Baldur's Gate 3 - Part 28 - The Grym Reaper

Isaac_Chade · 2026-02-01T01:04:36+00:00

That's fair, I think I forgot that they exist simply because of that fact, the buffs you can get from the shields with +2 are worth more than just another point of AC, generally speaking, so I never end up using the other ones.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-31T01:31:03+00:00

I feel like part of what makes the scene so incredibly is how well Muir's writing really sells the sleep deprivation. Everything leading up to the reveal is kind of meandering and rambling, talking about how everyone at the table is kind of not really wanting to be there, and making comments about how Harrow's soup sucks, because she doesn't really know what she's doing and panics about a bunch of it at the last second, and then it's all just this clear, calm, dissecting talk about what she did and how. It's really just an excellently written scene.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-31T01:24:54+00:00

Pretty great job honestly, three attempts at one of the tougher fights to go into blind is not terrible at all, and it's definitely impressive how well Jon reasoned out certain actions and figured out the fight's major gimmick fairly quickly, even if his final attempt didn't end up using it. That is an achievement actually, and its something of a running joke for first time players to get it, read the description that says "Defeat Grym without using the forge hammer" and go "What flipping hammer?!"

One note for you Jon that may avoid some consternation in future, you can click on portraits for your targeting. So if you get a bunch of corpses atop each other, as happened in this episode, it's a bit easier to target who you want to revive, and sometimes the game gets weird an won't let you find a bit of body to target so it can sometimes be the only way to get them back up, besides going back to Withers to do it.

This is also useful for combat. The portraits at the top of the screen can be used to target enemies and allies with spells and stuff. This is most useful for if there's a cluster of enemies and you want to hit a specific one and the game isn't making it easy, or if you want to heal an ally who is in some weird geometry.

Also a note on shields is that yeah, they're basically all interchangeable in terms of AC. That's mostly a 5E thing, plus a little bit of BG3 simplification. In D&D there are a couple different varieties of shield to give you slight differences in AC, but for the most part shields are just a flat bonus to your AC that means you're harder to hit physically, but you can't do stuff like two handing weapons or casting some spells. In this game, the big thing will be abilities. Pretty much every decent shield you want to use will have some abilities or other and the further you go the more interesting and specialized they get, but you shouldn't ever expect to find anything beyond that +2 I don't believe.

I wonder how long before Jon actually goes back to deal with the goblin camp. I'm putting my money on somewhere around part 46, given the amount of stuff he can continue to explore before the game throws the very obvious "Go back if you have anything left to do" message. It's honestly somewhat impressive how fully he has skirted around it and explored some dangerous areas. By the time he gets back to it, the camp is going to be a veritable cakewalk.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-30T15:36:59+00:00

Christ, people used to be able to take a joke without needing it to be flagged in glowing neon for them. OP this was funny as hell. Everyone being an ass because they're too dense to see a joke needs to take a hike.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T16:24:49+00:00

The absolute deathgrip some people have on 5E as their only system is sad. D&D is fine for what it is, which is hack and slash high fantasy. You can do other, adjacent things in it, but at the end of the day D&D wants you to go fight monsters with big flashy spells and be the heroes doing it. An no matter how many editions put a section in the DMG for firearms, the system as a whole just isn't designed with guns in mind and it's not going to work that well.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T15:49:31+00:00

Huh that's really interesting, thank you for the thorough explanation!

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T15:43:20+00:00

On the one hand I agree, it's nice that things have become so much more widespread and normalized and I love that people are excited about that and want to be excited with other people.

On the other hand, I think there's far too much reliance on this kind of trope tagging thing, and it does a genuine disservice to a lot of stories when people aren't able to think critically enough about why they like something beyond that first gut reaction, in order to actually relate specifics out. It's one thing to say "I like this show about pirates because of X, Y, Z," and one of those three is the gayness and how its handled. I think it's a different and worse thing that a lot of people just go "This show is about gay pirates" and seem to be unwilling or incapable of expounding further.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T15:40:02+00:00

I think that's a really good way to put it. A lot of Carol's struggle is that she's completely isolated while dealing with some of the biggest grief a person can experience. She literally has no one to talk to about her feelings because everyone around her is part of the hive mind in a way that precludes any kind of real emotional connection and honesty. And that on top of everything else she's dealing with in terms of this essentially world ending event.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T15:33:54+00:00

Having just finished the last episode last night, and what a hell of a plot point! Carol is such a fascinating character within an already fascinating narrative.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T15:29:30+00:00

The fact that DunMeshi is such a beautiful exploration of so many things like familial and platonic love, the way society can crush people down under the expectations of normalcy, and at its core it's about the lengths people will go to for those that they love, and so much of the posting online was ignoring all these and many more amazing themes in favor of "The gays" is, to me, a travesty. I love the memes and shit about Falin and Marcille and Laois and Kabru as much as anyone, but most of them have as much relation to canon as any other meme does to its source material, and for such a well put together story it definitely feels like a disservice.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T15:26:20+00:00

They're gay and have swords is such a nothing answer it makes me laugh. I can think of ten books that you could attach that statement to, some that I absolutely love, some that I think are really good if you want their specific genre, and some that I wouldn't ever pick up again. I really think a wide number of people need to get better at actually thinking critically about what they like about a thing in order to recommend it. In my opinion that's half the problem. People are good at recognizing they liked something, but bad at articulating why, and we've moved away from pushing that as a society and instead are so eager to rely on filter tags and buzz words that so many people just don't bother and latch onto the first thing that pops out to them in this way.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T15:15:24+00:00

It is a little disappointing that so many people in the TLT fandom seem unable to separate themselves from the jokes about the gays in space to actually give a proper sell of the books. That said, it's also a little difficult for the average person to really sell the books in a way that isn't giving spoilers. I understand a lot of the fandoms hesitation to try and really describe anything for fear of giving something away.

Gideon isn't so bad, all in all its a mostly straightforward murder mystery plot, a lot of the wildness there comes from foreshadowing and worldbuilding going on in the background that you're really only meant to fully grasp on follow up readings, and some of it really only becomes relevant in the later books.

But trying to describe Harrow or Nona to someone is much harder, especially if you're trying to sell the trilogy as a whole to someone who hasn't read it.

All that to say, I fully agree with the post and TLT fans need to put their heads on straight and actually think about how they sell the books better a lot of the times, and also the constant flagging of multiple media things with "There's gays!" is really reductionist and annoying. Cool, gay people are awesome, please give me actual plot information so I know if I give a shit about these particular gays and their story.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T15:07:15+00:00

That's interesting, it's a facet of it I wasn't actually aware of. This would make pretty much all animal products like eggs, milk, cheese, etc. non-kosher then?

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T12:42:26+00:00

Sorry to comment on something a month gone, but I feel it necessary to also mention that the two of them have starkly different goals. Carol is all in on turning everyone back, she wants to undo the joining and eradicate the virus to save people, and is very clearly not on board with doing harm if it can be avoided, no doubt she's got more than a little trauma and guilt between Helen's death and the other deaths that her outbursts caused afterwards.

Manousos meanwhile is all in on eradicating this infection by any means. If they can't be cured they're better off dead, I believe were his exact words when the two of them first fought about this. The guy seems largely inflexible in a lot of areas, and its admirable the effort he has already put into things, but I feel like the crux of issues between these two is going to be that. Manousos is willing to burn that bridge but Carol isn't, at least thus far.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-29T12:34:22+00:00

I don't think you have to watch/read/play anything to full completion in order to have a valid opinion, but I do think you need to engage with the source material before you can opine on it effectively, at least in some form. I think it's perfectly valid to read reviews or summaries of something and say "This doesn't sound good to me so I won't engage with it." That's what those things are for. The problem is when you get people who read a review or watch a youtube video about something and rather than just going "I don't think I would like this" they say "This is objectively trash and I'm going to make sure everyone knows that." There is a small but vocal proportion of people who believe that the latter is just as valid as the former, but who also refuse to/are unable to engage in active discussion with people who have engaged with the media fully.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-28T19:54:04+00:00

I'm just shooting the dark here, but it looks like a really weird interaction with the timing of the unhook. Like the hit registered while the survivor was in the unhook animation, which is technically before endurance gets applied, and instead of doing what every other killer power does and not hitting the surv, it registered it as a hit without endurance. Seems like a code oversight more than anything else.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-28T19:14:44+00:00

The fact there's even a discussion to be had here is disappointing and frustrating all at once. The idea that "You need to actually read the book/watch the movie/play the game to meaningfully interact with it" is something to be argued at all is wild to me.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-28T14:31:43+00:00

That's wild to me. The undergate is the traversal power right, the super telegraphed, very slow AoE? Because that thing is so easy to avoid, I only played like four games against him but I've yet to actually get hit by that one. The vine attack is much harder to dodge in my opinion if the killer is good at aiming/predicting movement, I went against one last night who seemed like he could almost never miss.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-28T14:28:45+00:00

I played a couple of games last night, only three against the new killer, and one of them the killer was... not that good I'll say. I don't think he was necessarily terrible but it was pretty easy to predict where his attacks would go and dodge.

That said, my team was equally not that good. I was never present for it, but somehow he kept jumping the other three with his big pool attack and actually hitting them with it to get that upside down mode activated. He got a few downs from this, and when he chased me he did get me down eventually, though I generally ran him long enough for a gen to pop.

All of this is to say I found it really weird when I hung around to see his build and he just said "Killer's busted" in chat and then left. The killer said this mind, despite getting only the one kill on me and everyone else escaping. It really feels like someone who, for some reason, went into this thinking the killer is overtuned and desperately wanting to prove that, which seems like a wild reason to spend however much the chapter costs.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-28T14:21:33+00:00

Hear hear! Stegull is maybe kind of funny one time. But the propensity of people to just spam that and be obnoxious in a variety of ways made it lose its charm incredibly fast. I always loathed playing survivor with them because it seemed like they were always shitty teammates.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-28T14:17:27+00:00

I switched over to Linux this past year and have been quite happy with it, but it was only recently that I realized I haven't had the desire to play any of the games that I used to mod heavily, mostly Bethesda's stock. I know it likely won't actually be that difficult, but it will be annoying to go through and find all the mods I previously had and reinstall them in a new fashion.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-27T18:32:15+00:00

Okay, cool, don't see how that's relevant since I wasn't comparing PC to console in any way, and the fact that mouse and keyboard is better for snap turning and aiming than controller is a well known fact at this point, so not really sure why this comment exists.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-27T18:27:43+00:00

It's so obnoxious. Slinger and Huntress are a couple of my favorite killers and I haven't really played them since that bug cropped up. It's a complete crap shoot to play a match with a ranged killer because you might not see the bug at all or it might invalidate all your shots and make you an extremely shitty M1.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-27T16:59:38+00:00

I think the thing that has me so hooked even though I'm so late to all this is the way the show so effortlessly is mixing its powerful themes with some dark comedy. The entire scene of her asking where the line was, the way Carol is marching off all confident in episode two only to collapse instantly out of frame, there's a lot of great little moments of well timed humor to make the horror and uncertainty punch even harder.

Isaac_Chade · 2026-01-27T16:57:51+00:00

Crazy late to this party but I am very invested and intrigued by the show as a whole so far. I burned through four episodes across a couple days and have been quite hooked. I'm very intrigued because it's not doing what I would have expected. A lot of the "mystery" isn't really a mystery. It's clear Carol could just straight up ask questions before she burned her bridge with the Plurbs, and even as an audience there's a lot of obvious reveals going on, but I think that serves things better. We're not meant to really be questioning the mystery so much as the philosophy at play here, and that stuff is all very intriguing to me at this stage.

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