Chapter 10: Powergaming vs. Roleplaying


There are two fundamental playing styles to the Baldur's Gate series, and in fact in just about every game there is: Those who play to win, and those who just play to play. Powergamers aren't happy unless they're winning winning winning, will employ any cheese or cheat they want to in order to make their character/party as godlike as possible, and don't give a damn about character interaction or staying true to one's Alignment. Roleplayers, on the other hand, try to always choose the path that their characters in the game would choose, and frown on cheesy, munchkin tactics (I'll define those terms in a moment), and anything else that's unrealistic, including almost all forms of cheating. Powergamers read walkthroughs ahead of time so they
know what to expect and have all the answers ready, Roleplayers read walkthroughs only after they've beaten that area, to see if they missed anything. In BG2, Roleplayers write unique Biographies for each of their party members (One of the nicer bells & whistles of BG2), while Powergamers scour online Item Listings to find the exact location of the Vorpal Sword of Cutchamuch+20, or at least the weapon's item code, so they can hack it into their game without even needing to go get it.

The difference between "Cheesy" and "Munchkin" is a very small one; for the most part, cheese is taking unfair advantage of the game's rules and AI, and being munchkin is using unrealistic combat tactics and making yourself insanely powerful. I'll give an example of each.
Cheese: In the city of Baldur's Gate lives a fellow by the name of Lothander, whom you can run into as many as three times. Lothander carries some decent gear, including a Short Sword+1, a nice gem, a couple of potions, etc. If you kill him the first time you see him, you get his stuff, but (understandably) you'll never see him again. This is the cheesy bit: If you pickpocket him at your first meeting, he'll still be alive to pickpocket again the 2nd and 3rd times. This is because when the computer wants Lothander to be somewhere, it creates a 'Lothander,' including all his gear, enabling you to loot him 3 times. No human DM would allow such repeated pickpocketings to gain multiple items, you're simply taking advantage of a bug.
Munchkin: In BG2, your Thieves can Set Traps on the floor, enabling them to hurt or kill enemies by leading them near the Traps. Now, there are some places in the game where enemies will teleport into the room, and if you've played that area of the game before, you know exactly where the enemy will Dimension Door in. So why not lay a bunch of Traps on that very spot? Because it's munchkin�Are your characters so damn smart that they can see into the future and know exactly when and where the bad guy will appear? Not only that, but Trapping their spawn point like that also doesn't even give the bad guys a chance�they warp into the room, and *POW!* dead. Hardly a satisfying (or deserved) win.

With that said, I must admit to putting munchkin advice into this very Guide�consider these quotes from Chapter 6: "Always, always, ALWAYS max out your Dexterity," or "Plan to spend at least 10 minutes hitting Reroll, saving your numbers occasionally when you hit a new high score." Even though practically everyone gives their PCs stat rolls of 18 in their most important stats, it is in fact unrealistic�after all, not even Schwarzenegger has stats of 18(00)/18/18, but go ahead and shoot
for that anyway, at least for your first few games. Later on, you'll learn that you don't need awesome stats to kick butt. My favorite way of getting characters with realistic attribute scores is to allow myself to Reroll as many times as I want, but I don't get to use the + and - buttons to move points from one stat into another. Hardcore roleplayers ('Puritans,' if you will) sometimes won't touch the Reroll or the + and - buttons; whatever numbers they got for their very first roll are their final stats. Of course, I'm not saying that rolling a powerful character is bad�go ahead and give yourself ridiculously high numbers. Yeah, it's unrealistic, but how else are you going to compete in those "My character could beat up your character" contests? Besides, all your party members are probably going to have stats that are well above the 'average' range�with the simple logic being that if they only had 'average' scores, they wouldn't have
become adventurers. We all make munchkin characters�remember in Chapter 6, I mentioned rolling a 95 with a Half-Elven Cleric/Mage? I went straight for the Munchkin Award with that character, and gave him stats of 5/18/18/18/18/18. No real person would ever be that nimble, healthy, & good-looking, and yet be so physically weak, but I made him that way anyway.

Of course, there are times in the game where you can powergame without even realizing it, such as casting buffing and protection spells on your party right before a big fight. Stop and think for a moment�Do your party members know a fight is coming up? If it's some situation like "Pull the final lever to release the demon," then yes, they do know a fight is coming. But if an enemy suddenly Dimension Doors into the middle of the room with no warning at all, then they can not know, so buffing your party beforehand would be munchkin. The ironic thing is that sometimes, if you want to play by the book, you have to be munchkin, in order to circumvent the unrealistic limitations imposed by the game. I'll give 2 examples.
ROLEPLAYING GOAL 1: You're in a dungeon, and you want to use your Thief to scout around, disarming Traps and keeping an eye out for enemies. If he finds a cluster of bad guys that could potentially be a major fight, you'd have your Thief come back and warn the group, so they could cast buffing spells on the whole party, and then start the brawl.
UNREALISTIC LIMITATION: "You must gather your party before venturing forth." There's a staircase going down, and you have to take your whole party down the stairs at the same time, and�Surprise!�there's a whole bunch of bad guys right there, and they're all ready for you, while you don't even have time to get your men into position. If your Thief could have Stealthed down those stairs by himself, he would have seen the ambush and warned the party, but the game can't keep track of 2 dungeon levels at the same time.
MUNCHKIN SOLUTION: Reload, and cast your buffing spells beforehand. You'll just have to pretend your Thief was sneaking down the stairs and saw all the bad guys.

ROLEPLAYING GOAL 2: In BG1, you want to form a party consisting of you (Fighter), Imoen, Khalid, Jaheira, Coran, Minsc, and Dynaheir.
UNREALISTIC LIMITATION: You may only have 6 people in your party at any time. You decide you have enough Warriors, so you get rid of Khalid. You go to the "Reform Party" menu, and kick him out of the party. He comes up to you and asks if you really want him to leave, and you say yes, at which point Jaheira leaves too, because she's his wife. You can't lose Jaheira�you want her Druid spells, but it's the game's fault that you have to drop Khalid at all.
CHEESY SOLUTION: Send Khalid into a building that you'll probably never need to enter again. Then drop him from the party. He can't ask you if you really want him to leave the party, so Jaheira never gets prompted to leave, enabling you to keep Jaheira, but leave Khalid safe & sound, in case you want him later.

Now both of those flaws in the game were a disadvantage to you, but you managed to find a way around them. You also need to find ways of not letting game flaws be a disadvantage to your enemies, as well, if you want to be fair. One of these flaws was referred to just now, with Khalid not being able to talk to you. That's because in BG1, only members of your party can travel from one place to another: The inside of a building is treated as a separate place from the outside, and so because you're not in the same area as Khalid, he doesn't know where you are, even though you're right outside the door. This can be taken advantage of in some pretty cheesy ways: Say you're in a really big fight in somebody's house. You're getting your butt kicked, so you pull your party out into the street, and your enemies cannot follow you. Do you smell cheese? Another flaw is that pretty much all the enemies in the game have the same AI�from Golems (most of them are mindless automatons) all the way up to Mind Flayers (the most intelligent race on the planet), they can all be fooled into doing the same things. Abusing the AI is
fine when you're against stupid enemies like Skeletons or Golems: If you cast debilitating spells like Web on them, they won't even notice, and if they haven't seen you, they won't even move, enabling you to cast Web again and again, so that by the time you move in for the kill, they're completely helpless. Doing this to anything intelligent would be severely munchkin�what would YOU do if someone off to your left was casting spells to try to trap you in a sticky net? You'd run over there and administer some beatings, that's what. Give smarter enemies the respect they deserve. Mind Flayers would never be stupid enough to stay in the area of a Cloudkill; Umber Hulks, yes, but Mind Flayers are not going to stick around and inhale toxic vapors until they die.....unless you find some realistic, roleplaying way of forcing them to stay in the area (or making them want to stay), no matter how intelligent they are.

If you're playing BG2 with ToB installed, there's a new 'feature' that I find embarrassing: There's a button you can press to highlight every container visible on your screen. What a joke: Suppose if there's a stash of gold that somebody buried under a rock, or a gem that someone wedged into a tiny crack in the wall, pressing that button will make those hidden caches jump out and say "Here I am!" In real life, you'd have to spend a lot of time searching the area, and in the game you should have to do a lot of scouring the area with the mouse pointer, and find the treasure that way. But no, now powergamers have this handy little button. I've even heard some people claim that they like to leave this feature on almost all the time, so they can go right to the goodies. What, do they have some kind of X-Ray vision or something? Please. Me, I use the button to highlight bodies, not containers: When I'm collecting loot right after a big fight, I'll hit the button to see if there any any corpses I haven't looted yet, perhaps obscured by a tree or something. My rule is "If I didn't kill it, and I didn't mouse-over it, I didn't see it."

Obviously, I dislike cheese and powergaming. You are going to have to find your own place somewhere on the Powergaming/Roleplaying continuum. For instance, in a conversation that could potentially lead to great rewards, will you keep Reloading your game until you find the conversation options that profit you the most? What about giving responses that conflict with your class or alignment? (It's a shame that the Baldur's Gate series doesn't have the cool Alignment system that Planescape: Torment has�In Ps:T, everybody starts out as True Neutral, and choices you make in the game will continually affect your alignment.)
There is one bit of cheese, though, that I'm not really opposed to: The very beginning of BG1 is essentially a tutorial on How To Play This Game. At one point, you will go into a cellar, and five NPCs will join your party so you can learn the basics of controlling 6 people as you kill some low-level monsters. These 5 NPCs will leave your party as soon as you exit the building, and they will not join you anywhere else in the game, because they were never intended to go adventuring through the Sword
Coast with you. Well, despite all that, there is a non-cheating (although it is very take-advantage-of-a-bug
cheesy) way to keep them in your party for the entire game. Go here to eat some cheese. �>

Since this chapter deals with the discussion of munchkin tactics, I'm afraid I'm going to have to talk about Traps some more. Apart from the "Trap the spawn point" cheese already mentioned, there are a whole number of ways in which Traps can be abused: 1) Traps can be placed very close together, even in one big stack. (Try doing that in real life.) The result of this tactic is that the enemy steps on all of them at the same time, which will kill anything in the game, without even giving them a chance to cast healing spells or drink Potions. 2) Traps will hit absolutely anything: no matter what they're immune to, or what protection spells they have up, the Traps will still do their full amount of damage. 3) Traps will not harm your allies or neutral characters, but nor will they be seen as an attack. There are certain enemies in BG2 that will be Neutral to you until you attack them. It's possible to litter the floor with Traps, and then attack
the enemy, turning them hostile, which activates all the Traps you'd placed near the enemy, and instantly killing it. Gee, what a challenge, and what's even worse is that while the enemy is neutral to your party, it would have seen exactly where you laid each Trap and been able to avoid them, yet somehow when it turns hostile, it forgets where all the Traps are and steps on all of them simultaneously. Riiiiiiight.
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