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Here are my final notes on playthrough 12.

Aren’t these posts getting long?

Not really.

Here are the word counts for my previous write-ups, as measured by the Article Word Count WordPress plugin:

• Playthrough 12 – 9047 (7 parts)
• Playthrough 11 – 6240 (7 parts)
• Playthrough 10 – 2393
• Playthrough 9 – 6409
• Playthrough 8 – 8668 (including fanfic) (5 parts)
• Playthrough 7 – 7143
• First post, playthroughs 1-6 – 9218

The plugin estimates the word count based on the number of spaces in the text. However, I include a lot of extra spaces in things like HTML markup, to make my editing easier. As a practical matter, this means that the word count becomes inflated if I include a lot of pictures.

Also, the plugin may simply be wrong. The word count for playthrough 10 seemed low to me, so I checked using the WordPress Classic Editor. It said that the post contains 4044 words. So I’d take all these numbers with a grain of salt.

While the word count for my playthrough 12 write-up is the largest since my first BG3 post, I’ve included an increasing number of pictures in the posts.

Here are the number of photos I’ve taken during each playthrough:

• Playthrough 12 – 2494
• Playthrough 11 – 2087
• Playthrough 10 – 716
• Playthrough 9 – 1237
• Playthrough 8 – 807
• Playthrough 7 – 273

It’s not that I’m writing more and more with each playthrough. It’s that I’m taking more and more pictures with each playthrough, and including a proportional sample in the blog posts.

Why is that?

• For playthrough 12, it’s because I wanted to capture the banter when I could. It was the purpose of the run, after all. I wanted a record of the effort.
• For a given playthrough, I’ve developed the practice of including only photos that I took during that particular run, to use as meme-shots. So while I could do this:



I’d rather show this:



They’re functionally the same image, but I want to be “historically accurate” within the playthrough.

• I’ve simply developed the habit of screen-shotting anything that I think I might use in the blog post(s) for my playthrough.

  At best, I use less than 10% of the pictures I take. But I want to have a good pool to select from. You never know when I might want to say…

  

• I include lots of pictures in the (probably vain) hope that they make the essays more readable. If folks aren’t interested in the pictures, they can just scroll past. If they want to skip the words and get straight to the nudity, they can scroll past that too.

  

I make no promises about what I might write in the future. All I can say is: I write these expedition reports because I enjoy them, both the games themselves and the act of writing them up.

If you like what I write, so much the better!

Face recognition

A quick follow-up to my posts on Using BG3 to understand Mac OS face recognition and Now you too can have fun with BG3 face recognition:

About a fifth of the way through the playthrough, I noticed that Mac Photos was recognizing some faces that I’d tagged only rarely, like Philomeen.

On the other hand, Photos still had problems identifying faces that I had literally tagged hundreds of times before.

At that point I decided to a do quick study of facial ID of the photos for the rest of the playthrough.

After each game session, as I went through the images I screen-captured, I captioned the image if any faces had been recognized. A given face was either IDed or not IDed.

I then saved all the photos that contained the text “IDed”. I wrote an Applescript to extract the text of all the captions within a folder. It was the first time I played with Applescript in at least 15 years. I hope you’ll indulge me as I show off.

set tagName to "description"

set theFolder to (choose folder)
set folderTree to {theFolder as text}

tell application "Finder"
set theFiles to the files of theFolder

repeat with theFile in theFiles
set theImageFile to theFile as text

-- Launch Image Events
tell application "Image Events"
launch

-- Open the image
set theImage to open file theImageFile

set tagValue to value of metadata tag tagName of theImage
log tagValue as text
close theImage
end tell

end repeat
end tell


The output was written to the Script Editor log, which I copied to a text file.

I’ll get to the results in a moment. First, as a scientist, I have to insist that was not a scientific study. It’s seriously flawed:

• I was not consistent in how I wrote my notes. Sometimes I wrote something like “Amaranth and Gale not IDed”; other times I wrote “Amaranth IDed, Gale IDed”. I did some minor corrections to my file of captions, but there are still mis-counts.
• Some situations were more complicated.

  

• While Photos had previously-tagged examples for hundreds of tagged images of the main characters, this was the first time Photos had seen “Amaranth”. Her rate of correct IDs would therefore be lower. I did not adjust for this.

  

  

• The Photos app can be flaky. I would come across an image in which (for example) Karlach was correctly IDed, and I noted it as such. Later, when I came across the same photo, Karlach’s tag was changed to “unnamed”.

With that noted:

• Of the 2494 screen images I took, 842 had captions in which I included the text “IDed”.
• Of those 842, 281 captions contain the text “not IDed”,
• 15 of the 842 had the text “mis-IDed”.

Which proves… nothing. It doesn’t even show that Photos has only a 67% correct facial ID rate, at least on video-game digital faces.

Like a massive party of 14 characters, I think I’ll drop this kind of “study” in the future. I’ll continue to fix tags in the images for my own amusement. However, I don’t there there’s anything to be learned by logging this.

Evil Endings

In my playthrough 11 write-up, I said I’d discuss the Evil Endings that Larian added in patch 7.

However, that discussion would be better suited for the write-up of the next playthrough. We’ll get to it then.

The next playthrough

My next playthrough will be my 13th. That number gave me an idea.

In playthrough 11, I made use of a mod: the Witch class. Therefore, my 13th playthrough will be a “coven run”: All the characters will be Witches.

This will be risky

By the mod author’s own admission, the BG3 Witch class is not finished. It’s based on the Witch from Pathfinder, a game about which I know nothing (and, like D&D, I’m not inclined to learn). As a practical matter, if the class weren’t called “Witch” and I were not a Wiccan, I probably wouldn’t try this at all.

There are other class mods out there, such as Mystic, which are more robust. Having played Amaranth and Jaheira as Mystics in playthrough 12, I know a party of four Mystics would be both fun and capable. I may do something like that in a future playthrough.

To compensate for potential weaknesses in the Witch class, I’m going to use the UnlockLevelCurve to allow the characters to go up to level 20. This won’t do anything for the Witch class; the mod’s author has not extended the class for the additional levels. So each Witch will be 12 levels of Witch, 8 levels of something else. I think that will be sufficient.

That’s not the only risk

Larian is going to release Patch 8 in a few months. It’s already in Beta Stress Test. There are many mods that currently don’t work in this preliminary version.

Will the Witch class work after Patch 8 is released? I don’t know. Given that the author has not worked on the the mod in months, it’s quite possible that if the patch breaks the mod, it will never be fixed.

I may be starting a playthrough that I’ll never be able to finish!

As long as we’re taking risks…

I’m going with the notion that “13” is a mystic number, and I’ve got the “coven run” idea. Let’s go full-on stereotype.

In all of my past runs, I’ve gone into the game with the idea that I’d generally make choices on the side of Light and Good. If that didn’t happen, it was due to a poor choice or a glitch or something like that. Even my Dark Urge run was like that.

If my overall goal for all these playthroughs is to explore the different paths available in BG3’s story, I should explore some of the dark alleyways.

This playthrough is going to be a “wicked” run. I’m going to make story choices that tend towards chaos and conflict.

If I’m going to have a “wicked run,” why not go with the Dark Urge? Then I’d get at least one magic item that only the Dark Urge gets.

My answer, for now, is that the Dark Urge is not just about being “Evil.” It’s about blood and murder. That’s not to my taste. I may try a full-on Dark Urge run at some point, but not now.

One more potential risk

If you make mostly negative choices, you’re cut off from some very useful magic items. This problem may be exacerbated by competition for the same magic items among the Witches, since the different sub-classes (Witchblade, Frost, Hex, Herbalist) are all Intelligence-based.

Fortunately, I lucked into a solution. I’ll discuss that in my playthrough 13 write-up.

How’s it going?

I’ve already started playthrough 13.

After only a few hours into it, I saw a bit of banter that I had not seen in the banter run. Ah, well.

Relationship goal: Minthara.

Finally!

Real Angela invited me to join her in her first game of Baldur’s Gate 3.

I’m acting as her guide, both through the rules and the story. Real Angela is more familiar with D&D than I am, but she needs some assistance with BG3’s implementation of that system.

As for the story, I do my best to leave the choices up to her. If she says “I’d like to meet Karlach” I can take her to the place.

Since she (like I) is playing mostly for the story, I also offer to show her some interesting plot elements that I didn’t discover until after many playthroughs.

It’s refreshing to see the game through new eyes. She brings a more critical perspective than I did when I first played the game.

For example, after talking with Astarion, Gale, and Wyll, she exclaimed, “Everyone in this game has some kind of baggage!”

What could I say except, “Welcome to Baldur’s Gate 3!”