Tbf there’s a good chance that story was massively exaggerated and overblown. Like, supposedly they didn’t threaten him at all, and he willingly gave them the cards in exchange for something else. They were after whoever leaked the cards from their supply chain.
I don't know the story, but if it's something that wasn't supposed to be released, it's pretty much definitely stolen property. You're not entitled to keep stolen property because you think it's cool, and sending PIs to recover stolen property instead of the police is the nice route.
Showing property that belongs to someone else online and can't be acquired legitimately is absolutely grounds for an actual police search warrant.
sending PIs to recover stolen property instead of the police is the nice route.
Exactly. However being in possession of stolen property is not itself a crime, you just don’t have any right to keep it. If you paid for it, then your claim is against whoever you paid.
They could have got the police to reclaim the stolen property, however perhaps that might not have been as effective for them in investigating the leak. In any case, the stories about the Pinkertons threatening him might not be true, and he’d have every right to refuse them entry or even to speak to them. The fact that he did suggests he willingly complied.
Knowingly possessing stolen goods is a crime, however that law is about addressing the trade of stolen goods, ie fencing. Merely possessing the goods is unlikely to attract a criminal charge, let alone a conviction with jail time, as it will usually be impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the buyer knew the goods were stolen. A reasonable person might think it is likely that they were stolen but would not know for sure.
Like I say, they were after the person who leaked it from the supply chain. If the police had been involved, they too would have been interested in the leaker, not the one-time buyer.
Edit: It can also vary by jurisdiction. Looking into it, there’s an interesting bit in the wiki for this in the UK section, where they distinguish between suspicion, belief and knowledge:
A person handles stolen goods if (otherwise than in the course of stealing), knowing or believing them to be stolen goods he dishonestly receives the goods
Belief … is something short of knowledge. It may be said to be the state of mind of a person who says to himself, “I cannot say I know for certain that these goods are stolen, but there can be no other reasonable conclusion in the light of all the circumstances, in the light of all that I have heard and seen.”
However I don’t think the US makes this distinction, as the US version of the law does not include “belief”.
It's generally hard to prosecute because there are plausible other explanations for intent. You don't have any way of knowing a generic laptop is stolen vs used.
Having a unique item from a company you make money covering, that wasn't ever sold legitimately and you didn't acquire from any legitimate source, is absolutely something that could get to trial at minimum, if the company is pushing the DA to do so. You'd end up having to have a lawyer convince a jury that "I didn't know" is believable.
The fact that they chose to give the streamer a pass for cooperating doesn't mean that they couldn't have perfectly reasonably or successfully pursued charges. Choosing not to do so is more evidence of them choosing the nice way.
You probably didn’t see my edit, which is pretty relevant :o)
US law requires knowledge of the goods being stolen, not mere belief. You don’t have to convince the jury you didn’t know, the prosecution has to convince the jury you did. That’s a very high bar to meet, and while it could go to trial it almost certainly wouldn’t, not unless they had solid evidence of his knowledge (eg, if he said they were stolen on his stream).
The fact that they chose to go through the Pinkertons more likely points to the fact that they knew they wouldn’t have charges thrown about if they involved the police. The buyer would have been less likely to cooperate.
The US tends to use the reasonable person standard. If a reasonable person, with the information you have, would know that it's stolen, you knowingly possessed stolen goods.
Something that doesn't exist through legitimate channels, especially for a subject you portray yourself as knowledgeable of, is enough. You have to cast reasonable doubt with a plausible alternative explanation.
You’re presenting generalised speculation as if what you’re saying is certain. It would be nice if you could provide something that would back up your claim, like a similar case with a one-time buyer that proceeded to trial.
A reasonable person would not necessarily know the goods were stolen, even if they had knowledge of the industry. All the buyer would likely need to say is something like “the seller convinced me that this was an early release for select reviewers”, and the only way to counter that would be for the prosecution to provide actual evidence proving their knowledge of the theft. “Legitimate channels” is not confined to retail.
It is completely overblown, and most people seem to be picturing the people from Red Dead Redemption and not a dead brand name that a Swedish security company bought to do collections under. Yes if you have sensitive possessions of a company they will send someone to get it, not trust you to mail it back to them.
The context that this was to prevent an NDA and happened within a month of someone else breaching an NDA with a leak that had a handful of noisy people declaring D&D dead is also pretty important, but never mentioned. It would never have even been a story without that context.
They said they were going to detain him and seize all of his cards, and make him prove he owns any of them.
That's a huge disruption to his life and business.
It wouldn't take a genius to be polite enough to be invited inside to talk about stuff, and slowly ramp up the severity enough to keep a guy listening and minimise confrontation.
That is a great attitude towards everything DnD stands for, don’t lose it. Theres been a great deal of controversy this year, because the executives at wotc/hasbro believe that owning a popular brand like DnD means they’re entitled to shitloads of money, so they’re attempting to turn it into a cash cow, completely alienating the long standing community
Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) was originally incorporated by Gary Gygax in 1973. It went bankrupt and got bought out by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) in 1997. That purchase gave us D&D 3.0 and the original OGL, which was intended to encourage third-party publications of a game set WotC wasn’t overly confident in. This, after a decade of aggressive litigation by TSR’s VP Lorraine Williams who’d engineered Gygax’s ouster from the firm.
Hasbro acquired WotC two years later, in 1999, but was generally apathetic towards its administration outside of it being another revenue source. So WotC ran more-or-less independently until 2020 when the CEO noted on an earnings call that WotC was something like 40% of the company’s overall revenue. This triggered a sizable realignment of focus onto the various WotC brands (Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon card games being two other big players).
Now we’re seeing a much more traditional corporate refocusing on the WotC product line (movies and cross-promotions), a return to aggressive litigation against competitors, and a sharp increase in the price of WotC products to justify the increased expenses.
Hasbro and WOTC are rotten to the core and, unfortunately, own D&D among other headline franchises you’d probably be familiar with.
Larian makes their own games and made BG3 after Hasbro was impressed with how well Divinity: Original Sin 2 turned out (which, imo has the best combat system of their games so far). That said, Larian really rounded out the dialog, conversations, and non-battle options in BG3. I hope they take that to their next title, preferably organically developed without Hasbro/WoTC.
I’m pretty sure hasbro/wotc had nothing to say in the development beyond ip related stuff. With dos1 larian moved away from editors to self-product all their games since.
I love abusing game mechanics and got the idea after seeing that video of using stacked crates to throw stuff (damage is based on distance thrown or something)
It reminds me a lot of what was commonly done to fuck around in early physics games, I remember doing stacking stuff like this as a kid in Ultima VII for example.
“This is really a disaster situation for us given all we’ve invested in content across studios at our GP [Game Pass] content fund,” ... “We set a very high bar in 2021 on quality and pacing of content which was awesome to see,” he continued. “But to come off of that year with no big exclusives launching in 2022 is a portfolio planning miss that we can’t afford. If we need to delay launches (understanding there is a financial impact of that) to create more regular beats for us we need to do that. We have to all understand that the situation we are in now is a failure of our planning and production execution.”
My corporate speak is a little rusty, but if I understand the gravity of this statement correctly, is Spencer implying that GamePass is a house of cards that is only supported by the regular timing of new exclusive releases? It seems like that's a very risky business model then, and the consequences of GamePass folding would be consumers lose access to a truly massive number of games. This statement would basically make me lose a ton of confidence in the service, and I'd be looking to take my library (and money) elsewhere.
The way I would perceive it is that mega-hjts in games are very profitable. A hit sells like 200k-300k at launch. But from time to time, a game hits the cultural zeitgeist and can 3x that. Those are you’re BOTWs and such.
Platforms bank on having those because they are the big bang for their buck. In Microsoft case, an exclusive like that would move a lot of gp subs. I think that is the idea behind making starfield elusive, and then getting rid of the reduced price trial.
So when people are busy playing BG3, and then ign gives starfield a 7, and people decide its not worth dropping everything to go and play, it can really mess up a company’s tire venue projections. Poor babies.
It’s no secret that they are “hemorrhaging” money into gamepass just to be competitive. Would have a tough time finding the article, but there was something about them doing it JUST to keep some games out of the hands of other companies.
That’s just how most streaming services work. You need the constant easy to make junk to keep people in, but it’s the big hits that get people to subscribe for the first time or come back.
I’ve found most RPG / CRPG games have really good subreddits. Most of time when I’ve needed to look up how a spell interaction works or how XYZ operations, the top search will usually lead back to Reddit (which is kinda a shame given how shithouse Reddit is now)
I think it is somewhat logical as there is literally an entire massive genre of “Japanese RPG.”
There absolutely is something suggesting that: precedent. Though it could be Czech RPGs, Columbian RPGs, Cuban RPGs, or Canadian RPGs. Though Chinese RPGs would be more likely given the game Dev industry there and population.
Also the fact that outside of the tabletop community, nobody calls video game RPGs CRPGs.
The term CRPG is very popular, but it means something different than just RPG video game. Starfield is not a “CRPG” for example. Baldur’s Gate (all of them) are. It’s a conversion of table top RPG style to computers. If it’s supposed to reasonably closely emulate a TTRPG in video game format, it’s a CRPG.
My mind just did the same association even though I knew the meaning.
If you remember JRPG has a J for Japan, it’s easy for your brain to go with C stands for Chinese, even if that doesn’t make sense when you really think about it.
Also, side note, just chill out with the conspiracy theories. And actually give the guy the proper explanation of what the term stands for like the comment next to yours.
It’s not really “interesting”? The first time I saw the term, that’s what I wondered if it might be, because of “JRPG” and all the games that had been coming out of China recently.
Ah, but give him all your stuff and you'll experience exciting interactions like discussing his cat over a date you didn't know you were on, and understanding exactly how badly you smell and how much he openly enjoys that! He's every incel's dream husbando!
And then he goes like “I see you found someone else. Who am I to stand in the way?” after I make it official with the person I’m actually trying to get with.
It’s like my man, we’re homies atbest. I shot you down every time, I made it clear I was into Shadowheart to others with you standing right there…what do you mean “I am no longer the cause of the twinkle in your eyes”? I mean, you’re my bro and I care about you, but not like that lol
I disagree with some of their assessment. Specifically the point that you really aren’t given enough information to weigh out which decisions you go with and that is something problematic. Unknowns are pretty inherent with Dungeons and Dragons. In tabletop, you typically don’t know what the outcome is going to be. You can only veer towards decisions you think will be a net positive and then hope you make your rolls.
With a couple of exceptions, no decision you make is really game over for you. It just changes how the story unfolds.
Yeah, I agreed with the headline, hoping to see some discussion about how the game doesn’t have a finished evil route and how bugs or failures of logic can cause the game to unfold in ways that don’t actually make a lot of sense. Instead, we have this purist “save-scumming is bad” perspective hiding behind a sense of academic authority.
I do think the narrative really breaks down in act 3. I do think the game fails to give your actions in the first two acts weight. Murder-hoboing your way to Baldur’s Gate, or consuming a shit-ton of theoretically inherently evil tadpoles never gets in the way of you simply defeating the grand evil at the end of the game and making all your previous decisions inconsequential, and I think that’s a failure of the game Baldur’s Gate 3 was intended to be. In this way, I do think the game undermines itself; you can’t both set out to be a grand adventure where all of your decisions are supposed to shape you and your world, and refuse to let the players actions result in actual consequences. But it doesn’t come from inconsistency in dialogue or a perceived lack of information.
Hell, the authors whole argument regarding the failures of the combat system doesn’t even hold water. Perhaps the most egregious case of having a “correct” method of winning a fight is the golem at the forge in the Underdark, and nothing stooped me from killing that boss, on tactician difficulty, using strictly my evergreen tools. The achievement popping up and telling me that I failed to realize I could use the giant hammer in the center of the forge to functionally skip the fight is the only reason I knew I did it “wrong”, and in part thanks to the achievement, I felt accomplished in doing so. I genuinely don’t think there’s any moment in the game that decidedly punishes you for trying to rely on your bread and butter combat tactics, beyond increasing the challenge presented by an encounter while still keeping it very winnable.
Analyzing whether Baldur’s Gate 3 is a “good” or “bad” game, definitively, is just not a simple concept, even within the confines of the author’s method. Player action has a massive impact on whether they find success or failure in combat, puzzle-solving, exploration and individual story-beat/dialogue. There are win and loss conditions, there are tensions created in getting to those outcomes, and by-and-large, players have the tools and knowledge at their disposal to reach the outcome they want while avoiding others. In a “bigger picture” sense, I would argue that some of these qualities break down; decisions fail to have meaning as you approach the end of the game, which is a problem that could reasonably contribute to one calling it a “bad game”, ie player action failing to determine outcome. If one wanted to focus on that perpsective, a reasonable argument could be made, but at best we’re cherry picking and giving weight to one quality that matters immensely to some observers and less to others. So is it a perfect game? An immaculate one? Absolutely not; it fails to do one of the major things it set out to do. Is it a bad game? Absolutely not. It is, by all means, good, as a game, even under the terms the author of this article sets.
I’m not very far into BG and never have played tabletop DnD, but it has shown me how much “on rails” and handholding there is in many open world RPG games. Currently I have multiple ways of fulfilling my main mission and no idea which is better or right. It’s a circumstance I’ve never seen in another game and did catch me off guard a bit at first and was maybe slightly frustrating, as I want to make the right choices, but I thought of how it would play out in a tabletop game where the players really do not know and see it more like a choose your own adventure now.
I think a very good distinction is the open-worldness of Elder Scrolls. When you have a virtual map spanning hundreds of acres, all of which you can visit, means the content gets thinned out and walking/climbing/riding around turns into a grind. Not every corner of BG3 has some amazing secret stowed away but I can’t think of any place I’ve visited so far that felt like a waste of my time.
You wake up, Durge style, and look around. Don’t remember your name. No idea what you are. All you know is that you’ve been marked by infernal runes, engraved into your skin.
You search high and low and after much effort, and months of travel, you eventually stumble across a demon who is willing to trade a favor. In exchange for you making him a sandwich (with the crusts cut off), he will translate these hellish symbols.
“Shoulder.”
“W… what?”
“It means shoulder.”
“What the hells does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m not the one who got the tattoo. I’m an infernal being not a psychic.”
“But… why the fuck would I get tattoo of shoulder? It makes no sense!”
“In case you forgot?”
“Bruh. If I forget what my fucking limbs are called I’m pretty sure I have other matters that are going to be more pressing.”
“Mmmike mmmwat?”
“Mother didn’t teach you any manners?”
(Devil just chews, staring you in the eyes)
“Oh yeah. Of course. Well, wanna try that again?”
(big swallow) “What other matters would be more pressing than discovering the names of your various body parts?”
“Like wh… forget it. Okay. Well now what am I suppose to do.”
“I dunno. Did you add mustard to this?”
“Yeah, it’s a little extra zing. I mean I revolved my whole new personality around discovering this. I thought it would lead me to the secrets of my existence. Of who I was. Of what I went through. Of why I ended up here in the first place!”
“Huh. Well you should have made a deal for that.”
“Fucking what.”
“Well dude, I’m a devil. While I may not be a psychic, I can hook you up with one pretty easily.”
“… Oh my sweet and sour Bahamut, what do you want?”
It doesn’t have to mean anything as long as it looks cool. I’m gonna get me a tattoo that says “Japanese tattoo” in Japanese, would probably look like this: 日本のタトゥー
I love BG3 to death. But I also don’t want Larian to become the next EA under the yoke of some Hasbro/WoTC for BG4/5/6/7. I hope they continue to make their own games and forge their own path, with little to no reliance on megacorps. Their Divinity series is a treasure in it’s own right, and they said their next small projects are getting them excited.
“this game is a gold mine! It’s being underutilised at the moment, let’s improve the profitability with some in-game purchasable items and a subscription for bonus content”
Steam could absolutely tamp down on this, by changing early access refund policy to be more restrictive.
Early access money should not be guaranteed. If someone wants a refund outside of the two hour or whatever game time they should get most of their money back. The timer should also reset at release, and players get a full refund if the gameplay isn't what was promised.
Mage hand is the kind of spell that is incredibly useful and dynamic in actual ttrpgs, and incredibly difficult to design around in a video game.
A GM is going to consider the distance and weight limits of the spell, and determine of it makes sense of not. If you stole The One Ring from Frodo, for example, the GM can pivot and make the world react to that.
The video game has to program all possible uses of the spell while also trying to keep a prewritten story on track. If you steal The One Ring from frodo, the game would have to reinvent the plot dynamically, which isn’t really possible. The end result is that they have to severely limit the uses of Mage Hand.
Because Mage Hand is so potentially chaotic, it can’t be as useful as it would seem. The same would go for the spells Fly and Invisibility. Imagine the Black Gate of Mordor. If there was a level 6 wizard, they could use fly + invisibility to get everyone safely over the wall. Now, sure, it would take a while waiting for spell slots, but this is supposed to be the most fortified pass in the entire world. Even GMs have problems with this. Suddenly every remotely secure area needs a mage on staff detecting intruders, or permanent enchantments. At that point, Fly might as well not exist.
Edit: I forgot that fly and invisibility both require concentration. Oops. Still, now you only need a level 6 mage and a level 4 mage, which is still pretty easy to pull off.
I somewhat disagree with you overall, because almost all magic have countermeasures. Invisibility for example is good to bypass humanoid, but you still need to be stealthy, because creatures with good ear or smell don’t care about seeing you. And the time constraints is the biggest limit.
Sure, you can use spellslots, but you only have so many of them, and if you take a day to recover them, evil has its plans going forth too. Which city will you sacrifice to Sauron while you sleep to recover your spellslots?
Usually spells are far less potent than people think they are. But it’s hard to be accustomed to them to easily prepare or think about all the countermeasures. It’s not hard usually though. A dog will do a lot against any kind of infiltration for example. And there are far worse creatures than that.
Another note is that Gandalf is only a tier3 sorcerer. Between lvl11 and 16. And you can see how the character is treated in the story: he has the eye of Sauron on him, unlike the hobbit.
Ironically Larian is doing far better for countermeasures and time pressure than most dm I feel.
For mage hand, it’s a programming constraint I feel. Summons don’t have inventory you can access, so it’s easier to prevent you from stealing with the hand than having players lose items because they pick them with the hand. It’s a limitation of the game engine.
You’re right that you can come up with pretty good ways to challenge players with certain spells. The problem is that it can be pretty difficult to do on the fly. Assuming the party goes in a direction you haven’t really prepped for, they’re are a lot of abilities that can make it trivial if you forget about them.
There’s a really big, tedious, ongoing discussion on exactly how overrated 5e D&D is and what type of game it wants to be, but it’s fair to say the system has a lot of small things that trivialize challenges. Goodberry means you never have to worry about food ever again. Fly means physical distance is not much of a problem. Pass without trace means stealth will almost always work. Leomunds tiny but means sleeping is almost always safe.
All of these examples can be fixed. Goblins can stack a bunch of rocks on leomunds hut for example. The problem is that it gets repetitive and forced to counter everything all the time.
I agree though that the developers have done a really good job trying to handle all the complexity of turning a tabletop RPG into a video game.
Ok, second part is to take a step back, and instead of trying to counter the players, just make the world a living one. Have the enemies be smart. Think in terms of factions and resources instead of individuals and encounters.
Even the wildest monsters can be smart predators, not because they’re smart, but because they’re predators.
Another question you’re bringing is wilderness survival. With this, you’re trying to make dnd 5e something it absolutely isn’t: a survival game. Survival in dnd is abstract and easy up to lvl5. After that, it’s not supposed to be a difficult, which is why you have spells like create food and water.
But these spells are not free. A party with this spell and leomund’s tiny hut means two spellcasters are down one spell when the day begin. At level5 that means only 1 of the important lvl3 spells. And if they can’t cast it, they can’t rest, because I doubt they will have provisions and camp if they rely on this. And if they don’t have comfortable enough rest or no ration, they can’t benefit from a long rest.
Time is usually the resource you need to constrain. For each day that passes, the vilain should have something going. This way the players will have to manage their rest properly.
Back to the resources of the enemies. A big mistake many seem to do is to give the monopoly of magic to the players. But it is ridiculous to do it. Enemies should have available magic one way or another. No an infinite supply of it, but they would have some. How many sorcerers, warlocks and clerics in a colony of goblins? Certainly quite some. Below lvl5 is apprentice level. Lvl5 to 9 is expert level. You can have a bunch of apprentices and a handful of experts in a colony. And then dispel magic, counterspell and everything is also available to you, the dm.
Before tier3, you have easy solutions for each and any trick a spellcaster can come up with. If they use their spells for utility, they will very quickly run out of them, and they won’t have them for combat.
Usually people who prefer PF2 will have a bias against 5e balance. It’s a bias because both games have different philosophies about it. It’s perfectly valid to hate one and love the other, or the opposite. PF2 is more about the encounter and the tactic. 5e is more about strategy and finding ways around the obstacles.
True, still difficult to pull off, both spells have vsm components. But obstacles are put there to be overcome, and your plan is as good as any, lets give it a go 😉
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