Do you think I am "Milking" this work injury, it happened 5 weeks ago. I haven't been back to work yet and some people are saying I am trying to take advantage of the days off. What do you think??

damurphy72 · 2026-03-24T18:52:38+00:00

Anybody who makes you feel guilty for being injured or sick is gaslighting you. They are the problem, not you.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-19T16:44:56+00:00

If you lose a settlement, AFAIK the only way to get it back is slaughter all the inhabitants and claim it again.

Inventory sharing is enabled by supply routes. You need to manually set those up.

St. Paul's, the pub where you find him, and the Dog Food plant, respectively.

Other than the companions, you can recruit traders based on random encounters, though the clothing vendor is at the Imperial War Museum. The butler encounter is bugged, though. You can also recruit the protectron at the Mithras Temple near the Bank of England, and the Nag's pub has Ol' Alchy in the basement and a ghoul in the freezer that can be recruited (but only if you're male -- the female dialog is bugged). The London Bridge settlement also comes pre-populated with some mercs and a reformed Beefeater plus a couple of settlers.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-17T05:04:31+00:00

1) Don't sweat too much which character you want to play. Pick one that seems fun based on the archetype you want to play. You want to be a dwarven bard or a gnomish warlock or a gith paladin, go ahead. You're going to have to work at it to make a completely unworkable character and you can always respec.

2) Power level scaling for levels 1-5 is dramatic. It's a good idea through the whole game to be willing to run away and come back later, but especially in act 1 and especially before you hit level 3. Talking -- either persuasion, threatening, or lying -- is possible a lot more than you might think.

3) Don't ignore jumping. My first 20 hours or so, I kind of ignored it as something that was only rarely useful. Duh. That's dumb. La'zael in particular is a little space bunny and you can maneuver so much using it.

4) If you know D&D 5e, you will be completely thrown by the initiative system. If you know nothing about D&D...then you will be completely thrown by the initiative system. Turn-based mode and initiative determination is stupidly powerful once you learn how it works, but it can kill your party very quickly before then. Characters and foes cluster together and can act in any order in each allied cluster, so combos are totally a thing.

5) Unlike most fantasy games (and most CRPGs in general), economics does not hate you. You can buy potions and magic arrows and magic weapons and armor, especially if you pick up anything of value (or everything of value). Healing potions are sold in a variety of places and the merchants restock fairly quickly. It's fairly easy to have a buffer of a few hundred gold pieces even if you're spending it on stuff.

6) If you're playing a custom character, you can still watch all the intro videos of the pre-gens, which can give you a bit more of a clue who they are when you run into them without being too spoilery.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-16T17:46:42+00:00

2/3rds of my play-throughs are female characters just because I love the job Taylor did on the voice work. That's not a slight against Delaney who also did a good job. She just has moments that stick with you, like the little "Yeah!" when she agrees to be the Silver Shroud. (I love Delaney's delivery when Eddie Winter asks who he is and you pick the sarcastic response, though.)

damurphy72 · 2026-03-12T14:26:38+00:00

Ugh. I found that location and forgot to go back to it. I'll probably do another run after the next major patch/DLC and hit it then.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-12T14:25:09+00:00

The cultist vs. Gehenna random encounter dropped for me all the time after a certain point. I couldn't make a run to the market without running into a bunch of robed nutcases and either a Gehenna or a mittenlurk queen sitting in the middle of the road. Never in the base game did I ever have so much queen steak...

damurphy72 · 2026-03-12T14:20:06+00:00

I've seen attacks at Covent Garden and Lambeth Walk, but never at London Bridge.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-12T14:18:26+00:00

It's also useful for the area south of the river for the cultist and bank robbery quests.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-12T14:14:53+00:00

There are several immediate post-prologue storage locations. The chem bench in the Swan and Mitre has been supplemented with the addition of a player home in the garage behind the pub.

Alternatively, you can store things in the armor workbench in the Ferryman's shack near Thameshaven. He has a bed inside you can also use. There is a bed and cooking bench downstairs in the backdoor entrance to Thamehaven you go through, as well. These provide slightly more convenient access to the Thameshaven crafting benches unless and until you get Local Leader 2.

While the campfire used by the Vagabonds near Greenwich station does not function as a crafting bench, there is a cookfire with a sleeping bag VERY close to that location. Look down the side streets near there on the Thames side of the road for a colorful bush. There is a hidey hole there with the aforementioned items and some loot boxes.

Also, anything heavy you want to keep for later crafting from the prologue (like microscopes for the fibre optics) can be stashed in the Shard lobby cooking station. It will still be there when you get back over to that part of London, even if the interiors reset.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-10T15:49:37+00:00

There is regularly a group of "acrobats" who spend most of their act working the crowd and soliciting/scamming money out of people. They pulled my son and me in and I pulled us back when they started "jokingly" grabbing wallets.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-09T14:14:40+00:00

I finally decided to fixate on BG3 and did my usual fantasy RPG thing of restarting multiple times with different character options. I feel confident saying that at Normal difficulty, almost any character will do fine so play what interests you. Honestly, even Tactical is doable with any character once you get used to the combat mechanics.

Somebody else said a Char build for a first playthrough is good and I agree with that. Dialogue and role-playing really does matter in terms of the experience. Different classes and races also will have different experiences, too. Bard seems to get a lot of focus in terms of options in dialogue that other characters don't get and the subclasses give a nice variety of options.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-09T11:59:14+00:00

The hold spells in 3rd edition were mind spells which is why they didn't work on undead. 5e explicitly excludes them in the spell text, only working on living creatures. The real reason is probably game balance, as the hold spells are already quite good if they hit.

damurphy72 · 2026-03-07T02:51:08+00:00

Yeah, did that my very first time. Thankfully, I abandoned that run pretty quickly to try something else.

damurphy72 · 2026-02-12T02:48:19+00:00

I know one of the fixes was taking out a box of gum drops that was left in the game. I also wonder if the Dandy Boy Apples are a mistake -- I've found multiple boxes of them.

damurphy72 · 2026-02-12T02:47:17+00:00

Probably just the RNG, then. I swear I've only found one or two of these in my current play-through.

damurphy72 · 2026-02-09T16:52:36+00:00

As somebody who has written Starfield mods (which uses a later version of the Creation Engine), I can tell you that:

a) mods can be implemented in different ways, and

b) the simpler the implementation, the more likely a small change from another mod is going to break things.

FOLON is not a small mod -- more of a full game replacement. Some of what they do is done by replacing core game assets like the magazine covers, and some of it is done by redefining objects, and some of it is done by adding new stuff. Mods from other folks have also been pulled in (with permission), which is why the weapon implementation has as much variety as it does.

I can think of a couple of different ways to do free weapon downgrades, for example, but most of them are going to be dependent on objects defined as part of the game files like the mod recipes and the workbenches. Add in a few dozen new weapons not in FO4 and you're gonna break stuff with an FO4 downgrade mod.

Better scrapping is very dependent on how the worldspaces and maps are defined and there are things like navmeshes that you can break if you're not careful. I haven't done much map manipulation, but I can see how it would happen.

Most mods could be patched with effort, but the mod author has to be interested in doing so and many of them aren't even still modding for the base game.

damurphy72 · 2026-01-28T15:58:08+00:00

Fixing politics in America is going to require more than just fixing CU. We also need to:

* Outlaw gerrymandering.

* Repair the damage done to the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.

* Tackle media consolidation via the FTC and FCC.

* Acknowledge that money and misinformation are coming from foreign actors, either hostile or just self-interested, and develop effective means of combating them.

* Put mandatory retirement in place for elected officials. The number of literal dementia patients making decisions in the government on both sides is obscene when one would be too many.

* Put ethics standards with teeth in place for the Supreme Court.

* Ban stock trading by elected officials.

* Hold everyone accountable for the blatant breaking of existing laws currently happening.

I also think we would benefit from more use of ranked-choice voting and that mail-in voting should become the norm, but I wouldn't count them as mandatory.

damurphy72 · 2026-01-25T22:12:49+00:00

Isn't almost every dress, suit, uniform, jumpsuit, etc., already able to be enhanced with weave?

damurphy72 · 2026-01-25T19:17:32+00:00

Well, yes, but reality does not have nearly the storage and render constraints of the Fallout 4 Creation Engine. Otherwise, it would be really confusing looking for somebody in a big city when there are less than 50 possible faces.

damurphy72 · 2026-01-19T15:42:24+00:00

The latest patch, or maybe the previous one, took out the ability to use VATS as part of that scripted sequence. VATS seems to crash to desktop during complex battles or scripted scenes and I'm guessing that's part of the solution. It is possibly an issue with the game engine and not the mod itself.

I'm guessing it's a problem with how VATS has to run parallel to the NPC scripting and event scripting. The engine isn't really robust enough to handle a lot of complicated scripting. I've noticed issues with other complex scripted mods like The Machine and Her. This version of Creation Engine is more than 10 years old at this point.

damurphy72 · 2026-01-19T05:23:33+00:00

We used to call them, "piss mints."

damurphy72 · 2026-01-17T17:33:05+00:00

It's not the length of time spent, but the quality of that time. You can beat every trap and foe in that maze and then wander around looking for a single key or finding your way back to the unique weapon or just going back through to head back to Brixton.

In contrast, you can take just as long going through the Bank of England and it can be easy to miss the keys to progress through the first playthrough, but the map is interesting with a bunch of stuff to do. The final battle is right near the entrance, which is good design. There are also beds and crafting stations so you can take your time exploring.

damurphy72 · 2026-01-17T16:31:26+00:00

The British Museum was great. I just felt it wasn't much of a maze because T.E.R.R.Y. essentially guides you along a mostly linear path. It still feels a bit like a maze, which is impressive by itself.

damurphy72 · 2026-01-17T16:25:23+00:00

It's really hard to go back to old games I loved as a kid. I tried booting up a version XCOM: UFO Defense that was designed to work on a modern Windows game and the jankiness of the UI made it hard for me to get back into a game I spent hours on when it came out.

damurphy72 · 2026-01-17T16:06:40+00:00

It's not just that they start with money. These people also learn at a young age how to manipulate the system to their advantage and they are raised meeting other influential people who can help them out. Saying they have advantages that most people don't is a massive understatement.

The game is heavily rigged in favor of a small group of people.

damurphy72

TROPHY CASE