Playing Divinity 2 with the lads a couple weeks ago we were fighting arguably the hardest boss in the game, near the end. He has massive health but you have to kill him in 2 rounds flat or he permanently dominates the mind of one of your party members and you get a game over. Problem is he summons like a bunch of adds when the fight starts and they disrupted and attacked us too much to be able to focus fire him.
So we snuck in a side entrance and set up a giant wall of reinforced crates in front of the doors to this back room, then teleported him inside and slammed the doors shut. We got our 2 rounds of beating on the boss alone while all the adds tried to hack through the crate barrier to get at us inside. We literally dropped him on our last possible attack, then had to turn and clean up all the rest of the monsters… it was so great
You kill so many rats in this game it’s obscene. Like 3 rat massacres so far, just “whoa here’s a room full of rats!!!”. They all run into Shadowheart’s Spirit Guardians and explode. Blood everywhere.
The planehopping you do in this game makes me wish that someone would do a new Planescape RPG now that WOTC has revived the setting.
all of astarions dialogue is like “hello beautiful creature of the eve~ i would savor every drop of ur blood like red wine beneath the moonlight also i go both ways btw” really admire the line theyre skating between Actual Stereotype and genuinely amusing… i think its a pretty campy game in general. which honestly could we ask for or expect anything else maybe d&d is just camp and this leans into that
D&D isn’t inherently anything I don’t think, its whole thing is to be as big tent generic as possible. The camp is all Larian. I’ve said the phrase “Larian wackiness” like 10 times in this thread. If you dig this you really ought to play Divinity 2
I havent played this yet (i want to!! yes hello i’d like to be a teifling that fucks) but reading this thread is giving me fond memories of all the fights i won in divinity OS 2 by teleporting someone far away and cheesing them. there was at least one fight where the boss was stuck in a corner and couldn’t do anything while i took care of all her adds. i oughta finish that game sometime
had so much fun murdering a spectator with a scheme that involved sanctuary, the ogre horn, a speed potion, some throwable objects, etc., definitely one of the games that came out this year. its really scratching some final fantasy tactics itches for me
thanks for the motivation to look up how to do this. for anyone else reading you can add --skip-launcher in the launch options in the steam properties dialog. what even is the icon for that thing, some kind of horn? why does the button to launch the game look like a progress bar?
gave karlach tavern brawler at lvl 4, ring of flinging from a vendor in the tiefling camp, returning pike, berserker specialization for frenzy / enraged throw, extra attack at lvl 5, and a pair of gloves from rescuing the mushroom picker in the underdark that adds another 1d4 on throws. so on her turns she can throw three times which is enough to kill most enemies in a single turn. idk if the numbers on throw mechanics are bugged or just really good bc shes also very accurate. also she gets crushing damage on throwing too
potion of speed gives u 3 turns of haste and you can make like ten of them with the hyena ears you get from the gnolls attacking the treasure caravan… so i could do 5 attacks with her in a single turn lol
made astarion multiclass into ranger for summon familiar bc you can use the cat to position enemies where you want them before encounters begin so its great for say luring a bunch of guys into a kill zone and then initiating a fight so everyone can just shoot at them from like 30 meters away on high ground
I feel like throwing usually sucks ass in D&D games so that rules??? In arcanum I made a character who throws knives and mixes Molotov cocktails who was amazing and I feel like it’s so rare to feel powerful doing that
i am sooo incredibly amused by how much of this game is about dating its like heres my polycule (sassy gay vampire, muscle girl, catholic) we murder people together
i’ve been taking notes while i play. probably won’t find the wherewithal to turn these into a real post with paragraphs any time soon so:
druid got me over the initial hump but i rerolled one last time as a bard to explain everyone defaulting to seeing me as the party leader and trying to get into my pants
game balance anecdote: i’ve only played on tactician so far. first encounter after the tutorial, those 3 intellect devourers in the tunnel: my 2 level 1s vs their 3 level 2s. first attempt: i waste all of my turns running away (b/c i didn’t notice dash existed) and don’t get to attack while they tore the party up. second attempt: overcome the problem by chugging oil of speed and attacking 2x a turn as a giant spider, dropping one enemy per turn. next run: pull with minor illusion, exploit terrain to force THEM to waste their turns dashing, clean up with basic attacks and spells.
wish there was more interesting failure than “you don’t get the content” sometimes
in addition to “fail-forward” i wish they house rules used “encounter xp” - ie you get the same payoff as for murdering every member of the enemy party no matter how you resolve the encounter. i’m pretty sure i’m losing out on resources by talking people down from fights all of the time
wish disarming traps granted xp, bg2 i saw a room full of traps and my pupils made the sounds of cash registers and turned into dollar signs
i love being able to toggle to turn based mode for stuff like having everyone cross a chasm on a spiderweb without being trapped in it, or sneak past a dragon on a narrow ledge. feels just like tabletop! d&d at its dice gamiest
this game is appropriately horny for a forgotten realms product. i don’t know if ed greenwood owned a shag-carpeted 70s swinger van which he took to renn faires, but it would surprise me if he didn’t
furthering the undergrad feel of the whole thing “lump the enlightened” articulates the same moral philosophy as the titular cyclops in the only surviving satyr play, saying “the only divinity i worship is my belly” etc.
magic boots that add electrical damage to your attacks based on generating friction with the ground, running on its own counter! yes! more house rules! more janky interactions and edge cases!
this is pretty much what i want out of a d&d computer rpg, including centering the weird late era tsr settings like spelljammer and planescape and embracing goofiness. i appreciate that they added something like the weapon arts system from BECMI / rules cyclopedia back in
