Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

Normally, at this point, I’d go upstairs and buy the Glasses of Identification from the merchant upstairs, thereby saving me the trouble of having to arse around with the scrolls and/or memorising the spell. However, we’ve installed the “Identify All Items” component from BGII Tweaks, so we won’t be needing them. We will, however, purchase ourselves a gem bag for keeping all those expensive jewels that’ll come in handy in TOB.

On the subject of jewels: I find it interesting that a lot of spells in D&D (the real game) require the material component of a valuable gem, which is almost invariably consumed when you cast the spell.

For example, “True Resurrection“, a spell that allows one to bring anyone or anything back to life no matter how long its been dead or how little you may know about it, (no excuse, Jaheira) requires one to use a perfectly cut, high-quality diamond worth no less than 5000 gold pieces.

Presumably this is to impose a limitation, because you don't want people casting spells like this all over the place. However, I think they've got it backwards. Once an adventurer is at a high enough level to cast spells like that, 5000 GP is nothing. I think, instead, it would be much more restricting if they had to find a perfectly cut, high-quality diamond worth no more than a single copper coin.

After all, for a high-value diamond, you just kill a dragon and take its hoard, and hey, 5000 GP. There'd probably even be just such a diamond in there somewhere, saving you the trouble of having to go out and buy one. At that level, no problem.

If it were the other way around, you would have to embark on a great mission to systematically locate and destroy major sources of copper all over the world, thereby artificially increasing its value until it becomes rarer than perfectly cut diamonds.

And of course, once you’ve done that you'll have completely screwed up the economy. Everyone will be angry with you. Nobody gets angry with you for killing a dragon.

What was I doing? Oh yeah, Baldur’s Gate.

Yep, we’ve just spent an entire update on going upstairs and buying a bag. I begin to wonder how long you people are going to read this crap for.