Shortest Black Pits game ever
lunar
Member Posts: 3,460
So I spent the good portion of an hour rolling up characters for Black Pits..A spiffy wild mage, a charismatic and agile swashbuckler, a fearsome halforc barbarian, an elven archer, a human monk, and a she-wolf shapeshifter. I rolled and rolled hundreds of times just to get the stats I like.
Finally we entered the pits, three tasloi came rushing in as usual. My super monk (STR 18, DEX 18, CON 16) could martial arts them to death, heck my shapeshifter could turn wolf and rip them apart easily. But what did I do? Ordered my wild mage to cast a sleep spell. Yeah, all great stories start with a wild mage casting the most basic of spells, right?
Needless to say, it wild surged into a fireball and it wounded all of my characters down to 1 HP. Game paused:badly wounded. I unpaused and all of them collapsed one by one, and the game ended, returning me to main screen. :facepalm:
Worse still, there was no auto save to load so my characters were gone for good. And I spent so much time rolling them!
Anyway, I wanted to share this with you and I wonder if anybody failed at the initial battle of Black Pits like I did? Even I am the first one to fall at that point, I think an auto-save at the start of the game could have been nice, to salvage neatly rolled up characters. ^^
Finally we entered the pits, three tasloi came rushing in as usual. My super monk (STR 18, DEX 18, CON 16) could martial arts them to death, heck my shapeshifter could turn wolf and rip them apart easily. But what did I do? Ordered my wild mage to cast a sleep spell. Yeah, all great stories start with a wild mage casting the most basic of spells, right?
Needless to say, it wild surged into a fireball and it wounded all of my characters down to 1 HP. Game paused:badly wounded. I unpaused and all of them collapsed one by one, and the game ended, returning me to main screen. :facepalm:
Worse still, there was no auto save to load so my characters were gone for good. And I spent so much time rolling them!
Anyway, I wanted to share this with you and I wonder if anybody failed at the initial battle of Black Pits like I did? Even I am the first one to fall at that point, I think an auto-save at the start of the game could have been nice, to salvage neatly rolled up characters. ^^
Post edited by lunar on
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Sometimes making the characters is the most fun, anyway. Right?
Umm, I could have saved them by exporting all of them when the game was auto paused, right? Then I could have imported them anew in a new game. I got excited thanks to that unexpected fireball and unpaused the game, only to watch them fall..at least the fireball got the taslois too. Small consolation, I know.
#1: Be liberal with your saves.
#2: First read rule 1
Honestly, the wild mage is overrated, and your experience illustrates why. In PnP there are no reloads. Why risk summoning a pit fiend every time you fling a magic missile? (The first time might be funny, but throwing away an awesome character on one roll of the dice can kill the laughs pretty quick.)
#1: Never stand within fifteen feet of a casting Wild Mage. At low levels they explode quickly and without warning.
#2: Don't be Reckless unless you've got a good reason to be. In fact, don't even cast unless it's going to win you a combat (this should be the basic rule of mages anyway). If you do Reckless, double rule 1 distance and have your wild mage parked a ways away.
#3: For routine spells like Fireball, consider a wand, mages are too important to waste spell slots on simple damage spells anyway.
#4: If you're going to need to cast a lot, or be Reckless at all, Chaos Shield first without fail.
#5: Whilst the added power will help most of the time, remember that you are riding a bell curve, and be prepared with contingency plans and tools for the off-chance that things go awry. Summon a Pit Fiend? Pop a Protection from Evil and run, run you fool. Your vital spell that the combat hinged on failed? Then your plan needed work anyway.
That's about it.
After killing the beast i killed Neera of course.
Only the poor craftsman blames his tools, as it were.
Suppose you had a six shooter, and you were asked to play Russian Roulette with it. Four chambers are empty. One contains 100,000 dollars. The last contains a bullet to your brain. If you die, neither you nor your heirs receive any money.
Only a fool would take those odds.
In a game of Baldur's Gate as a wild mage, you are going to fire that gun, again and again, over and over, hundreds if not more than a thousand times.
You WILL die. It is only a matter of time, if you are stupid enough to keep firing that gun.
Your "logic" would only work if there were only money involved, to win or lose, to become rich or go broke, and you could gamble to your heart's content, go earn some more money if you went bust, and come back to gamble again.
There is nothing "logical" about your argument.
Again, we are talking about DEATH.
Unless, of course, you have the ability to "reload" as many times as you want. and thus have unlimited "do-overs". That would be like going to Las Vegas with a bottomless bank account. Of course, if you had that, what would be the fun of gambling? What would you stand to gain?
Life doesn't work that way, and neither does a no-reload or minimal reload BG game.
So, the issue comes down to whether you care about reloading the game or not. Logic has little to do with it. It's just a matter of play preferences. In the case of the wild mage, it's a matter of comedy of errors. "Ha, ha, ha, that was really funny, I and everyone I care about are now dead, but so what, since it's just a video game, and I can reload as many times as I please. Let's see what funny way we all die next."
Puh-leeze.
But, to each their own, of course.
Here, you have a miracle drug.
This Miracle Drug instantly and permanently improves your performance without the limitations such specialisation normally brings, it gives you the ability to succeed in things you couldn't normally dream of, it lets you do things nobody else can do.
But there are side effects. It randomly causes fits, and almost always does if you're attempting the impossible. If one happens when you're not prepared for it, then you may die, or people may be hurt. You know all the possible outcomes that might happen with a fit, and most are benign, but some can be dangerous, and if one happens whilst you're doing something important, you may let everyone down. There are no guarantees in life, and about one perfomance in twenty causes a fit, but the longer you take the drug, the more often the benign effects will happen and the less often you'll suffer effects at all.
So what do you do? Do you cast aside the chance of ultimate power, or do you determine the possible effects, always accounting for the chance of failure or mishap, and work the odds to maximise the benefits in your favour as much as possible?
It's worth keeping one thing in mind:
There are no guaranteed death effects on the Wild Surge table.
In your Russian Roulette example, it's your choice whether you wear a helmet, or even to point the gun at your own head. You know there are bullets in there, but you do have the tools to prepare and handle that eventuality.
If you're not up to the forethought, planning and caution to mitigate risk to make Wild Magic work in your favour then yes, you'll probably get yourself killed, but just because you didn't avoid it, don't make the logical leap of assuming that you couldn't have avoided it.
Second of all, I will change my mind, agree with you, and compliment you on how right you are and how wrong I am, when you show me a screenshot-documented no-reload BG run as a wild mage, or with Neera in your party.
Nahal is the last resource of a desperate mage, never use it if you have alternatives.
I had the experience of playing a Wild Mage in PnP and he was one of the most powerful charaters I ever played. The fun of disassembling an enemy's spell and using his own magic against him was priceless
Let me quote my position about wild mages and wild magic from the Candlekeep Library thread:
Concerning the latter, four questions:
No reload due to wild surges, or no reloads for any reason? The first is simple, the second tends to get tedious if you happen to lose concentration for a second due to a screaming three month old kicking you in the shins.
Wild Mage Neera, Wild Mage Charname, both, can I run the PnP legal Wild Mage kitted multiclass or would you require me to snooze through the game single classed?
Solo or is partying fine?
Just the main plot, or do you want me to run through Durlags, Aec'Letec and Werewolf Island too?
2) Fun =/= Reliable. Yes, watching cows fall from the sky can be fun, but you won't think like that when you desperately need a dispel or a haste.
3) When you have to cast protection from evil/petrification and a bunch of other protective spells just so your mage can safely cast a magic missile, you know there is something wrong with that class. (Btw, what if the Wild Mage is your only caster? Who is gonna cast those protective spells? Ahhhh thought so...)
For Wildshield, what does absorbing a spell do? Restore memorized spells of equal level or just negate the effect?
For Spellshape, what does "without forgetting it" mean?
Wildstrike the lower results in the wild surge table are usually the worst for the caster. The spell forces an automatic wild surge roll with the cater's level being subtracted from the roll.
Wildshield completely negates an effect. For area spells it only negates if the effect is centered on the caster.
Wildshape allows the caster to destroy an incoming spell and use that energy to cast one of his own spells without it being lost from his memorized list.
There were many other nice spells in PnP. If anyone is interested I can post some.
Also an important aspect of the wild mage that was not implemented is that they had a chance to determine the results of any random magic item, such as an wand of wonders or deck of many things.
At the same time, you are looking at a 5% x 15% chance of Cow summoning, fireball or other spell that drastically improves the magic missile and the rest of the 33% chance of something about equal or slightly better (but hard to quantify compared to direct damage) of happening.
The chance of the wild surge being retargeted to you, and then being surged into a Petrification effect are 5% x ~3% x 1% x 1%, with a further 5% chance of your not passing the save. This is less than the chance that five of your enemies simultaneously critting your caster in a single combat round.
Rest assured you are unlikely to require a Protection from Petrification when casting a magic missile, and fairly unlikely to require it whilst casting Protection from Petrification.
Meh, maybe i just hate Wild Mages because i was clearing Durlag's tower and suddenly i noticed half my gold was lost. I immediately looked at Neera... and sent her into the Crushing-walls trap.