh, to each their own I guess. I absolutely adore BG3, and although I put in 300 hours worth of multiple play throughs on Pathfinder Kingmaker, I still say BG3 is better than both Pathfinder games by leaps and bounds. WoTR I had to stop at 48 hours in. I found the story to be a bit cliché, the characters uninteresting and the crusade mode an atrocity (painfully boring slog). It all must boil down to individual preferences I guess. I also happen to love the BG3 characters. They are some of the best written since BG2 and Dragon Age Origins IMO. Some of the characters in the Pathfinder games, to me, come off as either cartoonish (like straight out of an anime) or very bland and boring (Sosiel).

I love BG3 and while I don't believe there is such a thing as a perfect game, BG3 has been a delight for me. Not much that I would change about it (except maybe Wyll's stats. Come on, give that man some more dex! 🤣🤣🤣)

I love both, but so far BG3 still keeps me replaying it, while I don't think I'll likely replay WotR or Kingmaker or Solasta. Granted, I'm replaying Lost Valley for Solasta with my wife, but I never actually beat it to begin with. As for Kingmaker and WotR. They are just too intensive to play more than once. The idea of starting a kingdom from scratch in Kingmaker or doing a whole new crusade in WotR doesn't appeal to me. Meanwhile, I play BG3 EA over and over again, trying out new characters and such.

I am also not a huge fan of Pathfinder characters. I mean, I don't hate them, but I don't love them either. I mostly play with 5 custom characters and one other, whoever I feel like at the time, and usually I just take the same one with me all the time.

I am curious whether you will still play BG3 over and over again when it is finished and thus requires substantially more time to finish.

For comparison I started WotR and completed the shield maze with umpteen different characters, but I haven't actually finished the game a single time.

Lol. Who knows? Who knows? Guess it depends on how long a single playthrough is and how good the final product. How it ends may make all the difference.

Oh, I absolutely agree that AoS feels mostly like an attempt to re-invent a setting that was considered less popular and failing to do so. It's too bad that the WHF MMO (Age of Reckoning) flopped, because it wasn't half bad. Wasn't EA handling it, though...? Figures, then, I suppose.

My problem is not with WHF, it's with CA's games kind of dropping in quality and/or depth since Shogun 2 (which was my personal favourite in the series along with Rome 1). Sega quality control really showed how incompetent it was when Rome 2 came out as an utter disaster. They've been better than that since then, but I personally bounced off every game of theirs that came out after that. Sega's DLC ethics also leave much to be desired.

Enough going off-topic, though.

I'm sure it's been said before, but playing through wotr again, good lord, the music for the mythic paths blows away anything bg3 can muster, and it's not even close. The music alone creates this intense vibe, and these are text boxes with very few cutscenes we're talking about.

I really wish bg3 would have better music, or something that just drew me in like wotr has like it.

I played Pathfinder for about 15 minutes. The fixed camera was just too much for me to deal with.

I've played WotR a little over 700 hours at this point. One of my favorite games of all time, I do not see BG3 ever coming close to unseating it.