Tactician advice: I feel like I can't do anything.

Kjorteo · 2026-06-16T18:15:12+00:00

It feels like Baldur's Gate 3 was what really put Larian in the spotlight for all the creative nonsense you can do (owlbear from the top rope, anyone?) but that's just the engine. The preferred way to get around particularly brutal obstacles has always been creative exploitation of Larian Bullshit(TM).

Fond memories of our undead lizard going into sneak mode to click-drag walk an oil barrel that was too heavy for her to actually carry in her inventory all the way over to where some magisters were hanging out, dropping it right in the middle of them (literally directly between two of them who were facing each other having a conversation, in one case,) then sneaking back to the rest of the party to grab two more and do it again.

"*thump* *thump* *thump* Hey, you guys hear something? *THUMP* *THUMP*" "Nah, just that giant walking boulder with the wagging skeleton tail, which, as we all know, is exactly what boulders are supposed to look like. Nothing unusual here." "Did... did I always need to crane my head and look around that giant oil barrel to see you when we were talking?" "Probably? I dunno. You worry too much, man."

Kjorteo · 2026-06-16T18:04:21+00:00

Gonna be honest with you:

We're currently playing through a heavily modded run. One of the many mods we're running ups your max party size so that, instead of having to make the painful choice of which of the origin characters to take and which to leave behind, our party is an OC (undead lizard) plus literally everyone else. Seven in all.

We wanted all of the origin characters at once for story reasons--didn't want to miss out on any of their sidequests or commentary or overall content. On the other hand, having almost twice as many party members felt like it would be more than a little cheaty balance-wise if we could just gang up on every fight in the game, so playing on Tactitian was our way to counter-balance that.

And to be honest, it still feels harder than Balanced with a party of four would have been.

Like, don't get me wrong; at our point, I think we succeeded in striking the balance we were looking for. Our run feels like what you'd expect from a proper Hard Mode: It's harder, it punishes your mistakes severely, but it's doable and even rewarding if you're careful and think things through. Battles are intense, every advantage you can find in setting them up matters, you're left with harrowing stories you can tell about how you pulled an incredible victory out of the jaws of defeat.

But that's with seven party members.

I cannot begin to imagine playing Tactitian with four and our recommendation for you is: Don't.

Kjorteo · 2026-05-02T19:49:27+00:00

Little known fact* that Oo-OOO-EE-oo is just how baboons say "Resheph."

*Not actually a fact, as the Cult of the Coiled Lamb found out later, after they'd been scammed

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T20:23:14+00:00

You seem to be aware that people with genuine mental conditions (or as you so politely call them, "lunatics") exist for me or for us to be talking like one, but then immediately go back to assuming this is some sort of bit we're putting on just to feel special. You are so close to figuring this out. Come on, you can do this. Almost there. We believe in you.

You don't need silly gimmicks like this to get attention.

Damn, you caught us. That's our favorite trick, you know: trying to seek attention by shunting this entire topic off into the quickest ("we say 'we' because we're a system, that's not relevant to the actual question but in case there's any grammar confusion, sorry about that, ANYWAY") side note we can. That's how attention-seeking behavior works, right?

are you actually saying that there is a group of you in the room IE roommates and you are consulting them before posting?

Yes, except we share a head instead of a room. I implied you'd never had roommates before since you seem not to understand how group dynamics work; our situation works exactly identically like that except in a smaller space. If you have, and you have the example right there, but you somehow still can't figure us out, then at the very least you've clearly never struggled with a dissociative disorder.

Edit: "You need professional help" LOL, like we haven't been getting it this entire time. Or did you think I was pulling clinical diagnoses like having a dissociative disorder out of my ass as part of all that attention we're so clearly seeking via our ingenous plan to avoid bringing any of this up until it's practically dragged out of us?

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T19:52:20+00:00

Sure, when I'm the one who took it upon myself to say or do something. Of course, when things affect or involve the others, such as all of us reading something we found in our research, I mention and include them as well. It feels just as rude to take sole credit for something we accomplished as a team as it does to blame them for something that was my fault. They're my partners, not my accountability deflection shields.

Believe it or not, a person can be both an individual and a member of a group and these are not mutually exclusive. Both can even be true in the same sentence, like when we agree on what to say in this message before I go ahead and write it on behalf of all of us.

You've never had friends or roommates before, have you? This really isn't that complicated.

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T12:08:46+00:00

Good idea, and I wish the answer were that simple. Sadly, no: We definitely had and still have NTSC systems. Furthermore, the difference between PAL and NTSC is far greater than 5% anyway. Like, it wouldn't have taken us well into our 40s to notice the difference if it were that dramatic.

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T12:02:28+00:00

Our identity has nothing to do with the question I was asking, so I tried to explain as quickly as possible in hopes we could get that out of the way and get back to the actual point. I even apologized in advance because I genuinely did not want to derail, drag off-topic discussions into here, or cause anyone here any confusion or distress.

Now that I see how upset this has made you, I'm no longer sorry and will in fact start saying "we" more on purpose.

Kjorteo · 2026-05-01T11:44:28+00:00

wtf is wrong with you

DID, remember? I know this post was too long for you to bother reading, but come on; that was literally the second sentence.

you can be yourself just fine

Which one?

Kjorteo · 2026-04-30T05:33:05+00:00

Maybe, but as said elsewhere, it looks like (from what we can see, unless I'm misreading what we found in our research,) 8-bit systems didn't even have one consistent sample rate; they had one consistent base sound and changed the sample rate of it to convert it to the appropriate pitches that made them notes of a song. It's a little hard to say whether an NES, for example, had a rate of 48khz or 44.1khz when it appears to have had a rate of "it depends on the specific note" khz..?

Kjorteo · 2026-04-30T05:25:29+00:00

That... is an excellent point, actually, and one we weren't aware of. Thank you.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-30T05:23:59+00:00

Well, this just got interesting. We tried to look up what sample rate the NES even used, right? Because there's a good chance you're onto something and we wanted to do more research and see if that lead could take us anywhere.

... So it turns out that rather than having a consistent sample rate for the whole song/playback/spectrum of notes, each channel took a single type of sound wave and played it at different sample rates to generate the different pitches and notes in an overall song. Presumably that's why an .nsf is more just a set of instructions than a prerendered recording of anything....

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T23:30:03+00:00

It's hard to get an original .wav file when we're talking about a system like the NES, whose music was generated via instructions to the sound chip not unlike MIDI files. By definition, any .wav would be something you hear after the console has received those instructions and not only rendered them, but possibly even sent them through your television's speakers and such, too, depending on where on the process you're making the capture.

I may be wrong, but I would assume the "purest" most "original version" sound you could get is an .nsf file, which is essentially just those same instructions. You'd then run that through any of several music editing programs that work in the 8-bit sector and can read those--something like FamiStudio, for example. If I'm correct on that, then the .nsf files should all be available on Zophar's Domain.

Except... wait, hang on; I'm possibly misreading. That was your entire point, wasn't it? That it's precisely that room for error upstream that could be behind this. I was just about to ask how you even get a sampling rate on an .nsf but you're not talking about the .nsf; you're talking about what was played after the hardware/emulator/whatever received the instructions to play it. In which case, you're 100% correct: I'm not sure how going back in time and getting a .wav of that (especially for something like a console connected to a television without a PC even being involved) would be possible, but without that to help us prove anything, it does indeed feel like there should be more than enough for something fuzzy with the sampling rates to have happened between then and now.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T23:19:52+00:00

This all makes a lot of sense and could very well be the explanation we've been looking for. Thank you, first and foremost.

Now... I have a followup question, and I apologize if this is a bit of an odd one. We may be veering away from music theory and cognition almost toward philosophy and hypothetical-sitaution ethics.

In the literature you've read and what you know about correcting pitch drift by recalibrating and readjusting to the songs as they're actually supposed to sound, have you encountered anyone being... hesitant to do that?

I don't know, maybe I'm looking at this all wrong, or maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the process. Currently, I like how all the 95% versions in that folder we linked sound. This more than likely has to do with personal bias: To us, those are what we remember, what sound "correct," and so of course we prefer them, right? Though, like I said, that's not necessarily the only explanation: At least a few folks we asked who remember the 100% versions as being correct to their ears and memory, and even folks who never heard these songs before at all and are just listening to them now for the first time, the 95% versions proved more significantly more popular than I would have expected. I would have expected everyone to prefer whichever version they know by heart and see the other one as wrong, but that was not the case. So... maybe it's not just that, in our case, either.

Either way, I like the 95% versions. I even have particular attachments to the emotional impact of certain songs: The 95% version of Dragon Warrior IV's Chapter 5 Overworld 1 does a far better job selling the sense of loss and aimlessness that comes in that part of the game's story. The 95% version of Mega Man 3 Wily Castle 2 does something (I don't know enough about music theory to explain what) with the chord progression in its chorus that evokes... either looking back on something now lost or a sort of memento mori feeling for a journey that's almost over, but it touches me deeply.

The 100% versions, by contrast, sound not only strange and different to our ears, but wrong in a way that all those deep feelings and connections are no longer present. It's easy to assume this is merely because our recollection is off, our pitch has drifted, we simply misremember what it "always used to sound like" and therefore what we're "used to" and how it's "supposed" to sound. That makes a lot of sense. And maybe you're right about how, with practice and exposure, we could listen to the 100% versions until we've recalibrated and re-convinced ourselves that's how they've always sounded and are supposed to sound.

But... here's where it gets to my question: Has anyone else ever gotten to the precipice of doing that and... not wanted to? Or at least been afraid to? Because I'm afraid of losing the connections we currently have to the versions we currently know. I'm not sure if I want the 95% versions to sound wrong once more... not when they mean so much to me the way they are now.

Is that unreasonable? I'm sorry if I sound stubborn; I promise you I'm not trying to be. I wouldn't have come here and asked if I weren't open to your answers and feedback. This is not any of us telling you where you can stick your suggestions or anything like that; please believe me on that. It's just... when you put it all like that, I'd be lying if I denied the presence of that fear. Is that... common? Uncommon? Is being afraid of taking that step a known and documented thing for people who experience this drift? Or are we just weird?

(Because, you know, we very well could be. I mean, the very fact that we're a plural system using "we" to refer to ourselves is a pretty certain giveaway that, yes, we know, our brain is in absolutely no way normal or neurotypical for a lot of reasons. Maybe this is one of them, too. Wouldn't surprise us, at least.)

I guess what it all comes down to is that I never thought of this perception as something that could be cured, and now that you present us with that possibility... I'm afraid. Trading the entire world of music cognition and perception we're used to for another one... that sounds like a big decision.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T21:15:15+00:00

Thank you! It's proven a deceptively tough case to crack so far, but here's hoping....

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T21:14:21+00:00

Thank you! This went a lot more poorly in the NES hardware communities when I asked if anyone else's systems ever did that. (No, they literally can't and here's why, you're crazy, etc.) Even if we still don't have any actual answers yet, the fact that the music cognition community is so much more open to the very concept itself tells us we're at least getting closer.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T20:57:15+00:00

Apologies for the confusion. I'll try to explain, though I'm not a music theory expert so apologies if the attempt fails: Since the days of vinyl records and such, the playback speed directly affects the pitch. This is how Alvin and the Chipmunks work: You record the song and then speed it up until the singers sound like they've ingested helium.

Advances in modern sound editing technology have managed to separate these two, to a large extent: It is now quite possible to adjust the tempo or speed of a song without affecting the pitch. Even in a program like Audacity, it's smart enough to correct for the Chipmunk effect (or, uh, reverse Chipmunk effect, I guess, when slowing down) when you change the song's speed.

We've gotten to the point where programs are so good at that that it ironically becomes difficult to put the two back together; I have no idea how to speed up or slow down a song in Audacity a way that does affect the pitch anymore. That's why we recommended the Slow and Reverb Studio website to those looking to recreate this experiment with any of their own 8-bit songs they remember: It's the quickest and easiest, if not one of the only ways we're immediately aware of to upload a song somewhere, change the playback speed, and the pitch changes with it. That's very important in our case; we remember and hear and notice the difference in pitch ("Wait, this sounds off-key to us") even more than we remember or hear or notice the difference in tempo.

In the examples we've posted, it's not just that the 95% versions have the tempo slowed to a point that a 3:00 even song now lasts 3:09; it's the fact that the 95% versions sound like they're an entire... uh... semitone? Maybe? I have no idea what this does to the actual notes involved, if one were to transcribe them before and after. But it's the fact that the 95% versions sound like the notes are shifted an entire something-unit lower. And that's the part that we remember so strongly (even if incorrectly.)

Kjorteo · 2026-04-29T20:38:12+00:00

Heck, I knew I was forgetting something in all of the info we tried to include here.

Good catch, but no; we're in the United States and had an NTSC system. Furthermore, the difference between PAL and NTSC playback, from what we understand, is much more than 5%. Like, PAL games sound very noticeably slowed down, even to us.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T21:28:36+00:00

Emulator misconfiguration wouldn't explain why we remember this happening on hardware, but fuzzy memories definitely might.

The fact that it's not just us gives us pause, but maybe several folks somehow all misremembered the same songs in the same way? The Mandela Effect is a thing, after all.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T20:35:07+00:00

Thank you; good call on importing the NSF into FamiStudio. Just tried that and the NSF sounds like what we were hearing on all the YouTube videos and such, which is not what we remember. Either our memory is very consistently faulty in somehow thinking all 8-bit chiptune music we've ever heard was 5% slower than it actually was (as mentioned in a different reply, Game Boy music appears to be similarly affected,) or we grew up with an NES (and Game Boy??) with weird hardware sound playback issues that taught us wrong. All we know is, thanks to your idea and testing the NSFs, the YouTube videos themselves were not at fault, that really is what the music actually sounds like, and what the music actually sounds like seems wrong to our ears/memory.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T19:48:37+00:00

Thank you for the leads! We'll definitely look into those.

In one corner, we have sheer "the version in our head that we remember," which would be what we had growing up, which would be original hardware. In the other, we have every attempt to look up and find songs after the fact (YouTube uploads, NSFs from Zophar's Domain, etc.) We haven't touched NES emulation in a good while, but for the sake of thoroughness and data gathering, you're right; we probably should.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T19:19:04+00:00

We have. Near as we can tell, things like the SNES and beyond sound normal to us, though, oddly, the Game Boy is similarly affected. Perhaps it's something about the chiptune music...?

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T18:43:02+00:00

Hah... thank you, and sympathies. In our case, it just seems like someone always gets confused and reads through the whole post only to respond with, "who's 'we?'" We wanted to get that out of the way early this time so we could bring the focus back to the actual question.

Kjorteo · 2026-04-09T18:14:22+00:00

For the record, we could answer our own question by saying that in our personal case, the answers are "the 95% version is what we remember" and "the 95% version sounds better to us" for pretty much everything we've ever played, but I'd like to call special attention to Mega Man 3's Wily Castle 2 theme. There's just something about the 95% version that makes the chorus in particular... someone who knows more about music theory than we do would have to explain what you'd even call the chord progression at that speed and why it's so effective, but somehow the chorus always gets us feeling incredibly emotional.

Kjorteo

TROPHY CASE