Book Review: With Fire and Sword

With Fire and Sword by Henryk Sienkiewicz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is going to be a very hard book to review.
I very much enjoyed this book, but if I am being honest it was a VERY long read. Despite the length this is going into the list as one of my favorite books, and deserves to be up there with Romance of the Three Kingdoms as one of the all time classics.

I did a bit of Wikipedia research while reading it and as far as I can tell, the supporting characters were all real people during the events of the Cossack rebellion.

What I found so fascinating about this book is that it read both as a historical fiction, but also as a historical fantasy. There are multiple passages and scenes where the characters talk about their fear of witches, vampires, and other creatures of the night. At no point are any of these really portrayed as being real. They sort of exist as commonly held superstitions that remained persistent in both the character's and reader's peripheral vision. I found the inclusion of these superstitions both to raise the tension in a scene while acknowledging that weren't actually going to show up. Just their possibility added to a scene like MSG adds that "something" to a dish.

The book also reads easily despite its age. I read the Jeremiah Curtin translation from Standardebooks.org, which is also the Project Gutenberg version. It was very readable translation and a very nicely formatted book. I will caution though that despite the general ease in readability, the names are going to give most people some difficulty. The book does include a pronunciation guide in the back, but if you just roll with the pronunciations as you need to for your own head, you'll be just fine.

I would highly recommend this for anyone who likes historical fiction, military fiction. Even fans of fantasy will be able to get into this as the structure and writing could go right up there with any fantasy book you've read.

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Videogaming: Baldur's Gate 3 is Infuriating

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 for the past month or so, since it came out on the Xbox. People have been praising this game since August so I was pretty excited to get into the game. I am a huge D&D and TTRPG fan afterall, so the prospect of bringing that to a videogame seemed pretty exciting.

I’ve just hit Act 3 this past week and I think I am about 60-70 hours in. If I am being honest, I dont think I like this game very much and it almost entirely boils down to the combat.

But before we really get into that, let’s talk about some other things in the game that just don’t seem to connect with me. The game is very heavility influenced by the actual D&D roleplay mechanic system. Unforuntely, that brings all of the similar trappings that come with playing D&D, but without the benefit of having the ability to get contextual information or clarification form your dungeon master. Roleplay is probably my favorite part of D&D and Baldur’s Gate on the whoile does a pretty decent job of this. However, it obfuscates the skill checks and rolls in most roleplay or social situations. I very often will find myself in a conversation which results in a roll, but I have no way to know which character may be most appropriate for the situation or context. Furthermore, when a roll like Persuasion is required I have no idea what the stat for the chracter that I have select is. If the game didn’t explicitly have a dice roll in these situations, I probably wouldn’t care, but if it is going to show me that actual roll, every…single…time at least let me see what my modifier is before I select that as a dialog option.

Contextual clues are the biggest frustration I have with this game. There have been way too many situations where I am walking around the world where combat will just suddenly start, or worse yet, I think it will, and it doesn’t resulting in a conversation that has to preempt combat. Just today I wrestled with a combat scenario against some Githyanki in a hidden library. I must’ve run this combat 6-7 times. After getting obliterated the first time I tried to sneak and get surprise on the enemy for an attack. every single time I would get a spell off and then the conversation would trigger and then waste the concentrate or spell I just cast. I had a nearly identical level of frustration with the combat that occured at the entrance of the Moonrise Towers in Act 2.

I basically had to “cheese” the combat to get an upper hand due to the action economy. Almost every combat has significantly more combatants than your party.

Let’s continue our conversation though on that Githyanki fight and the way it was structured. There were two portals on the sides of the room, summoning in more Githyanki each round. Those portals were placed just sor perfectly to be out of reach of any of my spells like Fireball, etc. This is frustrating game design, because it is almost impossible to know that those exist until you fail at a first attempt of combat. There was no way going into that room to know how to position my characters and accommodate for that specific setup. So many of the combat encounters have this same sort of thing and it is just driving me away from wanting to continue to play.