Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc)

[Jubal]

So, I've been diving into this world lately with a playthrough of Baldur's Gate 1 EE, which is interesting. Some initial thoughts:

• Timescaling is amazingly janky: most of the game is completed best rather slowly, with lots of resupply trips and a need to head back. Most quests are not time limited so this is fine, except that a lot of the companion quests are very time limited
• Getting side characters resurrected, and dying myself, happen a lot: it definitely feels like a game where to have a "smooth" run you need to know what's ahead to an extent that you can't know intuitively, because the range of protections available are so situation-specific (I can for example protect my party from fire, or have good shutdowns on enemy wizards, or protect from evil, or protect from petrification, or have lots of poison removals available, but I can't protect from all possible options at once).
• I wish I could set it to have a quicksave when I rest. Worst moments have been forgetting to save and then needing to roll way back, or having to push through the end of an area and leave with basically no loot because I'm carrying two dead characters' worth of gear and can't come back later.
• It's really cool seeing the influence on later games. Pillars of Eternity I guess is the most obvious of games I've played or seen recently, but also Minsc and Boo being referenced via Mass Effect's space hamster was quite a fun realisation.
• Partly because it's so influential, bits of it feel almost generic, which is a pity but also inevitable.
• In terms of RP it's a bit limited but nice enough: I guess most stuff has "good options" vs "bad options" with some mercenary/greedy options in there, but some of the other things about how I imagine my character don't come through so well. My Gorion's Ward (main character, that is) is a dwarf cleric called Carduelis, who's I think of as more a 'cleric of the people' type rather than someone especially dedicated to any particular deity, though it's hard to bring that out.
• I'm running with Khalid (Tank), Jaheira (Combat damage), Neera (Mage), Imoen (Range damage/trap finder), and Branwen (Secondary Tank/Healer). Generally enjoying this as a comp.

Generally I'm enjoying it, anyway - there seems to be a lot of sidequesting around the main plot and I suspect my builds aren't ideal, but it's fun to worth through

What're other people's experiences with these D&D RPGs?

[Pentagathus]

Planescape Torment has an absolutely phenomenal story, would definitely recommend it. Haven't really played any other of these style of games, the gameplay itself isn't really interesting for me.

[Jubal]

Yes, psyanojim has told me to play PT a few times and it's definitely on my list And yeah, I sort of like the semi-tactical gameplay but it's definitely a bit, uh, unpolished in some of these older bits of the genre.

[dubsartur]

What operating systems is it available on?

I played Baldur's Gate II through several times, and Neverwinter Nights until I got stuck at a dragon fight.  Good times!  From my memory, core AD&D 2e is not a system where its easy to accidentally build a weak character like GURPS or 3e D&D.

[Spritelady]

Ooh which dragon fight did you get stuck at in Neverwinter Nights? I remember being very frustrated by one in one of the games, then going back much later and loading with a very advanced character, just so I could absolutely wipe the floor with the dragon in revenge!

I've always loved Neverwinter Nights, my dad and I used to stay up late and play it every summer when I was off school or home from university. Sadly, it's become much harder to do non-local multiplayer now, so that's rather come to a halt.

Where can one acquire Baldur's Gate? I've heard a lot about it but not had a chance to play it yet.

[Jubal]

The enhanced edition is on GOG for not too much money, I guess it's likely on Steam too

I've now finished Baldur's Gate! Though the game runs directly on to the in-between-that-and-BG2 campaign, Siege of Dragonspear, which I'm now playing through. The end of the main campaign was... a bit what you'd expect, I guess, you get a big old classic villain showdown boss fight thingy. Boss fights are tricky to balance well in this sort of game setup, because if the boss does have an obvious weakness it can make them feel anticlimactic, and if the boss doesn't, then it can end up being very "who got their spells off more successfully in the opening rounds and managed to shut the others' casters down effectively" - it's definitely the sort of game where if you start doing badly in combat, there's a harsh spiral effect. Generally I felt the campaign did build to the end though, and Siege of Dragonspear feels like it's going to have more voicing & character writing than the main game did which I like (though I have to be minus most of the companions I had in the main game apparently which is frustrating).

[Jubal]

And I've now finished Siege of Dragonspear and run straight on to BG2, which since SoD is a bridging campaign and it all happens in the same game engine really doesn't feel like there was any gap in the story.

Thoughts on SoD: I really liked it, there are definitely some janky quest design bugs which I'm surprised weren't fixed and things like that, but the characters are really nice, I enjoyed M'Khiin the goblin shaman a lot as a companion. The ending of the main quest feels good, too, it makes for a narratively satisfying conclusion without anything feeling unearned. The post-ending which creates the BG2 segue is... a bit contrived, I guess, and compared to the start of BG2 the things the Hooded Man manages to do at SoD make him seem way more omnipotent than he broadly seems to turn out.

I did have to use a walkthrough for more bits of it than I'd have liked because things weren't always obvious and the game does have a tendency to penalise failure rather heavily if only by making you re-fight certain battles again and again until you get right or lucky. Generally D&D isn't a system that's well built around evenly matched adventuring parties taking chunks out of one another: it's a system built around preparation and working out how to use the tools at your disposal, so a group that has all the tools you have often just comes down to who rolls better right at the start of a fight and manages to e.g. shut the enemy casters down first. I did sort of enjoy it sometimes when I did really hit on a "right answer" to a battle, that said. One of the longest fights was a 1v1 you have to do during the siege itself which given I was a support caster basically meant slapping all the protection potions I owned onto myself then sitting there waiting until the enemy burned through her entire spell list - and then casting my own buffs and starting to do damage, after about five to ten mins of real-world time (I think that duel in-game probably took the characters most of an afternoon!)



So now I'm on BG2. I did NOT EXPECT the

Spoiler

two major BG1 characters killed off offscreen before you start the first dungeon

and was quite sad about them.

Other than that, I'm enjoying it so far though I miss all the nice kit I'd got stored up in the previous game. I just did the Chapter One dungeon so far, and the Circus Tent quest that's very near to where you start. I get that the Chapter One dungeon needs to be kind of easy, but it does feel like SoD really over-egged the power of the Hooded Man at the moment. Like, he's meant to be this "threatening the devils themselves for power and evil" level guy, and then his home security is five squads of goblins, a few golems, and a couple of squads of duergar? Even considering the assassins have tripped or disabled a bunch of stuff, it's a really lame setup. Like, he clearly has a case of the Xykons in that he expects his own power to do all the work, but even Xykon goes and builds an extraplanar fortress when he really wants something protected. And doesn't let himself get arrested, for that matter.

That said, I thought it was otherwise a good starting run, I like having more djinn around, I really enjoyed the circus tent quest though I'm sure I missed some content, and generally I'm looking forward to exploring Amn more, I think this is going to be pretty fun.

[dubsartur]

Ooh which dragon fight did you get stuck at in Neverwinter Nights? I remember being very frustrated by one in one of the games, then going back much later and loading with a very advanced character, just so I could absolutely wipe the floor with the dragon in revenge!

I think it was the fight with the red dragon on the "dragon level."  There is an option to pick an unnecessary fight with a smaller dragon instead, but that goes against my principles.  No unnecessary draconicide!

I liked the idea of the 'level builder' in Neverwinter Nights although I never played with it.

[luplay]

Looks good. Thanks for your sharing.

[Jubal]

So, I hit a bit of a wall with BG2, largely working out who to have in my party, and that made me take a decent size break before coming back: I'm now a chunk of the way through the game and have eventually settled on Minsc, Aerie, Jaheira, Imoen (was Yoshimo until the bit after which you can't keep him in your party) and Mazzy. I'd considered taking Viconia instead of Mazzy because I find her a really interesting character, but it grates on me that you apparently can't do much of a redemption arc with her unless via romance, and she's not into very short men with very large beards (a category Carduelis firmly falls into).

I'm enjoying the unfolding plot, overall. I'm into Chapter Five and am in the Underdark at the moment. The various sidequests which I did lots of in Ch. 2 were mostly fun, the druid one I particularly liked, the cleric one as well. The Windspear Hills seemed a bit bugged because I didn't meet Firkaag before going there but it assumed I had, then I met him in the Copper Coronet afterwards and it was all a bit confusing. I just wanted to go there to drop off the acorns I'd been given in Ch. 1, not get into all those shenanigans.

As to the main quest, I think the thief guilds' split is kind of interesting but almost underplayed because Ch. 2 can easily end up being so much bigger than Ch. 3. I don't find Bodhi a super compelling villain (I went thieves as my option, probably unsurprisingly). On the other hand, I actually really do like Irenicus as a villain. He seems to have about the right amount of screen time, he's very well voice acted, and he looms over the plot quite effectively in a way that Sarevok in BG1 just flat doesn't. It was a bit annoying in Spellhold that I could 100% tell who Irenicus was well before it was actually revealed but was given no option to do anything about it. I also quite like that Irenicus is very powerful but not necessarily quite the top of the tree, so you do still get cutscenes where he's having to negotiate and talk rather than simply being so uberpowered that all he's doing is giving orders.

There are things I'm less enjoying. Inventory management is getting frustrating, and I swear this time it's not just because I keep picking everything up, it's more when party members keep dying that I end up needing to res them and then reassign about twelve items of gear and weaponry to different slots manually. Also the amount one needs to rest feels bizarre, often it's a case of doing about two rooms of a dungeon then resting because otherwise you'll just not have the spells needed. I'm also finding a bit of a lack of +3 weapons around the place, which seem increasingly to be needed for the higher level enemies.

My other slight annoyance in the game is that Dwarf male cleric seems to get a rough deal on content. You have two romance options, both added in the EE, and they are Dorn, a Blackguard, and Neera, a half-elf wild mage. I don't dislike Neera, but she doesn't really fit with Carduelis, and Dorn I killed already because, y'know, ridiculously evil. Annoyingly one can't romance Mazzy, who is both definitely single (albeit grieving) and in terms of alignment and height would be quite a nice match. As aforementioned I might've tried a Viconia romance, but again not on the options list.

Any of my issues with romance content though pale next to my annoyance at the Strongholds. The fighters get a full-on castle, the bards get their own playhouse, the wizards get an awesome interplanar spaceship thingy... and the clerics get to sleep on the floor in someone else's temple who happens to be of the same good/neut/evil alignment as them. This feels underwhelming, especially if you're not a cleric of the relevant deity (and indeed Carduelis is not a cleric of Lathander). And it's not like there aren't a load of ruined temples around the place, either! There are some very cool subterranean ones I'd happily have spruced up and used myself. I do quite like the "caring for the flock" quests you need to do, and the Unseeing Eye quest leading up to it was great, I really enjoyed that. But all that could have been done whilst also giving the player their own chapel, it's not as if the BG2 map system would be super hard to fit another place into.

[Jubal]

Aaand that's a wrap on Baldur's Gate (at least the original Bhaalspawn Saga, not diving into BG3 any time yet).

The end/latter part of Shadows of Amn is an interesting one. I liked the Underdark sections a lot, once I was out of the Underdark Ch 6/7 went fairly fast because I'd done most of the sidequests in Ch 2/3. I did do Neera and Rasaad's quests - I wasn't quite sure where the game was going with Rasaad's one, but I sort of liked the ambiguity involved in that. Neera is good fun and part of me is sad that the her-Carduelis thing never really worked out (though I stand by the RP decision not to pursue that romance properly in BG2, it would have stopped me having other characters I wanted with me a lot more).

I think they drop some of the plot a bit too late in Shadows of Amn, though it's quite well plot-paced generally: some of the bits of Irenicus' backstory, whilst it's nice they're hinted at earlier, only really drop into place right at the end and in a fairly unemotional way so they could maybe have hit harder. The ending battles are pretty well played though, I liked Suldanessellar etc.

Watcher's Keep is just a big multi-level dungeon, and like all such dungeons is a bit arbitrary and silly, but I did quite like it. I was actually intending to let the Helmites go at the end, but decided to snark at them first so they moved in immediately and I just sealed them in when asked to. Perhaps I should've done the actual mega-boss at the end, but I'm kind of glad I didn't: it's IMV clearly the Good option not to kill the thing because imprisonment is inconveniencing its evil significantly more.

Throne of Bhaal I think suffered a bit from trying to both be an extension of difficulty for super dedicated players and trying to wrap up the plot relatively fast, which leads to a lot of it being a very gruelling series of boss battles, a lot of which feel kind of arbitrary in their difficulty. I'm sure that's great for people who really like the games for the tactics play, and I kind of like the games for that, just not enough to want to repeatedly throw myself at quite that many dragons who I don't have a huge character investment in. It's clearly intentional that you keep your end-of-BG2 party and there's only one new NPC in ToB, and AFAICT there are no character quests (maybe extensions of some romances but they put so few options in for dwarves that Carduelis stayed single) - so it's very main quest heavy, and you're hitting so many bosses that they start becoming anticlimactic.

All that said, ToB does generally achieve its aim of wrapping up the plot, though I think they could've made the ending choices a bit more diverse/characterful with a little bit of additional dialogue. And the various new challenges are a fairly good "greatest hits" album of the series from a combat perspective. I had a nice moment in one of the pauses in the four-stage end battle where I realised with a sickening feeling that I was out of Raise Dead spells, but managed to work out how to use a potion and a wish spell to cover for that (I was hoping to wish for the resurrection, but actually managed to get "restore all our spells please" which was even better). That sort of "puzzling out how to use the items neatly" is the kind of thing I really like in these games. The new locations are nice too - I'd actually sort of have liked to spend more time in Saradush & otherwise get more human interaction in Tethyr.

[Jubal]

Annnnd I'm back in the Realms for Neverwinter Nights.

Which I'm not inspired by, eight hours or so in, but we'll see where it goes. So far I've just done the tutorial and first dungeon, I seem to be underlevelled or possibly the game was expecting me to build my character much more based on optimisation and much less on what sounded cool, and the upshot of all that is that I'm finding the bosses in particular a real grind or nigh impossible and am often beating them using slow/gamey methods which isn't very satisfying. Hopefully the story will unfold better as it goes on and I get a bit less underpowered. My character for the main campaign is a charismatic half-orc female ranger called Tercaresse Caraphian who is going adventuring with Sharwyn the bard in a sort of vaguely Witcher vibes buddy duo thing.

[Jubal]

Finished the NWN main campaign, it was fine and I enjoyed it overall, very classic conspiracy-pyramid stuff which I guess my narrative brain sometimes finds a bit gauche but it's a perfectly respectable way to do a campaign-story. I think NWN's campaign lacks the narrative efficacy of Baldur's Gate, because the player is explicitly a hired mercenary type throughout, so you're repeatedly saving the city for money but all your money is being spent on equipment to help you save the city so it's not really clear what's driving you other than that you're the protagonist, whereas Baldur's Gate gets personal, fast, and remains so (almost overblows it by Throne of Bhaal, but there we are). Also NWN's companions are fine but I guess I found their stories a bit disconnected from anything else that was going on and they came with rather odd pacing which didn't help, which given you only got a single companion with no party interaction made the game feel a bit less narratively driven. I guess part of this is that NWN has multiplayer elements, so part of this is the lack of other actual players in my own game.

The absolute stand-out and runaway star of the show who I will remember this game for was Hrut, Tercaresse's badget companion, who was the funniest thing I've found in games in ages, especially the weird AI thing that caused him to decide any box I couldn't open was a Bad Box that needed to be attacked. And him running away from mummies and hiding in a corner. And many other moments really.

Might do the other NWN classic campaign next? Or move on to try NWN2? Not sure.

[Spritelady]

I can solidly recommend the second game - I enjoyed it much more than the first!

[Jubal]

I decided to finish the base game campaigns: the main campaign, The Wailing Death, sits separately to the other pair, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark, which are meant to feature the same protagonist: HotU, which I've just started, has several companions from The Wailing Death, and annoyingly does not let you input any of your ending details from TWD which is annoyingly immersion-breaking when you had a female Hero of Neverwinter and Sharwyn, her main companion, refers to her consistently as male.

Anyway, Shadows of Undrentide: it is, like most of the rest of NWN in my view, fine. The companions are not magnificent, though Deekin the Kobold who started out as a jester to a dragon is a 10/10 concept which I'm going to mull over repurposing somewhere. I mostly used Dorna as my companion, who besides the excessively stereotypical-Irish accent worked pretty well. I enjoyed Chapter 1 more than Chapter 2 I think: the dragon was fun to deal with, as was Deekin, and the village was nice though human people were weirdly flirty with my dwarf. The interlude was good, that worked well for me narratively and I liked the change of pace and side-questing-for-travel style of it. Undrentide itself... could have done with feeling a bit richer as an environment, I think. The core of the city is tiny and has few sidequests, and the side towers where the core questing happens are conversely enormous and a bit too slow to get through, so redressing that balance and having a few more spots of colour to tell us what Undrentide was actually like for its residents might have helped.

My main character this time is called Mamuka Kvismtleli, and he's a dwarf fighter who hits things with a hammer. His backstory in my head is that he wanted to become an architect, went out to travel and do some architectural studies, and somewhat by accident a) got rather good at clearing out kobolds and minor undead from the ruins he investigated and b) ended up staying with a Dwarf wizard who absent-mindedly assumed he was a pupil at his centre for training heroes and Harpers, something Mamuka was too polite to correct him on. (I do like this guy and a version of him may make his way into some TTRPG stuff of mine sometime).

Anyway, some time later and back from the Plane of Shadow, Mamuka is now trying to deal with the Hordes of the Underdark, and thus far is mostly wandering around bopping various creatures in undermountain on the head with a big fancy hammer. I've got Sharwyn AND Deekin as companions now, with the companion limit boosted to two, which is possibly more bards than I need BUT on the other hand I haven't been given many other options yet and I'm not sure I'm going to be given a rogue who doesn't annoy the hell out of me (side-eye to Tomi) or a functional mage, so I might just end up keeping the backing band.