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UI, Controls, QoL : Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.
Roleplay, Story, Immersion : Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
Mechanisms : Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.




CREATING AND UNDERSTANDING OUR CHARACTERS




Information displayed on our character sheet.


It is difficult to look at the list of proficiencies of a character.

At the moment, I can infer who has what skills. But in order to do this, I basically have to go through a long list of numbers, one for each of the possible skills, and find the numbers that are bigger than others. It is really not convenient. Reading "Arcana, +2, Investigation, +4, History, +2" isn't as straightforward as reading "Investigation" in a list of skill proficiencies.

The character sheet should have a section listing all the proficiencies of a character (skills, armours, weapons, Saving Throws), organised by type of proficiency, and listing them regardless of the reason why the character has them (background, race, class or feat). Once the character is created, what is important is to know what the character has, not how each skill was acquired during character creation.

Having the skills listed would be useful in order to be able to put the right companion to the right task. But it would also be cool for roleplay : skill-sets alone can tell a story and brush up a portrait.


Many tags are duplicated.

Characters don't need to have some of their tags (e.g. High Elf) listed twice. Once is perfectly sufficient.


Please, don't create redundant tags.

- Having the tags "Cleric", "Good Cleric" and "Cleric of Tyr" sounds just a tad bit repetitive.

It is sufficient to have the tags "Cleric" and "Deity : Tyr". My "Good" alignment can be deduced from "Deity : Tyr" (if a player chooses Tyr and doesn't want to be Good, they can simply abstain from selecting the dialogues options which portray a Good character). From this "Good" alignment and the "Cleric" tag, it is easily deduced that I am a "Good Cleric".

Also, I suggest elsewhere that other classes should select deities. The fact that I'm a "Cleric of Tyr" is readily deduced from having the tags "Cleric" and "Deity : Tyr". If I have the tags "Paladin" and "Deity : Tyr", then I'm a "Paladin of Tyr". Easy.

- Having the tags "High Half-Elf" and "Half-Elf" is clearly redundant, as the former implies the latter (and it's even more redundant when this pair of tag is duplicated, see the entry above).

The character sheet is for us players to understand our characters. If the dialogue code needs to run tests on our character sheet and you find it computationally more efficient to store some results instead recomputing the relevant information every time, please make this invisible to us.



Choosing our skills.


Balancing skills.

I feel Athletics and Acrobatics are currently not exactly the most useful or appealing choices.

The Charisma skills and some Wisdom skills (Perception, Insight, Animal Handling) seem to be the overwhelmingly most attractive skills so far, both from a roleplay perspective (talking your way into some events or through encounters, feeling what people don't say) and from a mechanical perspective (finding traps and secret doors). Some other knowledge checks, such as History, Religion, Arcana or Medicine provide very nice insights and dialogue options here and there.

But I don't know of good reasons to choose Athletics or Acrobatics (I obviously don't know all the mechanisms, especially those are are hidden in the background but not described in any tooltip). I was told Athletics is used for jumps, but I found it far from necessary to jump super far.


Medicine should probably be an intelligence skills.

I might be completely missing something, but I think that Medicine should clearly be an Intelligence skill, not a Wisdom skill. It has a lot more to do with knowledge of how the body works than being attuned to your surroundings. And you are home-brewing 5E anyway (which the rulebook invites you to), so that's probably a change that can be done.



Races.


What's the deal with Drows ?

I have the greatest difficulty understanding what you're trying to do with Drows. Currently, they feel wrong in several ways.

- Why are Drows not a sub-race of Elves ?

That's how they're described in the lore. In terms of mechanisms, they have the usual +2 to Dexterity and +1 Elsewhere of elves, the Darkvision, the Fey ancestry, the weapons training. So ... why ?

- Why are there two Drow sub-races ?

I couldn't find any mechanical difference (Ability Scores, race abilities, proficiencies, etc). So ... why ?

If you are trying to get some sort of alignment tag for Drows, I feel that encoding this in the race is a poor idea. Just give us good dialogue options (see an earlier remark about freeing Lae'zel), so that we can roleplay a Drow through our words and actions. As for the deity, I list elsewhere the idea that all characters should be able to choose one.

- I don't understand what the Lolth-sworn Drows are supposed to be.

My understanding is that Drows that break from the cultural mould of Drow society (which exists beyond Menzoberranzan), including by no longer worshipping Lolth if they worshipped her before, do not instantly become of a different race.

- I don't understand what the Seldarine Drows are supposed to be.

I have never heard of those elsewhere. I cannot tell for sure, with the description given in the game for Seldarine Drows, whether it is implied that they are surfacers, followers of Vhaeraun, followers of Eilistraee, etc. All I understand is that they are "seeking allies" and aiming to "settle a conflict".


I don't really understand the various Tiefling sub-races.

From a lore point of view, I'm not quite sure about viewing Tieflings as a race that has sub-races. More importantly, equating a sub-race with the Devil in your ancestry means it is currently impossible to have a PC whose Devil ancestor is any other than the 3 proposed, which is a bit sad for roleplay.

From a mechanical point of view, Asmodeus and Mephistopheles Tieflings differ by ... their starting cantrip. I don't know, it feels as if you could just make the starting cantrip a choice from a list and merge these Tieflings. I mean ... whatever. This just feels weird.


I don't understand the difference between Cambion and Tiefling.

Gale explains that a Cambion is the child of a Devil and a Human. Which I thought would result in Tieflings.




******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************



MISCELLANEOUS




Banter.


Missing out on banter because the sound is tuned down.

Due to often having the camera far from the party, which is the only way that I find to do medium-fast travel, and the game's muting of all the sounds not in the camera's surroundings, I too often miss some banter. Which is sad. Banter is cool.


Is banter only location-triggered ?

It seems that banter triggers only when the party enters certain zones (this is a bit weird and exploitable, but it's also very easy to refrain from doing in a real, non-playtesting playthrough). Shouldn't there also be a time-interval after which we should hear one ? Banter is cool. The more, the better.



NPCs belongings.


It should be possible to read books belonging to NPCs !

And perhaps ask them if we can borrow their book. I mean, just like the UI issue where opening a book in the inventory and closing it brings us back to the world, this really goes against us enjoying all the little details you have put in throughout the world. (I could use Invisibility, but I feel that's a lot of effort to read books. Maybe it's the intention. But I feel books should be easier to read.)



Other things.


Why can we not resurrect non-companion NPCs ?

Zevlor died defending the grove and I thought I'd just use a revivify scroll on him. But I couldn't. So I discovered that, story-wise, you have back-up options. Which is cool if we want to let (or have) someone dead, who was supposed to deliver important plot points.

This request is not a big deal, but it's a bit sad that the rules governing some aspects of the world one moment (namely, recently-dead people can be resurrected) don't apply the next, because you decided so. Un-announced changes of rules are always frustrating and immersion-breaking. To be more specific : resurrection is a thing in the Forgotten Realms lore, it's not just a quality-of-life feature that you made up for the players, and thus doesn't get immediately registered as a video game convention from the start.


Flaming swords ... really ?

It's a bit ridiculous to be able to dip our swords in fire, without coating it in oil or something. It might be better to have bottles of oil, like there is for poison. Not a big deal, but still.


Flaming swords carried on the back ... really ?

I don't think putting one's flaming sword on one's back is a very healthy practice. It's already ridiculous to dip our swords in fire. And that missing arrows of fire can still burn their target and nearby creatures. Carrying a burning weapon on our back is the next step. The greatest thing is when the fight is followed by a cinematic, where we have all the leisure to witness the ridicule of the situation. This is clearly not a major issue. I'd rather have the writing and the narrative mechanisms be better and not pull me out of the story so often. I suppose I can file this flaming sword on the back as video game convention. But I also suppose it wouldn't be too difficult to stop the inflamed condition of weapons whenever the weapon is stored.


We shouldn't be able to Examine creatures.

We shouldn't know about the level, race, and HP of everyone. It feels like we are tabletop players fighting with the Monster Manual open in front of us. It also feels like we are playing BG3 : Play-Testing Edition, which it totally is, so hopefully this feature is just temporary.


We probably shouldn't know how many HP enemies have left.

A health bar, which would show us only the relative health, would allow us to know who is near death, wounded or has full life, without letting us know exactly how many Magic Missiles are needed to guarantee a kill.

It would be great to at least have the option to hide the exact amount of HP of enemies, as part of the difficulty-increasing options (and this one would also be roleplay-enhancing).


It is not necessary for half the world to be level 3.

Supposedly, adventuring is a big deal. We can start the game with the background of a Soldier, who may have fought a war or defended caravans, and we'd still be level 1. It feels weird to see every other creature we meet be a level 3 creature. Just because we are level 3 doesn't mean that all enemies, have to be level 3.


The correlation between the levels and HP of creatures is ... interesting.

I have seen level 1 Mind Flayers with 71 HP and Cambions with 82 HP. The ones I'm a bit jealous about are the Human thralls or dead adventurers with 24 HP. I don't know what class they have, but they have really good Hit Dice. I have also seen some level 3 goblins with 13 to 16 HP. They are a bit ridiculous, given that level 1 goblins have 8 to 12 HP.

And I noticed that Volo was a level 3 Bard with 6 HP. Can you make sure that we get the proper d8 HD if we create a Bard PC ?



Reactions of companions and other NPCs.


Companions at camp should not attack my Spider (or other Ranger's companion).

They seem to have an attitude problem. It's not very nice of them.


When I cast a non-damaging spell, people should not complain.

Spells like Cloud can be used defensively. It would be great if my companions didn't ask if we're in the same team.

It would also be nice if Aradin didn't pick up a fight with me for no reason after I saved his skin at the gate. Ok, maybe I got him wet, I can't remember all the details. But that was to make 2-3 goblins fall prone when I iced the surface.


Understanding some particular events or things.


Who did Raphael talk to exactly ?

Did he talk to each of us separately ? If not, how come I only see the PC in the dinner room illusion scene ? Can he create multiple illusions and talk to each of us separately, in such a way that we don't hear the conversation he has with the others and they don't hear the one he has with our PC ? The others sound like they've all talked to him separately. I don't understand this scene.


What do the characters know about each other exactly ?

Using only information available to the characters, in my first playthrough, I'm really not sure what I was supposed to know about Astarion. First, he tells me, right after meeting Raphael, about having a master and he mentions me being a warlock, a fact I certainly didn't tell him ! Later, when I meet the Gur hunter, he is tense, but I cannot direct the conversation toward what he is hiding from me. Finally, Lae'zel mentioned his master ... All of this occurred before the scene where he tries to drink my blood and is revealed to be a vampire spawn. Is that an EA bug in the permutations and triggers ? Or am I not understanding things ?


When do the goblins turn hostile to me ?

In my first playthrough, I let the guards at the door of the goblin fortress know that I'm a True Soul. Then I attacked and I'm pretty sure I didn't see any goblin beat the drums. (I was so fearing someone would beat the drums.) When I reached the room of priestess Gut, they were hostiles and waiting for me.


I don't understand Wyll.

He wants to sneak in and chop off the heads of the goblin leadership, but he disapproves if I want to save Sazza's life and perhaps free her so she can lead me straight to her camp ? Does he want me to kill my way through the whole goblin camp and call that sneaking in ? Or does he want me to find my own ways to sneak in ? Is he just a not-quite-brilliant-mastermind who doesn't see much further than his personal feud with the goblins ? I'm not too sure, I'd bet it's that, though I haven't played with him much.


Aradin's "Form a line".

It sounds as if he heard this phrase in a film bard's tale and he thought it sounded pretty cool, so now he is using it as a battle cry, similar to how nobles would shout the name of their family or castle. Or perhaps he understood that it's a battle order, but he doesn't exactly understand the meaning of it, so he shouts it just to sound like a party leader.

Charging into battle with a grand total of one buddy isn't exactly how I understand "form a line". Especially ironic is the fact that they are already forming a line, but when Barth and Aradin charge leaving Remira behind, they actually break the line.

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I can field a couple of your questions in here, though its still valid that the game doesn't explain them.

Cambions are direct half-devil offspring; very powerful individuals, but not full fiends. I believe a Cambion doesn't quite benefits from fiends' functional immortality, but they don't really age like mortals either.

Tieflings are mortals with fiendish blood in their heritage, but not nearby. I think the *maximum* amount of fiendish lineage a tiefling can really have is 1/8: that is, three generations down from first contact. They are just normal everyday people, who express fiendish visual traits, and sometimes manifest a few minor powers, but no more 'potent' than any other mortal race.

As for the drow mess... I made a thread about that myself. Drow are a subrace of elves, full stop. Anything beyond that is social/personal/spiritual and is not apart of their race.

My halfling has "Lightfoot Halfling", "Halfling", "Female", "Custom Character", "Halfling", "Lightfoot Halfling", "Baldurian"..... Sooo... They really do need to fix up their tag system.

For the rest, all valid issues and concerns, well raised. My support.

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"Form a Line"

hehe too good! That's the line for this one, no doubt. So many layers of meaning, such depth
+1

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Damn dawg, you wrote a whole bunch of these, mad respect.

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Originally Posted by Niara
I can field a couple of your questions in here, though its still valid that the game doesn't explain them.

Cambions are direct half-devil offspring; very powerful individuals, but not full fiends. I believe a Cambion doesn't quite benefits from fiends' functional immortality, but they don't really age like mortals either.

Tieflings are mortals with fiendish blood in their heritage, but not nearby. I think the *maximum* amount of fiendish lineage a tiefling can really have is 1/8: that is, three generations down from first contact. They are just normal everyday people, who express fiendish visual traits, and sometimes manifest a few minor powers, but no more 'potent' than any other mortal race.

As for the drow mess... I made a thread about that myself. Drow are a subrace of elves, full stop. Anything beyond that is social/personal/spiritual and is not apart of their race.

My halfling has "Lightfoot Halfling", "Halfling", "Female", "Custom Character", "Halfling", "Lightfoot Halfling", "Baldurian"..... Sooo... They really do need to fix up their tag system.

For the rest, all valid issues and concerns, well raised. My support.


If a cambion is a half fiend and a tiefling is at least 3 generations away from their fiend parent,
then what are the children and grand children of cambions?

- I could ask the same question about half elfs:
It is clear when one parent is human and the other parent is elf but
Does half elf imply what the other half is? Same for half orcs and other half races.

I have 3 questions that are not 100% serious
Question 1: If your mother is an elf and your father is an orc you are both a half elf and a half orc, which stats and bonusses do you get?
Question 2: So if your mother is an elf and your father is a fiend you are both half elf and cambion?
Question 3: I see many halflings, what is a ling? Whatever it is, it must be rather small.

Fun fact: Species is defined as a group of individuals who can have fertile children together.
So with a few exceptions, almost every sentient creature in the DnD universe belongs to the same species.
Just look at the sorcerer bloodlines, your ancesters could be anything, demons, angels, dragons, fey, snakes, undead and totally alien stuff.
Maybe the term "race" is correct.
Like there are many dog races that differ a lot in look and size, but all of them are dogs.

So I want to play this char:
I am a half elf and a half orc because my my mother was an elf and my father was an orc. I am very beautiful because the granmother of my mother was a nymph (my mother looks like an elf and the rest of her family are elfs, at least as far as I know). One of my grand-gradfathers was the result of devil + dragon who had a child with an orc while one of my grandmothers was an ogre. This means I am also a tiefling. So I am not only beautiful but also very strong and tall. I chose to become a bard.
Does anybody seek an actor who is 3 meters tall, has the face of an angel and wings like a dragon? Do not mind that my skin is a mix of green and red, some make up can fix that.


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Spoiler tagging so as not to derail


Someone who is the progeny of a cambion and a mortal (that is, second generation removed from the fiendish parent - the cambion is the first) may be considered still to be cambion, or may be considered to be a tiefling, depending on how strongly they inherit the blood. Cambions are considered true fiends by other fiends, while tieflings are not. The more diluted the blood gets, the fewer fiendish traits surface, however even Cambions are technically able to act outside of the normal LE Devil imperative - this is something that is considered a powerful and useful feature of them as fiends.

We have got some unusual cases of characters who are tieflings only two generations removed from their fiendish parent - I believe that was the case for Valen, in NWN2, but that's the more unusual scenario. Most teiflings in the present day are many, many generations seperated from their fiendish parents, tot eh extent that it can't even really be traced or tracked. The fiendish blood generally stops showing up at all after 1/64 blood dilution, but it never goes away entirely, and tieflings can and do still crop up between completely normal parents if one of them has a non-manifesting trace of that blood legacy.

The Avernus event threw a great big old spanner into this, as I believe it caused everyone with even a trace of fiendish blood at all to spontaneously manifest as teiflings, as well as causing every child conceived or carried during the decent, to be born a tiefling as well. I could be mistaken on those details; I'm not as familiar with the avernus story as I could be.

For other mortal races, technically no; half-orcs and half-elves are, for game mechanical terms written as human other half, but that's not actually necessary, and indeed there are guidelines for determining your racial traits based on what your other half lineage is; it can be any compatible mortal race (there aren't hard and fast rules for that that are 'official'. Even in cases where a race pairing might not be viable for children, it's a world of magic and power; visiting a temple and besearching the appropriate life/fertility deity for a blessing with your normally incompatible partner of choice may absolutely work, if you're lucky, just for example.)

Characters of mixed bloodlines exist all over the realms - as a player, you generally determine what parts of your blood heritage are strongest when selecting what your actual mechanical racial traits should be. So, if you are the child of an elf and an orc, for example, you might take the elven half of the half-elf traits, and then replace the stand-in human other half with the half-orc traits. It's the kind of thing you talk about with your DM when you make the character, though the books do provide guidelines for doing so.

Joke answer: A 'ling' is the Shou language name for pixies.

Just bear in mind that bloodline and blood heritage influence is not just from actual procreation alone, in the realms - storm sorceresses generally don't owe that to their parent getting it off with an air elemental. Other major influences impact these things - planar exposure, divine/demonic intervention, and a number of other things can spontaneously create or influence legacy bloodlines without a particular parent ever having any exotic tastes at all. The avernus events are actually a good example of that - the sudden massive uptick in tiefling births is not because everyone went and slept with devils while they were there - it was more a case of pervasive planar influence affecting them. (Though I've no doubt at all that at least a few were caused in the more traditional way...)


By that point in your lineage your character is what scholars might refer to as a 'Bitsa', or possibly a 'Mutt' ^.^ You can of course define your character as you like, if your dm approves it, though my personal take would ebthat in that situation.. let's see...

So, if I'm reading that right, your father comes out as 1/8 dragon blooded tiefling half-orc with a quarter of orgre blood (we have half-orgres to work from, also half-dragons), while your mother would be a 1/4 nymph-blooded elf.

That would mean that your character could display any number of traits, depending on how the chromosones land, though by this point it sounds like there's a great old one who is eyeing you up as a future warlock for them, with the amount of bloodline fiddling that's been going on ^.^ You might formally have trace bloodline legacies from (1/16) dragon, (1/8) ogre, and (1/8) nymph, but overall; the tiefling ancestry would still be very strong, and would probably stand a god chance of overruling most other trace elements on your father's side - the orcish lineage would also be strong. On your mother's side, the elven ancestry would probably be dominant, just with a mildly more fey than usual cast to it... So for yourself, you might choose to present as tall and fair, but with obvious fiendish presence; your stature and build would likely be reigned in by your mother's side, but you might have the impression of a powerful frame, even if your overall height wasn't excessively more than normal for an elf. You might start from the half-elf base, using the elf side of the half-elf traits, then replace the two human-side traits with one from tiefling and one from half-orc. Visually, your fiendish manifestation might have trace elements that are more reminiscent of draconic scales than devil leather - your horns, if you have them might, coincidentally resemble the horns of the dragon colour you owe that trace of your lineage to. I'd be happy with a player running something like that. ^.^

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I agree with most of what you said but I laugh a lot with the "form a lign"

"Form a lign"
"But we're only 3 and I'm an archer"
"That's still a lign !"

This is probably the most ridiculous line of every battles in every worlds and history^^

Last edited by Maximuuus; 18/12/20 05:10 PM.

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