Tuesday Bits

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

07:29 # This morning I think it’s fair to say that Baldur’s Gate 3 has caused me to completely abandon Pathfinder: Kingmaker yet again. P:K moves back to the back burner, where it’s made its home since 2021. Harwell’s Heroes, and the Pathfinder ruleset’s relentless nightmare of protecting against opportunity attacks, will remain frozen in time, halfway through the Troll Lair. #pathfinderkingmaker

08:20 # Some weeks ago, I configured my phone so that when I say “play the news” in the morning, it plays about 5 different 5-minute news summaries from disparate, competing ideological sources, in anticipation of the impending demise of TweetDeck as a daily source of news. The styles adopted by the different networks are pretty funny. From dry readings, to FM morning zoo-style, to starting out with a casual “hellooooo.” #newsconsumer

09:25 # Baldur’s Gate 3 Major Blighted Town Spoiler. Last night I experienced my first irrevocable party TPK in Baldur’s Gate 3 on Tactician difficulty, when I made the Ornate Mirror mad. It sent out a floating metal sphere that burned the whole party for a third of their health, leaving the ground covered with fire, and then it floated out past the party into the room and blew up the coffins in the grotto, out of which spilled an army of undead. The undead then used their turns to break open all the remaining coffins of their fallen comrades so the room was filled with an undead horde. And oh by the way the floating metal sphere also kept shooting fire at the party. And oh yeah also I hadn’t had a long rest since the owlbear cave. We didn’t last long. I didn’t even have the chance to try to run away. Luckily I had done a quicksave right before talking to the mirror. #baldursgate3

09:46 # Baldur’s Gate 3 seems very forgiving about downed player mechanics on Tactician difficulty, a lot more so than Solasta was. You don’t even really need a healer. Anyone can just run up and tap a downed player on the shoulder with a help action and bring them back with 1 hit point. It allows a battle to continue long past the point where it probably should have ended in a TPK, with a continual rotation of players going down and popping back up. As long as it’s not more than one or two downed at any given time. #baldursgate3

15:52 # I have to admit that after spending this year writing and reviewing code in Java, following the two years of writing and reviewing code in Golang, I’ve come to appreciate the simpler design philosophy of Golang a lot more than I did before. Java code tries to be everything to everybody and ends up being … really, really verbose. Feels like writing a novel every time you want to just check a variable or something. #development

15:59 # By the way, I don’t like how my blog post notifications look on this crazy GoToSocial thing, so I stopped doing them. I have to put it all in manually, and there’s no fancy schmancy attachment with all the opengraph information from the post displayed in a nice, neat box with a picture below. Just some plain text and a link. It’s not a good sign when my own stuff looks like completely ignorable spam to me. #blog

22:40 # Baldur’s Gate 3. Tonight I think I found one of those hard encounters I’ve been hearing about in Baldur’s Gate 3. The Paladin Sword of Tyr, who I call “Mister Anders,” at The Risen Road. Not to be trifled with at level 3. I did manage to kill him with a lucky crit on the second try, but with 3 out of 4 of my party down, Mister Anders’ two remaining helpers made short work of the last one standing. Going to have to come back later for Karlach’s personal story of revenge.