What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[warty goblin]

Watch out for anyone wielding Dragon Lances, or mages with hourglass pupils

That's a brilliant idea, next game I'm absolutely going to set my leader up as Raistlin. Honestly Laurana would work pretty well too, but I haven't gone up the Dark tree in a while.

[ArmyOfOptimists]

So basically, Solasta turned Calm Emotions into a better version of Hypnotic Pattern. Probably not a great call on their part, but I guess it's something to keep in mind.

I don't see it as a misread of the 5E text. Calm Emotions does specify that it can cause all targets to become indifferent to hostile creatures as one of the effects. The main difference in the book text is that Calm Emotions is restricted to Bard, Cleric (a bit weird that a mass control spell is available to Clerics earlier than Wizards) and when any of the affected targets is attacked, it breaks for the whole group. Hypnotic Pattern is Bard, Wizard, Warlock, Sorcerer and each target is affected individually, so you can pick them off one-by-one.

Haven't booted up Solasta yet, but it seems like they implemented it faithfully reading the book text versus the game text.

[Beelzebub1111]

Hypnotic Pattern has a larger radius and makes them unable to take any actions at all. Calm Emotions still allows for non-hostile actions and movement. In practice of the game, however most enemies with low will saves don't have actions that aren't hostile so they will just meander about for their turns.

[Form]

I've picked up One step from Eden and whilst the gameplay is entirely different from what I've played before (I'm not used to frantically dancing around on a 4x4 grid whilst desperately shooting/casting away at the enemy), I've been able to jump right into it and have fun. I'm starting to get a better feel for the various cards and bosses, but the later bosses are both too tough and too fast for me to clear. I've gotten to the final boss only once so far. Usually I get killed one or two bosses before that.

I will make it to Eden eventually. Though I may have to lower the difficulty via Angel Mode to do so.

[warty goblin]

Wrapped up my dragon lizard velociraptor AoW 4 game with a Magic victory. The two remaining AI empires actually put up a credible fight at the end, throwing absolute buckets of reasonably powerful armies at what amounted to my own personal continent. Sadly they were immediately absolutely smashed by my seven fully pimped stacks of doom. Six actually, I held one in reserve just in case.

So ended the reign of the dragon, with an ascent to the stars. He started out a young and confused firebreather, just searching for answers. Then he entered his hippy phase, started glowing green, and healing people (well, lizards) with his breath. Tree hugging however did not supply the answers he needed, so inevitably he found God. And by God I mean himself. Yes, it was his destiny to lead his people (well, lizards, ratmen and a batch of elves who declared war on the wrong reptile and got absorbed) into legend as a big scaly angel who is also God Emperor.

Various heretic foreigners (mostly dwarves) failed to get with the program and kept invading. They all got enlightened, by which I mean vaporized by the holy vapors of the dragon god to be's breath. Or torn apart by undead dragons, because for some reason I ended up with gobs of undead dragons. Look, the Church of The Big Dragon embraces all, being dead is no obstacle to a righteous life.

[WritersBlock]

I just noticed recently that Daggerfall Unity does not have an option to exit to the main menu, just to exit to desktop, I wish they would do something about that.

That minor nitpick aside Dream combined with Weeb Overhaul makes the game look absolutely amazing. In some ways I prefer this to Skyrim actually and I DEFINITELY prefer this to Oblivion. (Morrowind I like about the same but in different ways)

[Zevox]

Okay, wrapped up the main campaign of Solasta. For the most part, opinion of the game didn't change much throughout - it does the combat of D&D well, the rest of it fairly meh to weak, and isn't exactly my personal type of D&D in tone or style. I will say I did not much like the final battle; it was a huge difficulty jump compared to the rest of the campaign, simply because the bosses did so much damage (on their turns and as legendary actions) and were accompanied by so many other allies, some of which were pretty durable, and practically everyone gets 3 attacks per turn.

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And that random Gold Dragon that joined me as an ally helped way less than it feels like it should've. Hell, I had to restart a couple of times just because it was AI-controlled and dumb enough to use its breath weapon on my party, killing 3/4 of it, twice. Outside of that, pretty much every enemy resisted its attacks, it kept rotating who it attacked rather than focusing on any one target, and it started with half of its health already gone, so even as a meat shield it wasn't that great. It did not survive wave 1, despite me having Zelda cast Heal on it to try and save it.

Blessedly I'd picked Improved Invisibility as one of Midna's spells, so casting a twinspell version of that wound up being my answer. With Midna and Zelda permanently invisible and these enemies seemingly having no way to see invisible things, they were safe to do whatever they wanted throughout the fight, while Link's AC and Sheik's mobility made them tough to kill (although boy did they both come close).

Also, screw them for including Shikkaths in wave 2. Why on earth would you be dropping one enemy with 160+ hp, legendary actions, and legendary resistance every turn during the survival portion of the fight?

So, overall, not bad, but not that great either. I'm hesitating on whether I want to pick up with the Palace of Ice right now, or move on to something else.

Oh, and here's a weird one: remember I mentioned being on a Yu-Gi-Oh nostalgia kick? Well, that included rewatching the original show, and when I got to the end of the first season, I was reminded of an old GBA game for a Yu-Gi-Oh spin-off: Dungeon Dice Monsters. And wouldn't you know, digging through my old games, there it was, and the oldest system I still own just so happens to be a GBA SP. So I've actually played a little bit of that recently. It's honestly a decently fun little spin-off game, but it can be frustrating because everything is so RNG-dependent - even moving and attacking with your monsters requires a resource you get only by rolling specific "crests" on your dice, so some games can go by with one side basically unable to do anything because they just don't roll any attack crests or movement crests. So not any kind of hidden gem or anything, just a strange thing I happened to still have when the mood hit to play a little bit of it again.

I don't see it as a misread of the 5E text. Calm Emotions does specify that it can cause all targets to become indifferent to hostile creatures as one of the effects. The main difference in the book text is that Calm Emotions is restricted to Bard, Cleric (a bit weird that a mass control spell is available to Clerics earlier than Wizards) and when any of the affected targets is attacked, it breaks for the whole group. Hypnotic Pattern is Bard, Wizard, Warlock, Sorcerer and each target is affected individually, so you can pick them off one-by-one.

Haven't booted up Solasta yet, but it seems like they implemented it faithfully reading the book text versus the game text.

Hypnotic Pattern has a larger radius and makes them unable to take any actions at all. Calm Emotions still allows for non-hostile actions and movement. In practice of the game, however most enemies with low will saves don't have actions that aren't hostile so they will just meander about for their turns.

The fact that attacking any of the targets breaks the effect on everyone is a notable disadvantage relative to Hypnotic Pattern for it I'll grant. I do feel it's a misread of the spell though. Altering the enemies' attitude towards you would only sometimes help, and even then only if you also stop acting hostile in turn. The spell doesn't change what the enemies know about the situation at all after all: they know that you were fighting and why, so depending on that "why," their attitude may not matter. The spell could stop someone who was only fighting you because you made them angry for something like that I feel, but a bandit who wants to kill you and take your money? An assassin who was paid to kill you? More monstrous humanoids who see you as attacking their homes, or even as dinner? Not so much.