I think this is where I get annoyed/confused at the way the RP is being taken out of RPGs, and instead turning them into a game where there is a specific narrative you want to follow to get to a specific ending.
I personally feel like having outcome control taken away is one of the best things art like RPGs can do for us.
I think this is interesting and is what took me some time to come around to as a non-TT player, despite having played a number of cRPGs in the past. For example, I’m one of those people who has a canon Shepard and replays her story every year or so (in the way I also reread favourite books), and I’d have found it really frustrating in Mass Effect not to be able re-experience her story because the game kept chucking random checks in. I guess I did see it as a bit of a choose your own adventure, in which I felt I’d created a story I really liked and wanted to be able to reliably recreate it.
That’s the mindset I came into BG3 with, so it was a bit of a culture shock to feel that all I could really control was my character and that same character could end up having very different stories depending on the luck of the dice. But then I decided to just roll with it (groan!) and now I’m a convert, in a way that no other cRPG has made me even those that do use RNGs. To the extent that I now actually would love the opportunity to replay the Mass Effect trilogy with my canon Shepard and have things go randomly wrong and have to somehow deal with it!
