Baldur's Gate: The Zero Reload Saga

I never quite realised just how terrible Jan is at hiding until just now. I mean, I knew he had very little skill in it, but I wasn’t expecting it to take TWENTY ATTEMPTS before he managed to conceal himself.

How exactly were you supposed to function as a low-level thief in an actual AD&D game? Even if you pumped all your points into the sneaking skills you’d still be pretty bad at them, and you’d be absolutely hopeless at spotting traps and all the other things that thieves are supposed to be able to do. Furthermore, one would imagine that in a real game, you’d actually have to play out the act of hiding rather than just rolling the dice over and over again until you manage to get into a sort of all-encompassing “stealth mode”, so there’d be nowhere NEAR as much margin for error.

No wonder thieves level up more quickly than everyone else. The first few months of their lives are a desperate race against time, a terrified scrambling to escape from the realms of abysmal feebleness before someone steps on them.

Why are we hiding Jan? Well, there’s an Otyugh just down the corridor to the west, and I’m going to draw it out and soften it up with crossbow bolts and assorted missiles.

At least, that was my plan. Shortly after setting things in motion I discovered an interesting tidbit about Otyughs that I’d somehow managed to miss, even after all this time, and that is that for some reason, they are completely immune to piercing damage.

Well hell.

I’m guessing I didn’t notice this because normally, when a character’s weapon isn’t inflicting any damage, they have the courtesy to alert you to the fact. Alas, for whatever reason, Otyughs appear to be a special case. Perhaps everyone’s afraid to open their mouths, given that Otyughs are basically diseases on legs. Well…appendages, anyway. But why the hell does a throwing axe inflict PIERCING DAMAGE?

It’s not a big deal, of course. The dreaded Otyugh lurgie is far from lethal; it’s just irritating to have to wait for that Slow effect to wear off. In fact, I don’t actually think it does anything aside from a tiny amount of damage, which rather makes one wonder what the point is beyond allowing them to feel like the Cure Disease spell wasn’t a waste of time. It might as well just be poison, but that would mean compounding the status effects and their respective cures so that we’d actually have a single spell that would be kind of useful (Slow Poison) instead of three spells that are fairly worthless (Slow Poison, Cure Disease, Neutralise Poison.) That would be convenient. That would be a favour to you. Do you deserve any favours from BioWare? What have you done for them lately?