Ever since I heard about Baldur’s Gate 3, my anticipation reached new heights, amplified by snagging an early access pass. With high hopes, I embarked on what I believed would be the ultimate gaming journey. Yet, as I dived in, an unexpected challenge arose.
Every character I designed, every crossroad faced, and every spell selected became an intense internal debate. I was striving for that elusive “perfect run,” where every decision was optimized, every consequence foreseen. The game’s vast potential felt more like an overwhelming maze of possibilities. “What if I chose differently?” became a constant refrain, casting a cloud over every joyous discovery.
The excitement I had was overshadowed by the pressure of perfection. Hours were spent revisiting choices, rerolling characters, and second-guessing strategies. Instead of being an adventure, it felt like an intricate puzzle that I was forever trying to solve.
But then, a shift occurred. I asked myself: “What if I just play, embracing every twist and turn?” Rather than striving for the perfect game, I chose to savor the journey itself. And in that choice, I found liberation.
By owning my decisions, the game transformed. Mistakes? They became intriguing plot twists. Unexpected outcomes? Exciting surprises around each corner. The narrative of Baldur’s Gate 3 became alive, dynamic, and I was genuinely immersed.
For those ensnared in the quest for the flawless path, consider this: sometimes, the beauty of a game lies not in perfection, but in the spontaneous, unpredictable journey it offers. Embrace it, own your choices, and find the joy I rediscovered.
I don’t understand all of the save scumming that people seem to do. The whole point of table top DND is that if you fail a roll or make a “wrong” decision, that shapes the narrative of your story.
You haven’t “failed a quest” you have opened up a new story path.
You aren’t going to ask your DM to forget the last hour of play irl, why would you do anything different here
I get two hours of playtime week nights, maybe 10 hours over the weekend. It’s gonna be months before I get my next playthrough and I am NOT gonna miss a chance to experience my desired outcomes with certain NPCs.
But I respect your play style and will get to experience it on my next playthrough.
I try not to just reverse decisions I end up not liking, but I’ll tell you what I’m a goddamn adult with minimal game time and I’ll be damned if I’m going to restart because I accidentally clicked on the wrong thing or decided to pick a very stupid fight.
It’s going to take me forever to get through the game as is, I don’t need to add all that extra overhead.
There are a few bad rolls that can just outright kill you in this game. My entire party got blasted off a cliff because I failed a disarm trap roll. There was no “new story path” at the bottom of that cliff, let me tell you.
Exactly! And some will go “lol well that’s how my story ends” and make a new character. Some like you and me will go “well that was ridiculous, let’s try that again.”
I don’t think it matters how people want to enjoy the game. It doesn’t make any difference to you. Sometimes when something really interesting happens, I enjoy going back a few minutes and seeing a couple of the other scenarios. I just do what I feel like in the moment. Just earlier today I decided to let something insane play out that I assumed was going to be terrible for me and
I’d have to reload after. When I saw the result, I was laughing hysterically, and decided to keep going forward. Once again, I just did what I felt like in the moment and I had a blast.
Also, this isn’t D&D with a DM. It’s a video game that replicates the experience very well, but it isn’t D&D the TTRPG. If I want that experience, I’ll go play it with a DM.
Why do we need to be dogmatic about how we play games?
A good DM generally knows what makes for a better story. If failing makes for a bad story, they’ll give you some divine intervention which may as well be save scumming.
That is why there is karmic dice…
And even with Karmic Dice enabled, I’ve had streaks of critical fails or critical successes. It’s not perfect.
There’s an intense different scenario in a DM taking some flubbed rolls and quests and writing the story from that point, and a PC game with only so many potential scenarios and outcomes.
I agree with the premise of OPs post, but this is simply not a reasonable comparison.
I think it depends on whether or not people are coming to games like this having played ttrpgs before. Video games often punish failure, whether by removing quest rewards, impeding forward progress, having no follow up to a failure state, or even an outright “game over.” This trains a lot of gamers to min-max their playthroughs of games so as to not miss anything, as even a failure in a conversation check can lock them out of content. This was something I struggled with as well, quick-saving before every conversation in case I failed a persuasion check or something and was punished for it. Up until I did a quest in this game where a character died by accident and the game just kinda went, “That was a thing that happened. Anyways, here’s your xp. Let’s move on.”
That broke me from that mindset because the game wasn’t punishing me for screwing something up - it just changed the flow of the story. It was no longer like the game was a Dark Souls boss where I had to learn the right pattern to get the game to give me what I want, now it’s play the game the way I want and see what wrenches it throws into my plans because the game won’t lock me out of half the story because some kid died in a sidequest, it’ll just give me a different version of the narrative.
Now I largely use quick saves just in case me and my buddy mess up an encounter so badly we end up with a total party wipe, or if we just wanna try something funny like using shrink + a potion of giant’s strength to see if we can throw Kagha off a cliff in the druids grove (it didn’t work).