Gerold: Update 7, and a Minor Challenge

Published by

atcDave

April 28, 2025

I plowed through Siege of Dragonspear with little trouble. This is still at the “Improved” difficulty on SCS.

Corwin is a fearsome addition to the team. I suppose any Ranger/Archer would be, I honestly don’t recall if I’ve ever created one for BG. I’ve used one a few times in IWD.

Safana is a very capable thief. It is funny both of the new characters added for this part of the adventure strike me as unlikable.

*“Skie is beyond help, but I care not what you say, Gerold DID NOT do this!”*

The Challenge

The team has moved into BG2. I’m trying a minor challenge to myself here, mainly out of curiosity. But Irenicus clearly has access to several vampires. So I’m thinking, Bohdi takes it upon herself to level drain the team back to first level. And I’m thinking of an old school PnP type level drain, I reduced everyone down to 500 experience and dialed back their skills and abilities to first level. This will NOT be getting “Restored”, they have to gain experience from here. Well, except Imoen, Bohdi didn’t want to damage Imoen prior to the next step in her brother’s plan. So she’ll be fine, except for no spellbook. Nothing. Every scroll is precious…

I don’t expect this to have much long term impact. By the time we leave Irenicus’ dungeon we’ll only be a couple levels behind normal? And experience is seriously not in short supply for this game, especially with Imoen having to rescribe everything.

This is about getting started, the jailbreak. And having now played level one of the dungeon, I’d say the difference was pretty small. I was most concerned about the ogre mage as the second fight, but everyone was already second level and it wasn’t a hard fight.
Level progression has come quickly through the first level of the dungeon. At the end, everyone was about 5th level. Maybe one more level by the end? That really let’s us loose in Athkatla not too much below average. Aerie should join at her normal minimum level.

*“Gerold what’s wrong? You look sick, you never get sick!”*

It may have taken some creativity for Bohdi to figure how to level drain an Undead Hunter. But for argument’s sake we’ll say she did, and the experience was massively disorienting for young Gerold.

2 responses to “Gerold: Update 7, and a Minor Challenge”

Zeno

April 28, 2025

Imoen looks very different from previous runs in that pic above. Did you tweak the description? I love the Dynaheir pic above. Really like her in general – particularly with the NPC mod. Just wish it was easier to experiment with her in different combinations. I just have real trouble breaking up the canon pairings, and that often means I end up with the same few parties every time.

I feel like something changed with the render AI while I was gone. “blurred motion” appears to be working quite differently than it used to. I may have to do some experimenting to sort out how action works now. It doesn’t feel quite the same.

I agree about the Dragonspear characters. I haven’t tried all of them, but the ones I have tried have ranged from irritating to bland. And they picked among the worst for the forced ones at the start. I mean, original characters like Xzar, Montaron, Xan, or BG1 Quayle could be irritating as well – but mostly in ways they were *intended* to be irritating. Some of the Dragonspear characters are more irritating in the “this comes across like it was written by a ten year old that thinks tropes are new” sense. And Safana is just an over-used trope played straight.

Starting at L1 sounds like a fun idea to re-invigorate the into, but you’re right. The way XP works in 2E means you quickly catch up to within a level or so. Particularly below L10. Intentionally I think – since those early Gygax modules often expected characters to die and be replaced with L1 recruits on a regular basis. So “quickly catching up” was almost a necessity.

LikeLike

Reply
atcDave

April 28, 2025

I do think the AI has moods! I think that’s nonsense? But it does seem there are aspects it will get stuck on, that will sometimes resolve if I come back later? Is it cycling through something? Is other work it’s doing for other users influencing my work? I don’t know.

but there are two changes in Imoen’s description, from your original descriptors, that seem to have broad consequence. One is changing her age from 20 to 21. The other is changing her from “Ukrainian Girl” to “Ukrainian Woman”. I find even if I cancel out all other changes, those two seem to matter.

I really love SoD “technically”. It is colorful and has a lot of new tricks from the old IE (large mixed battles, huge crowd scenes, well scripted “random” encounters, etc). And I love having to put together an ad hoc party for an emergency.
But it is really badly written. As you suggest, like not written by an adult. It is clearly, massively let down in that one single dimension.

your take on Gygax’ influence is one I’d not heard before, but I sure do see the sense of it! In the early days it was not uncommon to loose characters to random, stupid things.
I really like the way the xp graduates for a lot of reasons, but this case is not one of them. It basically ensures your team will catch to where they belong pretty quickly.
But that said, it did add a fun dimension to an opening dungeon I’ve run a million times!

LikeLike

Reply

DavesGaming