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Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Planescape: Torment - playthrough update

I am still tooling around in Planescape: Torment.

I'm a 6th level fighter but I picked up level 1 in mage and I think level 2 or 3 in thief. I can only do one thing at a time, so I'm concentrating on fighter until I hit level 9, then I'll sweep through mage and thief for a bit to get some extra HP for the levels, then turn back to fighter in all likelihood.

I'm heading toward evil. Right now, I'm CN, but I keep doing evil stuff. It's mostly petty stuff - demanding payment for favors, lying about my name or when I make promises, and so on. Sometimes I feel bad when I choose those options, since they're basically "bad person" traits and not "servant of darkness" traits. But still. I walk around as if I have a "What would Flashman do?" Basically, I act like a ruthless cad.

Torment is interesting in that it's the rare game where I'll cheerfully have people do horrible stuff to me, or do it myself - dig around in my body, tear my own eye out, let someone chew on me (I'll regenerate!). And where I'll cheerfully equip cursed items because they're pretty good and I can get them removed when I find better. Evil claw-hands you can't take off? Equip them! They're better than my magic dagger!

More recent games have done well with giving you better roleplaying options, and deep roleplaying choices. Torment isn't that deep, really, but it has a hell of a story - you don't remember your past and have to find out, with people who have reasons not to give you the full answer. And oh boy, are they right to feel that way. And plenty of choices about how you go about it, even if the plot itself is on rails. They're good rails. It's like Murder on the Orient Express. It's going from A to B to C, wether you like it or not, but there isn't anything off the rails that is more fun. And how do you argue that your Nameless One protogonist would just abandon a search to find out who he is and why he doesn't die? Someone like that isn't going to say, screw this, I'm going to open a tavern.

Fun stuff.

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