The Queue: Expeditious Retreat

Turns out installing WoW from scratch can take a lot of time. Anyway, I reused that New Dances image because it makes me laugh, and because it saves me five minutes, which is really helpful right about now.

It’s the Queue, here comes the questions and answers.

I mean, if I was that easily upset by either unofficial adaptations or paleontological inaccuracy in adaptations, I’d have crapped my pants over any number of animated shows over the years, including Grave of the Fireflies (which owes a massive debt to Brecht’s Mother Courage and her children) and really, there’s never been an accurate dinosaur reconstruction in a movie ever. Even the ones that try usually get it wrong. So I’m okay, neither of those things make me sad.

If it absolutely has to be a licensed D&D game, then I’d say it depends on if you want to play the most current form of D&D or if you’re okay with older versions. You can get a solid taste of second edition AD&D by playing Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2, as well as Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale and it’s sequel, Icewind Dale 2.

If you really insist on it being 5th Edition, you’ll either have to wait for Baldur’s Gate 3 to come out (or play it in early access, which is like an unfinished beta that you pay money to play with the understanding that you’ll own the full game when it releases) or pick up the OGL compliant Solasta, which is D&D 5e without the trademarks.

If you’re okay with it being D&D adjacent, then pick up Pathfinder Kingmaker or Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which both use the original Pathfinder system which was basically just a tweaked version of D&D 3.5e. They’re excellent games, probably better than most of the ones I listed above — in fact, WotR is one of the best CRPG’s I’ve ever played.

There are a lot of other CRPG’s I could recommend – Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Arcanum — but they’re further away from D&D, so just keep them in mind if you get a hankering.

Honestly, I think it would probably help the game as it is today, for the simple fact that it adds flexibility to groups. But honestly, I wonder if it would be better to let a character swap classes. I know a lot of MMO’s have some form of radical respecialization or job system that lets them switch between classes, and maybe bringing that into the game would obviate the need to play so many alts, and thus, to keep them as current as possible.

But maybe not, and at any rate, going account bound would be a lot less like completely switching everything around while letting you play whatever class you want.

I don’t know where your burrito is.

I’d personally like to see us get a full on construct race, like the Automa. Playable Automa, who use a system of ‘incorporation’ with gear, so that they get the stats because the gear they put on is literally partially absorbed into their bodies. So if a Warrior equipped the Tier 6 plate, they’d grow spikes and take on the coloration of that armor when they entered combat. Kind of like a transmog Worgen, I suppose — they’d look like their normal Automa form until combat stated, but morph into armored form when it it was on.

Weapons would replace their dominant limbs when in combat, so that if you had Ashkandi equipped the blade would replace your hand when you entered combat, and then your hand would turn back to normal outside of it.

This is never going to happen but I think it would be cool. You’d basically be a transformer, except instead of turning into a car, you turn into your gear.

The raid is going to be cleared fairly quickly, in my opinion, and I wouldn’t expect we’ll see a new expansion announcement before August. That’s my take. I’m not married to it, but as of right now it’s what I think will happen.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. See y’all when I see ya.