So in the past I've highlighted how Lily Orchard has no actual D&D experience; how everything she knows comes from the early Baldur's Gate games. I've never really gone into the specifics of why that matters, though. It feels like a disservice to assume that it's self evident; after all, the people most likely to eat up Lily's D&D takes are those who don't have much D&D experience themselves. With that in mind, let's talk about why Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 are bad substitutes for D&D.
Of course, there's all the social elements; BG1/2 are single player experiences, D&D is a collaborative game. BG1/2 are pre-set adventures with strict resolutions to every conflict, while D&D puzzles are invariably more freeform in their solutions. BG1/2 lets you save your game before tricky fights, meaning even the riskiest fight isn't half as devastating as the same fight would be in a tabletop game.
I could go on, but today we're going to focus on something else entirely. Today, we're looking at one of the ways BG1/2 completely misrepresents its progenitor game, and it's something that comes up before you even start your quest:
Baldur's Gate is lying to you
(at least, about how it generates your ability scores)
So, cliff notes; when you play D&D, you make a character, and that character is defined by their race (or heritage, in newer editions), their class (or classes), and their ability scores. Ability scores can be generated in a number of ways, but Lily prefers the harshest method; 3d6 in order.
Why? According to her, it reduces minmaxing. Most likely she prefers it because that's how Baldur's Gate generates abilities:
Excerpt from the Baldur's Gate game manual
Or at least, that's how the manual says abilities are generated. If that were true, then I wouldn't be making this post, but before that, let's run through the obvious caveats:
The Ability Score page in Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition
You can reroll your stats as many times as you like without penalty. Each reroll takes only the click of a button, so you can go through hundreds of randomly generated stats in the span of a minute, before settling on ones you like.
Secondly, you can trade points between ability scores on a one-for-one basis. Did you roll two 13s? Why not make that an 18 and an 8 instead?
I should mention at this point that ability scores in 2nd edition AD&D only give bonuses and penalties if they're very high, or very low. Most scores will only provide bonuses to attack rolls, armor class and hit points if they're 15 or higher, and likewise you won't suffer any penalties to scores unless they're 7 or lower.
For 99% of cases, these two characters would be functionally identical. In other words:
Baldur's Gate's game design passively encourages you to create a character with stats like these.
These opportunities are not afforded to someone creating an AD&D character in the traditional way. Perhaps a generous DM would allow a player to reroll a character with truly abysmal stats, but the idea of trading points in ability scores, one-for-one? Well, that's suspiciously similar to Point Buy, the method that Lily opposes.
Now, let's go back to the manual's original claim, that ability scores are generated by rolling 3d6 in order. How can we interrogate this claim?
For this, dear reader, I'd like you to join me in a little experiment.
Let's make some D&D characters.
Grab three six-sided dice if you have them (If you only have one, that's fine). Roll them, note down what you got, and the total between them. Do this six times, then combine all of your totals to get a combined score (you're effectively rolling 18 dice altogether)
(Hey Hearts? You only have to do this once~)
Now, I'd like to make some assumptions about what you just rolled;
Your highest score is no higher than 15 (this will be true for 75% of you)
Your second-highest is no higher than 13 (75%)
Your lowest score is no higher than 7 (65%)
Your second-lowest score is no higher than 9 (72%)
If thirty six people do this experiment with me, then one of you will roll an 18 (and one of you will roll a 3). Half of you (myself included) won't even manage to get a high score above 14; the characters you generate wouldn't even qualify for the most basic bonuses under AD&D 2nd edition rules.
As for the total number rolled between all 18 dice, it will vary a lot between you, but your totals will average out to somewhere around 63. For every person who rolled higher, there will also be a person who rolled lower. One in twenty participants will be stuck with a total below 52, and one in twenty will manage a total at or above 75. That's basic statistics for ya~
Now, let's go back to Baldur's Gate. I'm going to click the "reroll" button a bunch of times. See if you don't notice a pattern.
No matter how many times we click "reroll", we can never generate a set of scores with a total lower than 75. This is deliberately coded into the character creator; despite the average roll of 18d6 being 63. In other words, the weakest Baldur's Gate PC is already stronger than 95% of AD&D 2nd edition PCs.
If your only experience with AD&D 2nd edition is through Baldur's Gate, then your perceptions of average character strength are going to be incredibly skewed. In Lily's case, it means that she looks at the following ability scores, and thinks they're unplayably bad...
... when in truth, these ability scores come straight from the 2nd edition player's handbook
Have you really played this game, Lily?
A couple of post-scripts:
you could argue that the BG is only partly dishonest about how abilities are generated; it technically uses the 3d6-in-order method, it just quietly discards any result that would give the player ability scores below 75. The output is very similar to that of an 18d6 bell curve, with any result below 75 chopped off- your odds of getting a total of 80 in the character creator (0.35% on a normal 18d6) are about half that of getting 78 (0.67% on 18d6) and one third that of getting 76 (1.12% on 18d6)
Yonks ago, Lily suggested the following:
If you were to take Lily's advice while using the 3d6-in-order method, then 48% of all characters would be functionally crippled in two different ability scores. 18% would be crippled in three. You can't push players to have balanced abilities while using 3d6-in-order; they have no control over the abilities they roll!
When discussing characters with bad ability scores, Lily specifically highlights the character Anomen:
With combined ability scores of 79, Anomen is stronger than 99.5% of all AD&D 2nd edition characters.
Someone asked me about this post a little while back:
and... yeah. It's pretty stupid. Let's break it down:
"A single 20 can trivialize an entire dungeon"
unlike other roleplaying systems, D&D's skill checks are a binary success/failure paradigm. Some DMs will introduce a sliding DC to a check (eg "succeed by more than 5 and you'll get a neat little bonus" or whatnot) but the core metric is "if you roll high, you succeed, if you roll low, you fail".
so if something can be trivialized by "a single 20", then it can be trivialized by any successful roll.
"Stop letting players cheat"
My Dungeon Master in christ, if you allow them to roll, then they're not cheating. They're playing the game.
And finally,
"Skill checks don't have Criticals, that's never been the rules in any edition of D&D"
3.5 Edition, Dungeon Master's Guide, page 34:
What now, dingus?
In all seriousness, if you're worried about players rolling for absurdities in game, the solution is as follows; before any rolling occurs, have the player describe exactly what it is the are trying to do. Then, also before the rolling occurs, give a brief summary of what will happen if they succeed, and what will happen if they fail.
As an example:
Player: "I sneakily scale the castle wall"
DM: "Okay, you have proficiency in stealth and athletics, so I'll only get you to roll one of them. Your DC is 15 - pass, and you can find a way over the wall without the guards noticing. Get between 10 and 15, you won't make it over, but you can at least stay unnoticed. Get below 10, your attempt will make enough noise to alert the guards.
Player: "Hrm, I only have a +7 to those scores, hopefully this will- NATURAL 20!"
DM: "Hell yes! You practically run up the wall, finishing your ascent with an acrobatic pirouette off of the watchtower's peak. If anyone was watching, they'd be astonished."
Player: "Was anybody watching?"
DM: "Well... no. You were trying to be stealthy, after all."
Player: "GOD-"
And I've mentioned this before, but a task you can succeed at with one roll is fine. You really have to watch out for tasks that can be failed forever with a single roll. If a player is stuck inside a jail cell with a single lockpick, and they end up breaking that lockpick in their attempt to pick the door, then you have to give them another means of escape, unless you want to hit them with the "you don't get to play the game now" beam.
Lily once again provides fantastic evidence for having never played a game of D&D in her life.
Hey folks, it's been a while. There's stuff of Lily's that I've considered covering, but
a) so much of what she posts now is blatant rage-bait, where any sort of response is playing into her need for attention, and
b) I've just been feeling a bit crook lately. I guess conditions in the pit could be a little more sanitary.
But anyways, Lily's recent attempts at proving her D&D experience have led to her creating a mythological kid DM named Jordan. There's a few different reasons why the anecdotes around him don't match up to reality, but for now I'll just cover these posts from earlier today.
Never mind that these two anons were answered a mere 3 minutes apart. Never mind that if you google "center of gravity riddle" you will find variations of this exact riddle dating back to at least 1999, as well as versions with this exact wording.
Just ask yourself; what is the context here?
Lily remembers this riddle she supposedly heard as a child so vividly that she can recite it to the letter... and yet gives no information as to how it was used. Was it the key to a magically locked door or chest? Did a Gynosphinx demand the party solve the riddle before she would allow them safe passage? Was the answer tied to a goblet puzzle with multiple solutions, any incorrect answer leading to the would-be-solver's death?
Nah. The reason Lily thinks riddles are the epitome of D&D puzzle is because riddles are all over the place in Baldur's Gate 2 and other Bioware games
Baldur's Gate 2
Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide
Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic
It turns out, in an engine where the bulk of interactions occur within dialog, a form of puzzle that can be expressed as dialog is really easy to program. None of the riddles mentioned above bear any relevance to the games they appear in, they're just stock riddles smacked into their respective games so that players have something to do other than point-and-click combat, and Lily's context-free example fits that bill perfectly.
All that being said, I'm confident that Lily's example doesn't come from a Bioware game. One of the big limitations of CRPG riddles is that the correct answer must exist within a set of finite options. This is arguably a feature rather than a bug; it certainly makes riddles like the above light/time/hope one far easier than they need to be.
Now, should you use riddles in your D&D games? Eh... I'd be careful. Riddles can be interesting, but they run the risk of grinding the game to a halt, especially if they're tied to the only means of a party progressing. Worse, you run the risk of your players having already heard your riddle somewhere else, and treating its solution as a non-issue.
In my opinion, the best way to implement riddles into your adventure is to make them semi-optional; as an example, have a door locked behind a magic riddle, but make that door one of multiple paths through the dungeon so the players can opt to revisit it later when their minds are clear (and perhaps another route in the dungeon will lead to a critical clue for solving the riddle)
From the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition revised Dungeon Master's Guide, published 1995:
Lily continues to confirm she has never actually played D&D in her life.
under the cut: the more in-depth rules on infravision, and a brief analysis from yours truly
Also from the same DMG (the Internet Archive is a wonderful place):
So yes, there is technically a more "accurate" version of Infravision available to players. A version which tells you multiple times "hey, don't use this. You're going to have a bad time if you do." I actually kind of love that? 2nd edition is wild, man.
Anyways, Lily clearly wasn't thinking of these rules when she was talking about infravision. Remember, her most salient critique of 5th edition is that it does nothing to reduce the cognitive load on the Dungeon Master. Now I invite you to consider that criticism against a rule set that requires the Dungeon Master to consider the relative heat signatures of different types of stone.
But of course, the best (and worst) aspect of this version of infravision is how blatantly easy it is for any crafty player to abuse. "Large heat sources will temporarily blind characters with infravision just as looking at a bright light blinds those with normal vision"? Congratulations, you've just made Fireball (already an overpowered spell) into something that will blind every demihuman in an 80-foot radius.
... huh, maybe that's how 2nd edition humans are balanced.
Hey, here's a fun scientific fact, completely unrelated to anything posted by anybody recently. (lie)
It's been calculated that a black hole with equivalent mass to the Earth (5.97 octillion kilograms) would have a Schwarzschild radius (that is, distance from the centre to the event horizon) of 9 millimetres. Or to put it more plainly, a black hole with Earth-like mass would be 18 millimeters in diameter.
A United States penny is 19 millimeters in diameter.
Lily's been posting a lot of D&D content recently, and by content, I mean "diatribes about why 5th edition is the worst edition ever, mixed in with homebrew class replacements that wouldn't stand up to the most basic of playtesting." This content has been provided by Lily almost entirely unprovoked.
As an experienced D&D grognard, I of course have plenty of opinions on her takes, but I'm also open to Lily expressing her views. She is, after all, coming from the position of another experienced D&D player.
There's just one problem.
All of Lily Orchard's D&D experience comes exclusively from Baldur's Gate, and not from Tabletop Dungeons and Dragons.
I would even be confident in saying that Lily has never played a tabletop game of 2nd edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in her life.
For all that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 are considered faithful adaptations of the 2E ruleset, the games aren't exact replicas; several compromises were made when adapting the system for computer play. To someone who is familiar with tabletop 2nd edition and with BG1/2, the differences stand out.
Lily, having never touched the tabletop game, is unaware of those compromises. Hence she treats mechanics exclusive to the Baldur's Gate games as inherent 2nd Edition features, and is ignorant of mechanics that said games failed to implement. For example:
Race/Class restrictions
One of the core pillars of Lily's complaints with 5e, is that players are given too much freedom when creating characters; specifically when it comes to pairing certain races with certain classes. Her justification for this comes down to the race/class limitations of 2nd edition; how dwarves can't become mages, how nobody but humans can become paladins, et cetera.
Except...
Somehow, Lily never brings up the other key facet of this system; that non-human characters cannot advance beyond specific levels in each class.
Racial Class and Level Limits, from the 2nd Edition Revised Dungeon Master's Guide, published 1995.
An Elven fighter in 2nd edition can never advance past 12th level, and an Elven Mage caps out at 15th level- preventing them from gaining access to 9th level spells. These limitations weren't an obscure variant rule of D&D- they were baked into the system from the get go.
So why would Lily not be familiar with the level limits of demihuman races? Because Baldur's Gate didn't implement them. The first game limited players from reaching higher than 8th level in any class, so there was no need to implement level caps. The second game came out alongside 3rd edition D&D, and borrowed more than a few concepts from it, including the removal of race-specific level caps (as well as the sorcerer class, but that's for another post)
Character Permadeath
All of the forms of "permanent death" Lily cites are only permanent in Baldur's Gate - a regular Resurrection spell will undo the effects of all of these in every edition from 3rd edition onwards (and, save for disintegration, in earlier editions too)
Prior to 5th edition, D&D has had 3 "tiers" of resurrection over its lifespan: Raise Dead, introduced in the original 1974 rulebook, requires an intact body (no decapitations) and only works on corpses that have died within the last week or so. Resurrection, introduced in AD&D 1st edition (1979), simply required a body or part thereof ("the bones of a long dead adventurer", for example) and can bring back someone who had died in the last century. True Resurrection, introduced in 3rd edition (2000), can bring someone back even when there's no body to target - a name and time of death will suffice. There is no strict "permanent death" in any edition of D&D, simply forms of death that are too severe for a given tier of resurrection magic. Even in editions prior to 3rd, the Wish spell is capable of bypassing the limitations placed upon Resurrection (but we'll get back to Wish, trust me)
Since Baldur's Gate is working off of hard-spun rules, rather than DM interpretation, characters who take damage well in excess of their hit points are "chunked"; they are turned into a spray of bloody giblets. Being chunked precludes the use of Raise Dead; peculiarly, it prevents the usage of Resurrection as well (likely due to an oversight with early programming). Regardless, the mechanic of "permanent death" is exclusive to Baldur's Gate, and does not appear in any tabletop version of D&D.
The Wish spell being impacted by wisdom
The Wish spell is the pinnacle of Arcane magic, able to produce just about any effect the caster desires (at the cost of a big hit to either strength or XP, depending on edition, and significant time spent in recuperation.
As you can imagine, programming such a spell into Baldur's Gate would have been a nightmare. Instead, the BG2 incarnation summons a genie who will grant one of several (powerful, but finite) wishes. The pool of wishes available depends on the caster's wisdom score, with lower wisdom options having more potential for adverse effects. This was never the case in tabletop D&D. Instead, the caster is merely encouraged to word their wish in such a way that it can't be misinterpreted by higher forces.
Ranged combat
Ranged combat, and the effect attacking at range has on accuracy, is a pretty big part of D&D. It was spun off from a wargame, after all. In 2nd edition, ranged weapons will have a short range (no penalty to attack), medium range (-2 penalty) and long range (-5), so it's important to know just how far you are from your target.
Except...
Ranged weapons in Baldur's Gate don't have this issue. You simply cannot attack something from far enough away for range increments to apply; In Baldur's Gate, the thing attacking you is never more than an 800x600 screen away.
It turns out that an isometric viewpoint isn't great for deep tactical expression
Lily fails to take range increments into consideration, because they're irrelevant to the one form of D&D she's familiar with.
Percentile damage
A number of Lily's homebrew races and classes refer to a percentage resistance to damage, or otherwise a percentile calculation of one's health. If that sounds weirdly videogame-y, that's because it is; percentage damage resistance is an invention of Baldur's Gate 2, and does not exist within 2nd edition
(or in any edition of the game, for that matter. It's either half damage, double damage, or flat value reduction)
See, high level characters in 2nd edition AD&D die a lot. The effects and spells that these characters face have a tendency to kill anybody, quickly, regardless of how many hit points they've banked (this problem has its own fun nickname, "Rocket Tag"). Unfortunately, dying at all isn't in the interest of the Baldur's Gate PC, so the system had to be modified to give them some kind of defense against effects that would one-shot the average character.
Hence the need for incremental damage resistance, something which a computer has no problems calculating on the fly, but which would slow any tabletop game to a crawl. Seriously, can you imagine?
"Benny, your character takes 17 points of damage"
"Oh dang... wait, I have 15 percent damage resistance. 15 percent of 17 is... like... 2 to 3? It's two point... something?"
"Call it two. Okay, so you only take 15 then."
"Great! I only had four left anyway." *dead*"
Getting back on track, all of the above examples are mechanics that exclusively pertain to Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, or are mechanics that do not appear in Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 despite being core elements of tabletop AD&D 2nd edition.
I could put some profound wisdom here, something about the value in trying new things and being able to admit when you're wrong about something, but there's no need. It all comes down to three little words:
Stop lying, Lily.
Don't get me wrong, I'm thoroughly enjoying Lily revealing how little she knows about D&D in real time, but as someone who's played a bit of every numbered edition of D&D, I really need to address her misconceptions regarding 2nd Edition's attack metric, To Hit Armor Class Zero (THAC0, usually pronounced thack-oh)
(caution: old-school D&D autism ahead)
Here's the simple, straightforward explanation of how THAC0 works:
A given player character will have a set THAC0, which represents the score they need to roll on a d20 to successfully hit an enemy with an armor class of zero. To figure out what number you need to roll to hit a given defender, simply subtract the armor class of the defender from the attacker's THAC0.
Thus, to hit an armor class of 4, an attacker with THAC0 of 10 would need to roll (10 - 4) = 6. To hit an armor class of -2, that same attacker would need to roll (10 - [-2])= 12.
Perhaps you can already see some issues with this. Let's run through two of the most common:
1: The attacker doesn't always know the enemy's Armor Class; Oftentimes, to add suspense to an encounter, the DM will withhold an enemy's exact AC, instead choosing to tell the players only if their attack is a miss or a hit. This is especially important in scenarios where an enemy possesses unknown defenses, such as enchanted armor or a spell's protection.
Here's how a common to-hit scenario might occur with
THAC0:
Player: "I swing my sword at the beast. I roll... an 8!"
DM: "Okay, and your THAC0 is...?"
Player: "It's 11. Is that enough?"
DM: (Okay, so this thing has armor class of 2, so take 2 from 11 and we get 9, and he rolled...) "It was 8, right?"
Player: "No, 11"
DM: "I mean your roll"
Player: "Oh yeah, 8".
DM: "Cool. Your attack whooshes past. Sorry buddy."
(note that every player in the combat will have a different THAC0, leading to the DM having to run this calculation with different numbers for every player)
Now, here's that same scenario in the "Attack bonus vs Armor Class" paradigm of 3rd edition onwards:
Player: "I swing my sword at the beast. I roll an 8, and my attack bonus is plus 9, so... 17?"
DM, who knows this thing has an armor class of 18: "Oooh, it comes close, but no dice. NEXT!"
Notice just how much more math the DM had to do in the second scenario. Poor guy.
2. Perhaps THAC0 would be fine if attack bonuses were static, but D&D is chock-full of buffing spells and effects. Players will often have multiple temporary bonuses to keep track of on top of their base attack bonus. The difficulty of keeping all of these bonuses in mind is a long-running joke amongst D&D players:
Now, compound the fun of cumulative bonuses with the framework of THAC0:
"This enemy has an Armor Class of 4, and my base THAC0 is 16, so I hit on a 12. Except that I have a magic longbow +2, which raises- I mean lowers it down to 10. I also have +1 to attack from the bard song, that lowers it again to 9. Wait, does that armor class include a shield? That's a bonus to missile attacks, so the base to-hit is 13 now, which goes down to 10... or is it 11? Oh shoot, I'm attacking from long range, so that's another -2, I guess I have to roll 13 then."
Not that the underlying math is particularly complex- it's all simple addition and subtraction, after all- but the more steps you add in, the more risk there is of something important being left at the wayside.
as an aside, the tendency for characters to stack up ridiculous bonuses was one of the driving forces behind 5th edition's concentration mechanic- there is a world of difference between a high level party who's had time to buff before a fight, and a party who hasn't. When you're DMing for said high-level group, you need to know what your players are capable of dealing with, and that can change drastically with what buffs are active. By limiting spellcasters to one concentration spell at a time, the DM has to deal with a lot less guesswork as to how strong the party is going to be today (and if the party is caught unawares, it takes them far less time to get up to full strength).
So, all that being said, what is the reason Lily gives for people disliking THAC0?
"The only reason people don't like THAC0 is because it means low THAC0 good, low saving throws good, low armor class good. What it doesn't mean is, big number go brrrr, right?" - Lily, during a BG1 stream (and many times before and after)
This argument might hold water against 3rd edition D&D, where attack and skill bonuses went up every level (and good saving throw bonuses went up every other level). It's not uncommon for a 6th level character to rock an attack bonus of +15 in 3rd edition, and that number will only continue to increase. It's worth mentioning that similar ridiculous bonuses were possible in 2nd edition; the numbers were just flipped in the other direction (which power gamers of the time were totally fine with, believe me)
However, Lily is making the "Big number go brrrr" argument against 5th edition D&D. You know, the one which famously curtails bonuses, such that you're lucky if you have a +15 to attack at level 20. 5th edition is the least "Big number go brrrr" edition of D&D to date.
Look, I'm not going to pretend that 5th edition (or any edition of D&D) is perfect; D&D is a game that has been organically developed through perpetual playtesting for 5 decades now. Every edition is full of flawed answers to the biggest problems of the edition prior; even THAC0 was a hasty revision of 1st edition AD&D's attack matrices. I also have no problem with Lily preferring 2nd edition over 5th. It's clear that the early Baldur's Gate games are a source of great joy for her.
But of course, Lily cannot simply enjoy 2nd edition, not when so many people are happily playing the wrong version of the game. No, she has to insist that 5th edition D&D is a fundamentally broken game in dire need of fixing, and in revealing her fixes... well, she's proven just how little experience she has with any version of Dungeons and Dragons.
do you have any tips for someone that has recently started dming?
I'm sure tips like these will be all over the place, but here's a couple things worth remembering:
- don't be afraid to fudge things a bit in the name of having fun. If a dungeon is proving to be more tedious than engaging, you can always make it so the final room is sitting behind the next door. If the final boss is proving to be a bit too tough for the current party, you can always wipe off a couple dozen hit points. If your players are okay with things going south then that's cool too, but if things look towards an unintended TPK, you do have the power to change things a little. Sure, the dice tell a story, but so do you.
- It's worth remembering that players and player characters are ultimately not the same person. Sometimes a solution that would be obvious to a character in the moment won't come to the player in question. It happens - things that happened yesterday in-game may have been weeks (or even months) ago for the player, and people forget things. When that happens, it's fine to nudge people in the right direction. One way to "gamify" this is to tie it to an appropriate ability roll, eg. "Hey, can you make a flat wisdom roll for me? DC 12. Success? Fantastic. You hear the sound of jingling from your pack, and remember the key that you picked up last session..."
- You can also use the above when dealing with characters who are high intelligence or wisdom, being played by people who are... not that. Hey, look, it happens. Not everyone can be dialed in all of the time.
