Baldur’s Gate 3, as Rolled by Two D&D Neophytes

Everybody's Talking At Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 169.

Drew and L talk about their time so far with Baldur’s Gate 3, which works beautifully as a sprawling computer RPG, and as a unique intersection of free play and complex game rules—but how does it work as an introduction to Larian’s RPGs? How about to Dungeons & Dragons?

This ends up being a conversation about expectations, about the actual moment-to-moment experience of playing games (especially strange and/or complicated ones), and about the push-and-pull of stepping outside our comfort zones, and then right back into them.

• “We’ll do Beholders another day” was Drew channeling “We’ll do blood another day.”

• As ever, let us praise elegant design, but let us also praise messy design.

• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade is the one that L recently played. It’s on Nintendo’s Switch Online quasi-virtual console Game Boy thing.

• L’s new project is the Four Buds Floral Collective.

• Remnant II and Baldur’s Gate 3 both prominently feature multi-classing: As in, you can be a Bard and a Barbarian, a Summoner and an Archon. This wildly increases the sense of player agency, and of build diversity—counter-intuitively enhancing the sense of free play by piling on more and more rules and mechanics and systems.

• Why do we say that’s counter-intuitive? Well, in The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber says:

D&D, as its aficionados call it, is on one level the most free-form game imaginable, since the characters are allowed to do absolutely anything, within the confines of the world created by the Dungeon Master, with his books, maps, and tables and preset towns, castles, dungeons, wilderness. In many ways it’s actually quite anarchistic, since unlike classic war games where one commands armies, we have what anarchists would call an “affinity group,” a band of individuals cooperating with a common purpose (a quest, or simply the desire to accumulate treasure and experience), with complementary abilities (fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief …), but no explicit chain of command. So the social relations are the very opposite of impersonal bureaucratic hierarchies. However, in another sense, D&D represents the ultimate bureaucratization of antibureaucratic fantasy. There are catalogs for everything: types of monsters (stone giants, ice giants, fire giants …), each with carefully tabulated powers and average number of hit points (how hard it is to kill them); human abilities (strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution …); lists of spells available at different levels of capacity (magic missile, fireball, passwall …); types of gods or demons; effectiveness of different sorts of armor and weapons; even moral character (one can be lawful, neutral, or chaotic; good, neutral, or evil; combining these produces nine possible basic moral types …). The books are distantly evocative of Medieval bestiaries and grimoires. But they are largely composed of statistics. All important qualities can be reduced to number. It’s also true that in actual play, there are no rules; the books are just guidelines; the Dungeon Master can (indeed really ought to) play around with them, inventing new spells, monsters, and a thousand variations on existing ones. Every Dungeon Master’s universe is different. The numbers are in a sense a platform for crazy feats of the imagination, themselves a kind of poetic technology.

Still, the introduction of numbers, the standardization of types of character, ability, monster, treasure, spell, the concept of ability scores and hit-points, had profound effects when one moved from the world of 6-, 8-, 12- and 20-sided dice to one of digital interfaces. Computer games could turn fantasy into an almost entirely bureaucratic procedure: accumulation of points, the raising of levels, and so on. There was a return to the command of armies. This in turn set off a move in the other direction, by introducing role-playing back into the computer games (Elfquest, World of Warcraft …), in a constant weaving back and forth of the imperatives of poetic and bureaucratic technology. But in doing so, these games ultimately reinforce the sense that we live in a universe where accounting procedures define the very fabric of reality, where even the most absolute negation of the administered world we’re currently trapped in can only end up being yet another version of the exact same thing.

• Here’s Xalavier Nelson Jr.’s important thread on Baldur’s Gate 3 and our present, highly volatile era of “megagames“. The thread has, unfortunately, been covered really badly and dishonestly, partially as a symptom of the closely-related phenomenon of “orbital decay” in mainstream games journalism.

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