D&D General BG3 Massive Spoiler Thread

[Paul Farquhar]

It's Durge's Plot! And he would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for that inbred nepo-baby!

Even Durge is being manipulated by the illithid grand design.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I was pleased it was released for macOS a few weeks back. I grinded through it exploring everything I possibly could. I think I stumbled into an easy mode monster of a class, but I always love playing monks. I was avoiding doing anything with tadpoles until the dream guardian just became so over the top pushy I dropped them all on myself.

I felt terrible about me then pushing them on the companions so I hoarded every single tadpole figuring I’d do some heroic character sacrifice at the end. Also, that astral tadpole wrecking your look was such a downer. I just did not want all the rest of the team having to look all smudged up in the face. I was pretty much only using fly until I noticed she was one punching enemies who had 50 hp. I dug in and saw the Cull the Weak becomes gross the more tadpoles you evolve.

oh, I got the good Karlach ending. Running off into the Nine Hells, the three of us, Will, Karlach, and myself.

 

[haakon1]

I was avoiding doing anything with tadpoles until the dream guardian just became so over the top pushy I dropped them all on myself.

I do not trust the Dream Guardian any more that I trust Raphael, which is to say: not at all.

I guess I will find out.

 

[Seramus]

Also, that astral tadpole wrecking your look was such a downer. I just did not want all the rest of the team having to look all smudged up in the face. I was pretty much only using fly until I noticed she was one punching enemies who had 50 hp. I dug in and saw the Cull the Weak becomes gross the more tadpoles you evolve.

There's a mod to remove those! I choose Head Only so I keep the pretty faces but still have the body veins, but the mod can remove both.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

There's a mod to remove those! I choose Head Only so I keep the pretty faces but still have the body veins, but the mod can remove both.

I didn’t even think about modding, didnt cross my mind until way late. I instead went to the magic mirror and changed something’s up a bit. Seems that the design for the inky-veiny look also worsens freckles you might give. So the faint freckling I added became like ink spatter drops.

Then I did try and do exactly that mod, I think I followed the instructions exactly but immediately upon launch BG3 popped up some error from a mod check. I then took out exactly everything I added but BG3 would re-launch and continue showing the same error. Deleting and reinstalling the game using Steam didn’t fix it, same mod check error. I spent a good handful of hours hunting down every folder and manually uninstalled every trace.

I was glad that worked because the next thing I was going to have to try is creating a new local user account on the computer and install BG 3 there. It was kinda traumatic, . I might give mods another try in a new run when I haven’t already spent 100 hours+ already.

Oh, the music during the big battle in rescuing Hope was such a chef’s kiss. Almost it‘s own reward!

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Discovered a pleasant bug, of sorts, related to the potion the drow blood magic potion merchant brews for your character. As an elf, she gives some elf-essence potion. The text of which says something like 10 more move, 40 feet darkvision, and immune to charm. It felt quite underwhelming that I never used it until the long rest before going after the elder brain. With the night walker boots having some unwritten speed bump, wood elf +5’, the +10 movement ring, and monk speed, another 10’ movement was not much to think about and just forgot it.

Nearing the finale I decided to try items I never bothered with before and, well, math musta been bugged because instead my level 9 monk, 3 rogue drank that potion and got … +33’ movement and +120 darkvision instead. My move went from 60 to 93, and darkvision from 40 to 200.

that was a fun long rest worth of running circles around everything.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

As an aside, after seeing your post here and learning some terms I didn't know before, this came up in my Google News feed today:

Cockney and Queen’s English have all but disappeared among young people – here’s what’s replaced them

Accents are constantly changing.

theconversation.com

Yeah it's a good but slightly weird article because it's making a strong distinction between Standard Southern British English and Received Pronunciation, and... there just is not a strong distinction that I am aware of. That's part of why people complained about Received Pronunciation - because it was really just Standard Southern British English. They're saying "Oh we didn't find any Received Pronunciation" and it's like, yes you absolutely did, you just called it something else and haven't explained why! I also notice they linked a definition of SSBE but not a definition of RP. Looking it up seems to suggest they're synonymous too. Hmmm.

This site about accent bias in the UK for example discusses it as follows:

Accents in Britain

Accents in Britain A nation defined by the way it speaks George Bernard Shaw famously wrote: “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despi…

accentbiasbritain.org

“Received Pronunciation”, “Queen’s English”, “BBC English” or “Southern Standard British English” are all labels that refer to the accent of English in England that is associated with people from the upper- and upper-middle-classes.

I would slightly disagree because I would suggest actually traditional (aristocratic/generational as opposed to noveau riche) upper-class people have a distinct accent from RP, which is in fact, broader and slower in its use of vowels, and generally involves a bit of a drawl, and which is even more rarely heard on the TV or radio than regional accents (but definitely still exists IRL). Whereas upper middle class people reliably speak RP/SSBE in the South.

The article is a generally good one, but I think fails to grasp a couple of things - it talks about how MLE and EE are looked down on - and to some extent this is true - but this is the UK, and everyone eyebrow-raises at other people's UK accents (less so non-UK accents as that might be flirting with racism) to some degree (as a generalization), so the idea that it's a one-way street is a bit silly. I think the reality is many people in Britain actually don't have a single fixed accent they use 100% of the time, but rather at least a couple of accents that they use in different situations. This has been discussed particularly with Black people (Sorry To Bother You does some amazing stuff with the US equivalent of this phenomenon), but it's much broader than that. If I spoke like I did at home, at school, when I was at state school, I'd have got bullied! Even at private school, kids tended to have or affect different accents for at school and "in front of their parents".

Amusingly this is true for upper-class people too - the broad drawling accent I described isn't seen as appropriate for business, and engenders mockery, so they too conform to RP/SSBE when at work, for the most part.

(My man Saka in the video in the article is very definitely speaking MLE, so that's a helpful illustration of that. Both your article and the one I linked are definitely correct in terms of the sounds they're describing for the accents.)

 

[haakon1]

As an American Anglophile, I love this discussion. And I find the US is a lot less honest about class than the UK. We generally try to pretend it doesn’t exist, which has good and bad sides.

When I worked in London (1998-1999), I felt like I was exempt from class in an odd way. I joked around with both the security guards - the Northern Irish guy who I got into serious discussions with after hours, being a poli sci major & Irish-American, and the African guy who I trotted around with at lunchtime looking for African food - and also with the founder. Some people - upper class (plus southern Irish) as I recall - gave me flak for being American (or Irish American), but I tended to shut it down quickly. I remember wearing an Ocean Pacific bright yellow anorak one day and getting a rye: “Are you going yachting later” but getting a laugh for a quick, “Nope, just American.”

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I felt like I was exempt from class in an odd way.

As an American you are, at least until you start to acquire a noticeable British accent, pretty exempt from the class system. My wife came to the UK with me, and she was able to mix well with entire class spectrum from the poshest to the least posh - the only people she ever got hate from, accent-wise, were a couple of weird people who essentially blamed "all Americans" for Gulf War 2 (which is dumb because we were just as much to blame). She got on particularly well with a lot of ultra-posh British people, despite being from a single-parent family in rural Indiana, because of shared experience like riding horses, living in the country and so on!

I remember wearing an Ocean Pacific bright yellow anorak one day and getting a rye: “Are you going yachting later” but getting a laugh for a quick, “Nope, just American.”

Hahaha yes there's a real cultural difference on "what colour should coats be", with black being the main colour in the UK, but seemingly almost frowned-upon in the US.

 

[Ogre Mage]

I would slightly disagree because I would suggest actually traditional (aristocratic/generational as opposed to noveau riche) upper-class people have a distinct accent from RP, which is in fact, broader and slower in its use of vowels, and generally involves a bit of a drawl, and which is even more rarely heard on the TV or radio than regional accents (but definitely still exists IRL). Whereas upper middle class people reliably speak RP/SSBE in the South.

That is interesting that the British peerage have an accent distinct from the non-peerage upper classes. As an American, I have never noticed the difference between the accent of the peerage upper class vs. non-peerage British solicitors/professors/business executives, etc. But I can hear the difference between RP and Cockney.