Matthew Supert

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.

If you are not in the tabletop gaming world, you may not have heard about the controversy surrounding Dungeons & Dragons for the past couple of weeks. In short, Hasbro, who owns Wizards of the Coast (WOTC), who make D&D had leaked an update to their gaming license that would've imposted some severe restrictions upon content creators, 3rd party publishers and pretty much anyone who did anything creative within the D&D world. What is/was known as the Open Gaming License 1.0a (OGL) has been around for around 20 years. This licenses allows content creators to create content in and around D&D without imposing upon WOTC's copyright or trademark. For example, you wouldn't be able to call your book a D&D book, but you could say something along the lines of "it is 5e compatible and has these new monsters I created". 

This all got into a big mess when WOTC had their new OGL leaked. There were many problems with it, but most notably it appeared to revoke the previous license, implied that WOTC could claim the rights to creator's work and required creators making more than $750,000 annually to pay ~25% royalty. It was a shit show to put it mildly. 

Gizmodo broke the story and it put the fandom into a maelstrom as WOTC failed to repond. When they finally did, nearly two weeks later,  the community was not pleased. 

As result, multiple companies in the TTRPG industry have now struck out on their own to avoid any potential issues like this in the future. The backlash to WOTC has been so strong and so swift that they have essentially now created more competition in the market against themselves. Kobold Press has announced that they are making their own RPG system, code named Project Black Flag, which will likely be a 5e compatible system (aka 5.5). MCDM productions announced their new system and Paizo has announced they are leading and effort with multiple other publishers to create a truly open gaming license to be called ORC that can be applied to any gaming license. 

On top of that the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Cory Doctrow have chimed in with numerous other sites detailing how the original OGL was not even needed and how it even restricted some rights which might be inherent. 

In the end it has been quite a disaster. 

At this point I don't intend to stop playing D&D, but I think this might be an opportune time for our group to take a look at some other RPG systems and try those out for 2023. Paizo has put many of their books one sale this week to encourage some different play. 

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While folding laundry this morning I had a minor epiphany that subsequently lead to a resigned sigh. (The picture by the way doesn't really have anything to do with this post beyond the observation that the ends of this towel have apparently shrunk). For those that know me, you know that I absolutely dread folding the laundry. It is like the bane of my existence and despite all that I found myself folding laundry this morning quite contently, in addition to doing some other minor house chores. 

For the past week I have been off work on holiday and despite the sort of rush of the holiday and family, and friends, I mentally finally have had a chance to sort of catch up with the rest of my life. I even had a chance to enjoy some Netflix, even work on some music. The whole "Fight or Flight" rush of my life had an opportunity to just simmer down and I didn't feel like I had a mountain of horses and other personal items backing up, or at least I didn't feel like I had an urgency to get those things done before the week ended. And I think because of that I was able to fold some laundry today, for an hour or so and not feel any stress about it at all. I didn't have anything else specifically on my list that needed to get done. 

With the end of the holiday looming and work coming back up tomorrow though I can feel the sense of anxiety already begin to creep into the back of my mind. Right off the bat I have a meeting tomorrow morning to kick the year off. 

So my latest ADHD obsession right now is watches. I've pretty much always worn a watch in some fashion or another all the way back to high school, may be even junior high. Nothing fancy. A Fossil typically. The most recent iteration happens to be an Apple Watch, which I have had for maybe four years now. I am noticing though that I am not really utilizing all that many smart features on it and it is basically a fancy heart rate monitor. Now, don't get me wrong. I still love that and being able to track all my health data all the time is fascinating, but I feel like I want to start to get into the watch game a bit more. 

James Bond was always a favorite character growing up and of course he has quite the watch game. It wasn't until last year that I realized how expensive some watches are though. Omega has always been a brand that seems to have caught my eye, but it wasn't until this past fall when I decided to look up how much an Omega Speedster costs. It is somewhere around $4,000, which if I am being honest is incomprehensibly expensive. I don't think I can justify that much money on a watch, but I suppose I would be willing to pay a few hundred dollars for one. After all I paid ~$350 for my Apple Watch. 

Citizen Eco-Drive Titanium

The Citizen Eco-Drive Super Titanium has caught my eye. I think in general any watch that doesn't require a battery seems appealing as I can just sort of pop it on and go. The titanium color matches my wedding ring too and I think the style of this watch has a nice look that can be dressed up or dressed down. 

Timex North Field Post Solar

Timex really catches my eye as well, especially their field watches. The Field Post Solar has that nice rugged look which I really like with the fabric band. Although I can't say that I really like how it loops. Perhaps the leather band would be the best way to go, and I have never owned a leather banded watch. It seems like it has a nice simple and clean look. 

There are a few others that catch my eye as well. Some are dreams and some are something perhaps worth looking at more closely. 

• Tissot Gentlemen Powermatic
• Jack Mason Solar
• Omega Speedmaster

I have never been a fan of point buy system for D&D stats. I feel it lends itself a bit too much leeway for those people who are obsessed with building the "perfect" character build. I am not saying it is wrong, just I like the idea of D&D having a bit of randomness in everything it does to make the outcomes exciting and unpredictable. Typically I use the Standard Array system, but that admittingly gets pretty boring. There is of course the standard roll and drop method too, where you roll 4d6 dice, and drop the lowest number. You do that six times and add up your scores to get your character's scores. That works fairly well, but it can really skew someone's stats if they end up with even two very high or very poor scores. 

I have seen this "TicTacToe" method online which I sort of like, which should give people an option to not feel "locked in" if their roll and drop doesn't go their way. 

TrueAchievements.com has a cool little summary of a users' past decade on Xbox. It is a cool little insight into my past decade playing Xbox. I am a bit surprised that I have been playing for ten years on Xbox to be honest. I actually think I picked up my 360 back around 2009, and that data is just this list. 

So take a look at this cool little infographic. 

Megan and I went to a great concert last night to see Heilung. Heilung is a sort of folk Scandinavian pagan band. I discovered them on Youtube about a year ago by accident. They were somehow recommended to me through Youtube's recommendation system, and I stumbled into watching an entire concert by them. 

They are doing their first US tour right now and Megan and I jumped at the chance to see the show. We thankfully got tickets and they sold out very quickly. So fast in fact that the show changed venues from the Vic to the Riviera Theatre. 

So the show was a 7:30 show and Megan and thought we would get there early, around 6:00 to get in line. Little did we know, the line extended around the block on three sides. Thankfully we got in pretty early and Megan grabbed some fantastic seats in the balcony. 

I feel like this year was an "off" year for books. Looking back on the year, I don't feel like I was really excited for anything that I read. The vast majority of the books I read this year were in audiobook form. Sabriel was perhaps the book that I enjoyed the most this year, surprising me in how simple and how good it was. It is basically a folklore fairytale that was just a pure and enjoyable read. 

As part of our book club at work (which I think has died now), I read quite a bit of other novels including The Alice Network and A Gentleman in Moscow. Those books were good, but I never was truly captured by them. They served their purpose as book club reads to broaden my horizon, because they certainly were not books I would have read otherwise, but I can't say I was truly drawn into either of them. 

I started reading the Dervish House a few weeks ago, a book that has been sitting on my Kindle for years now, and it unfortunately did not spark my interest in reading. I have slogged through on to the second chapter and it unfortunately just seems a bit too heavy of a book for me right now. I think I will have to come back that that one. 

The Witcher on Netflix right now has in fact sparked my interest in reading again. I have been devouring that show this past holiday week and it has spurred me to get back into the books. I loved the Last Wish, the first book in the series and this show as sparked me to not only go back and read the books, but to also go and finish the Witcher 3 video game.  

Megan and I recently came across a cool app that we are using to keep track and manage our chores and other tasks around the house. I have been struggling for a while now on divvying up household tasks. I have admiringly been frustrated as I feel like I am spending my days off doing more house chores than Megan. 

I have always used Omnifocus for my own task planning and project management. While I have used it for my own chores and errands as well, it seems to be a bit overkill for just managing chores around the house. It also unfortunately does not have a  good way to share tasks with other people in a shared in environment, and it is pretty expensive for an iOS app. 

After some searching online a few days ago I came upon the OurHome app, which seems like it perfectly fits the bill. It is originally designed for families to assign chores to kids, but if you read the reviews online it appears that there are a lot of couples using it to just manage their household. They even have a special FAQ section for that. 

OurHome  has the basic "to do" list and tasks list for chores, which is what we are using it for right now, but also has some really cool features that expand upon that that make it perfect for chores and house tasks. 

The app features a really nice "autofill" feature that will suggest different types of chores. You can also peruse their "suggestions list" for various household tasks that you need to get done. You can also assign tasks, setup reoccurring schedules and more. One really great feature is that you can have tasks that are setup to "always be available" everyday. Something simple, like making the bed is available once and can be done by whomever gets to it first. It is very quick to make a task, assign it to yourself, spouse of leave it open for anyone to do and then just move on. 

It follows the GTD metholdogy that i like to use whereas you need to get something out of your head as soon as you think of it, otherwise it'll be forgotten or take up previous headspace. 

One other thing that I like about the app is you can assign reward points for tasks as they are done. It defaults to a number of points associated with how long it takes to complete a tasks. 15 minutes = 15 points. This is a feature primarily aimed for kids, as they complete their chores, they accuse points which they can then cash back in to mom and dad for rewards, like a allowance, a trip to the movies or something. 

I don't quite know what we are going to do with this yet, but Megan and I both think it will be fun to setup some sort of rewards for each other that we can cash in. 

There is also a calendar feature for shared events, a grocery list and a message center for group chats. All, very cool features, but I'm not quite sure if we will end up using those. Time will tell I suppose.