While I’m sure their casualties are undercounted (as are everyone’s), I find it very easy to believe that the real numbers are still low; dropping guided munitions on children doesn’t expose your troops to much risk

There’s a decent chance you might not be missing anything, it’s just not for you. Minecraft and Terraria are beloved titles that people put thousands of hours into, but I never got into them myself.

A turn-based CRPG is a very old-fashioned thing (the C stands for Computer), and it’s a pretty faithful adaption of a TT (tabletop, so pen-and-paper) RPG, which is even older (though the current ruleset for DnD is pretty new). I can definitely understand how Skyrim appeals to you but something like BG3 doesn’t; they’re fundamentally different games, and Skyrim is much faster-paced

So I recently listened to an episode of the Data over Dogma podcast specifically regarding angels and demons. It’s hosted by Dan Beecher (an atheist podcaster) and Dr. Dan McClellan (a Bible scholar), and they discuss how angels and demons are actually depicted/described in the Bible, compared to the extra-biblical descriptions of both that we’ve gotten over the millennia. It’s about an hour but should serve as a nice little primer on the subject, with some recommendations for further study.

I think OP means in 2001, not in the 80s

It’s been my observation that ambassadorships are often given out as rewards or for other domestic political purposes. The career foreign service people whose job it is to do the real work of diplomacy aren’t political appointees

It sounds like one solution to this would be having the entire party enter turn-based mode, with members either being in or out of combat. It seems like that would be a very easy change to make, because turn-based mode can already trigger automatically, but the question would be how well that all blends together while you’re playing. I think that should be tied to difficulty; in Story you can cheese like you do now, while in hardcore (or whatever it’s called) you always enter turn-based.

I this is partly the consequence of adapting a tabletop system to a video game. In DND your DM obviously wouldn’t pause combat indefinitely while the rest of the party messes around, but a DM can account for out-of-combat shenanigans much better than a game that must use pre-defined systems.

An important thing to keep in mind is that the practice of religion changes over time alongside culture, and is itself a part of culture. The Christianity of people living in places like Judea and Anatolia in the 1st century CE differs from the Christianity of, say, the Teutonic (not up on my post-Roman ethnicities, so might not be using the right term) tribes of Western Europe in the 6th century. This again differs from the Christianity of indigenous peoples in the Americas post-Columbus. In all these cases, these people had pre-existing cultural and religious beliefs which Christianity syncretised with instead of wholly replacing.

The Bible has been used to endorse slavery as well as oppose it, to condone violence and warfare as well as serve as the basis for radical non-violence. It is not “univocal”, because the various people who wrote and compiled it had their own beliefs and perspectives.

The various sects of Christianity differ in their values, beliefs, and even canon literature, and that’s before you get into Christianity as cultural practice rather than strict religion. Like all religions, Christianity is wonderfully human, encompassing our wide range of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and that even includes people who don’t read the damn book! So yes, you’re going to find commonly accepted “Christian” practices which seem to clearly contradict the doctrine, but the doctrine contradicts itself, and serves people just as much as people should ostensibly serve it. The conception of Christianity as a unified religion, with 1 canon and 1 accepted interpretation, has never been accurate.

FWIW Early Christians did practice communal living and sharing of property (the New Testament tells us as much), and you can still see these things in practice today, albeit rarely. I also wouldn’t use modern terms like socialism to describe that sort of thing, because the economic order and class structures which Socialism and Communism are a response to literally did not exist at the time.

“I ask thee again: what is the value, of a single PC level?”

Ah gotcha. I’d be interested to hear why they made that choice. On the bright side, there’s already a mod to unlock multiclassing for story . I can’t speak to ease of installation or possible issues obviously, but if you’re comfortable using Vortex (the mod manager from Nexus Mods) it should be pretty straightforward

EDIT: I’ll paste the link here at the bottom since link-naming isn’t displaying correctly on my phone

https://www.nexusmods.com/baldursgate3/mods/546

I have the option to multiclass playing on “normal”. Is it confirmed that they don’t permit it on the “story” difficulty? I ask because the level-up screen could be tweaked a bit in my opinion; it’s not super obvious what you need to click on

Yeah that’s what almost 3 years of Early Access can do for you. On top of completely changing the game, they’ve also been able to fix things the players have found over time

Project Wingman and Subnautica can both be played entirely in VR if you’re into dogfighting or the indescribable horrors of the deep, respectively