Post AtH73RCixPqY7CQC5A by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
(DIR) More posts by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
(DIR) Post #AtH6zRRi7ITdhrWf0i by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T01:02:42Z
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Baldur's Gate 3 chose to have individual character inventories (and individual carry weights) despite letting you transfer items between characters at infinite range with no action economy cost. So for all intents and purposes the inventory is already party wide but they've just added a lot of tedious manual steps to the process. It's a really baffling decision. Pretty much all the worst parts of BG3 involve UI and inventory management in particular.
(DIR) Post #AtH6zScNl6bjLFWhHc by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T01:06:54Z
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And there's lots of other issues related to this. For example, they have a feature where you can drink a potion directly from another character's inventory without transferring it to your inventory first. But if you want to throw an item from another character's inventory, you have to transfer it to your inventory first (which I will reiterate can be done at infinite range as a free action).
(DIR) Post #AtH6zTCtZLoZAUbrCC by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T01:09:35Z
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I assume they special-cased drinking because they wanted to make it easier for summons (who don't have accessible inventories) to use potions (which otherwise would have to be done by first dropping a potion as a free action). But if they didn't want familiars to be able to e.g. throw items directly from the party inventory, they could have fixed that in a number of ways without imposing any inconvenience in the usual case where one of your characters does it.
(DIR) Post #AtH6zTtmzs7rJWg73Q by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
2025-04-20T07:16:42Z
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@pervognsen wait what? summons can drink potions? I thought I have to throw potions at them to heal them...
(DIR) Post #AtH6zWjyQp3a7x6ofg by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T01:25:35Z
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Speaking of Baldur's Gate, the original release of BG1 didn't pause (it would unpause if you were already paused) when you were on the inventory screen, so while you could move items between character inventories if they were close enough, it wasn't really something you could do leisurely in the midst of a hectic fight. They changed that in the base game as of the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion. Mid-fight inventory and gear juggling then became a staple of high-level BG1/2 gameplay.
(DIR) Post #AtH6zWjyQp3a7x6ofh by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T01:15:07Z
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And regarding carry weight in particular, party-wide carry weight (sum of everyone's carry weights) would go a long way to improving quality of life. Owlcat's Pathfinder games did this (if you had animal companions they also contributed to carry weight) and it was a very welcome quality of life feature. BG3 also lets you "send to camp" items at any time as a free action, so the entire concept of carry weight is altogether pretty pointless and just another source of inventory management tedium.
(DIR) Post #AtH6zcAOG29sxKVU2a by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T01:19:55Z
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It feels like they must have had a much more hardcore, simulationist attitude about inventory and carry weight as a tactical element during earlier stages of development and then over time they added more and more convenience features like send-to-camp without revisiting the fundamental decision of character-specific inventories, which by release was just a layer of tedium that didn't add any tactical depth or resource management whatsoever. I barely played Early Access so I don't remember.
(DIR) Post #AtH6zcAOG29sxKVU2b by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T01:29:08Z
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BG1/2 do not have any action economy cost for transferring, equipping or unequipping gear mid-fight. The only restriction is that you cannot equip or unequip the main armor slot during combat. As silly as juggling equipment between characters mid-fight is as a concept, it's pretty fun and leads to some interesting possibilities. BG3 does retain some of that craziness since it lets you unequip items as a free action (I believe D&D 5E only lets you do that for dropping what you're holding).
(DIR) Post #AtH6zhaS6YyblbjrrE by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T01:32:06Z
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E.g. you can start a fight wielding a versatile weapon (can be equipped in either one or two hands) and the Sentinel Shield (+3 initiative). Unequip the shield once combat starts and your initiative is locked in and you're now two-handing your weapon; all of this is a free action. Or start a fight wearing the Risky Ring (advantage on attack rolls, disadvantage on saves), attack with advantage (it's easy to guarantee you always go first in initiative), then unequip the ring as a free action.
(DIR) Post #AtH73RCixPqY7CQC5A by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
2025-04-20T07:17:28Z
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@pervognsen > lets you "send to camp" items at any time as a free action, so the entire concept of carry weight is altogether pretty pointlessbut you can't bring items back from camp at any time
(DIR) Post #AtH7HnKdU4zunSy4ye by zeux@mastodon.gamedev.place
2025-04-20T04:38:05Z
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@pervognsen Good for coop though
(DIR) Post #AtH7HoR3Nhj2DeyicS by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
2025-04-20T07:20:01Z
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@zeux @pervognsen was about to say the same - shared carrying capacity would be pretty annoying if one of the players insists on picking up, idk, barrels of oil
(DIR) Post #AtH7XnPCyg5HeujjpQ by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
2025-04-20T07:22:57Z
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@pervognsen sounds like cheese...
(DIR) Post #AtH8299KhNdXmfmdN2 by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T07:28:24Z
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@wolf480pl Yup. With the summon selected, you open up the tab menu and right click the item you want to drink and it should say "Drink (Quasit)" with the name of the character/summon in parentheses. It's most useful for elixirs since elixirs, when thrown/broken, only have 10 turn duration whereas they have long-rest duration when drunk.
(DIR) Post #AtHA7UcgUKrfjsBnw8 by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T07:43:21Z
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@wolf480pl Or the heroism elixir for low health, high value summons like the Dryad (with unlimited casts of Spike Growth) where an upcast Aid + Heroes Feast + Heroism will almost triple its HP + temp HP. Using elixirs on summons is obviously easier to justify when play under rest restrictions where you very rarely rest.
(DIR) Post #AtHA7VKdqu1hwCkuS8 by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
2025-04-20T07:51:48Z
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@pervognsen uh... idk I never liked elixirs / grenades / etc in Larian games. The games are complex enough without them, and barely ever get to my preferred difficulty of "never win a battle on the first attempt". But maybe that'w because I'm playing in co-op with someone who somehow always gets OP character builds...
(DIR) Post #AtHAghsRCZZAytLi4G by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T07:58:08Z
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@wolf480pl I definitely wish they'd balanced the higher difficulties a bit more. I almost don't remember dying more than a few times on my first Tactician playthrough at launch. Honour Mode raises the stakes with perma-death and encourages you to play more carefully and more optimally while nerfing most of the overpowered stuff in the lower difficulties. I still haven't played coop.
(DIR) Post #AtHBG6YpQ76xfi3XkG by wolf480pl@mstdn.io
2025-04-20T08:04:34Z
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@pervognsen yeah honour mode sounds like the opposite of what I want...
(DIR) Post #AtHDPZXtDyDk56G8dk by pervognsen@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T08:28:39Z
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@wolf480pl I guess it's not technically perma-death. Once you die, you can reload your save, but it just gets marked as "custom difficulty" so it doesn't count for completion. You can also just a game under a custom difficulty mode from the start and enable the HM rules without the one-save option.