![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethPlaying Wrath of the Righteous yesterday I got to the bit where we see what happens at Heaven's Edge and it is one of those times where inconsistent application of the rules undermines the story.
For one, healing magic should have worked. It needs a better explanation for why it wouldn't work than, like, 'I don't know man it was really fast'. It's easy to say no one at the party was sufficiently powerful, it's easy to say that an old priest isn't necessarily a powerful cleric, it should be simples but they didn't do that, they were just like, oops guess they died.
And it would be a perfect moment in the character progression to highlight the fact that the vast majority of people, even rich and powerful people, are levels one to five. We have left the vast majority of people far behind, even if it's just been by number go up stages. Sure we could fix it, but even very rich people don't have people like us on hand at a birthday party. It would explain why so many quests get dumped on us personally. Even without the Mythic, there's fewer and fewer like us.
... even if we can hire those few via the Pathfinders instantly. That part makes it weird.
Another reason is with one spellcaster per six people you can probably manage six remove disease spells. But this was a large birthday party with lots of rich people, not a gathering of clerics or healers. Say simply, they tried. There were too many. Even with the two paladins and a cleric we were shown, it's easy for a disease to hit too many. So then they'd have to wait for their magic to renew, and even with in game rules, eight hours is a long time for a fast illness.
Mostly though it's the part where they died without getting a message out. They say it is because the oldest priest called a quarantine, and that's a respectable reason, until you realise literally everything else about how this game is set up requires magical communication to be simple and routine.
And also to happen once a day at midnight.
They have their out built in right there, really fast disease that happens in daylight, someone wants to physically go for help, though the travel times don't look plausible maybe they have teleport set up to take them home and we know you can only do that from on the road in the comouter version, priest wants to hold out for the method that doesn't endanger others, you still have the fundamental conflict.
I don't agree with the dialogue option tagged 'good' though, if an infectious disease is passing person to person, the 'good' selfless option is never going to be the one that endangers everyone.
Back to inconsistent application: your team never infect your team with magical diseases. You can't take infections back to camp and make the army ill. There's no chance that being plague stormed leads to anyone getting sick who wasn't in the storm. Disease is treated as just another spell effect, like a more problematic poison cloud, to be countered with magic.
So this is the one time in the entire game that disease is treated realistically.
Which makes it seem nuts by the in game established laws of magic.
And it didn't have to! Just tweak the demon's dialogue and instead of infecting everything in their environment they infect one person and let it rip. That sets up your dilemma by establishing that this time a disease actually acts disease like.
I can talk it through so it makes in game sense that Heaven's Edge happened that way, but on screen I don't think they did, which is frustrating.
In other game news, doing things on a higher difficulty setting is harder, and enemies can do so many more things more effectively than I remember. I keep having to take extra rests and still use a bunch of healing magic. Frustrating.
I retrained Lann because I had distributed his skills poorly and we kept falling off things, only I think I wasted a feat this time that Zen Archer gives you for free, so now I'm just... considering building him again, but I think that costs money.
Also I feel I should know how to do this better by now. Too many numbers. Like, optimising the numbers is its own fun thing when you are planning your character, but to optimise like a dozen different characters at once in different disciplines and then get your party balance right? Ugh.
Also also I keep forgetting to bring an arcane caster with me. Or anyone good at Use Magic Device. Do that in the wrong place and your option is run back to Drezen or be toast.
I would have more fun if I dropped the difficulty or retrained my main character to be actually useful.
... retraining the main character is the sense making one. but I wanted them to be good at Knowing Things. Trouble is if you do one character who knoww all the things instead of distributing the knowing around the team then you run out of feats for Stabbing Things. Ugh.
I am still mostly having fun but in a reloads a lot and gets frustrated way.
For one, healing magic should have worked. It needs a better explanation for why it wouldn't work than, like, 'I don't know man it was really fast'. It's easy to say no one at the party was sufficiently powerful, it's easy to say that an old priest isn't necessarily a powerful cleric, it should be simples but they didn't do that, they were just like, oops guess they died.
And it would be a perfect moment in the character progression to highlight the fact that the vast majority of people, even rich and powerful people, are levels one to five. We have left the vast majority of people far behind, even if it's just been by number go up stages. Sure we could fix it, but even very rich people don't have people like us on hand at a birthday party. It would explain why so many quests get dumped on us personally. Even without the Mythic, there's fewer and fewer like us.
... even if we can hire those few via the Pathfinders instantly. That part makes it weird.
Another reason is with one spellcaster per six people you can probably manage six remove disease spells. But this was a large birthday party with lots of rich people, not a gathering of clerics or healers. Say simply, they tried. There were too many. Even with the two paladins and a cleric we were shown, it's easy for a disease to hit too many. So then they'd have to wait for their magic to renew, and even with in game rules, eight hours is a long time for a fast illness.
Mostly though it's the part where they died without getting a message out. They say it is because the oldest priest called a quarantine, and that's a respectable reason, until you realise literally everything else about how this game is set up requires magical communication to be simple and routine.
And also to happen once a day at midnight.
They have their out built in right there, really fast disease that happens in daylight, someone wants to physically go for help, though the travel times don't look plausible maybe they have teleport set up to take them home and we know you can only do that from on the road in the comouter version, priest wants to hold out for the method that doesn't endanger others, you still have the fundamental conflict.
I don't agree with the dialogue option tagged 'good' though, if an infectious disease is passing person to person, the 'good' selfless option is never going to be the one that endangers everyone.
Back to inconsistent application: your team never infect your team with magical diseases. You can't take infections back to camp and make the army ill. There's no chance that being plague stormed leads to anyone getting sick who wasn't in the storm. Disease is treated as just another spell effect, like a more problematic poison cloud, to be countered with magic.
So this is the one time in the entire game that disease is treated realistically.
Which makes it seem nuts by the in game established laws of magic.
And it didn't have to! Just tweak the demon's dialogue and instead of infecting everything in their environment they infect one person and let it rip. That sets up your dilemma by establishing that this time a disease actually acts disease like.
I can talk it through so it makes in game sense that Heaven's Edge happened that way, but on screen I don't think they did, which is frustrating.
In other game news, doing things on a higher difficulty setting is harder, and enemies can do so many more things more effectively than I remember. I keep having to take extra rests and still use a bunch of healing magic. Frustrating.
I retrained Lann because I had distributed his skills poorly and we kept falling off things, only I think I wasted a feat this time that Zen Archer gives you for free, so now I'm just... considering building him again, but I think that costs money.
Also I feel I should know how to do this better by now. Too many numbers. Like, optimising the numbers is its own fun thing when you are planning your character, but to optimise like a dozen different characters at once in different disciplines and then get your party balance right? Ugh.
Also also I keep forgetting to bring an arcane caster with me. Or anyone good at Use Magic Device. Do that in the wrong place and your option is run back to Drezen or be toast.
I would have more fun if I dropped the difficulty or retrained my main character to be actually useful.
... retraining the main character is the sense making one. but I wanted them to be good at Knowing Things. Trouble is if you do one character who knoww all the things instead of distributing the knowing around the team then you run out of feats for Stabbing Things. Ugh.
I am still mostly having fun but in a reloads a lot and gets frustrated way.