D&D Nerd Plays Baldur's Gate 3 for the First Time! 

9:10 video actually starts for anyone looking to skip the pre-stream card 1:40:37 return from break

I love that the character's bsckstory includes the Zhentarim. Both because it helps tie her to the setting right from the start, and because of the non-zero chance that she'll run into some Zhents in this game and fail the knowledge rolls to recognize them. :P

Really enjoyed this stream particularly how you're playing your already established character and talking through their choices!

38:17 Mike, the game is not actually paused when you are in the inventory screens (or other similar windows like spells). The game plays on behind you. Especially important for roaming creatures

I'm discovering the stream right now. I think your overlay takes too much space and is too distracting (blue color too bright) from the game. My humble advice would be to reduce the space taken by the chat to about 30% of what it is right now, and reduce what's around of the game overall by at least 50%. You don't really need to put all these logos on your stream either (Patreon, Twitter, tiktok etc...). Advertising these accounts can be done more efficiently in the chat with a bot sending a message with links every 30 minutes for example, or with commands that people can type like !patreon which will trigger a specific response from the bot. or !socials if you want 1 message for everything. I realize now that you are streaming in 720p, it is greatly participating in my perception of the game being too "small" on the stream. If you are able to stream in 1080p that would be better. I realize you might not be able to do that. Most streamers have their game full screen, don't have the chat displayed, and put their "webcam"/face somewhere not disruptive. I hope you can find some useful things for you in this comment. I realize it's a process, and you probably have constraints I am not aware of.

2:11:31 note that you can Trade with NPCs when you have dialogue options to choose from. Most have very little if anything but some might have other things to sell, either items or fun lore

1:41:24 On the controller, if you hold down X (ps5) or A (Xbox) you can send out a radar scan to a limited distance. When you let go, you get a list of options that you can interact with. You can then press Square / X to get a context menu that gives you options, including attack, open, lock pick, pickup, steal etc as available. Useful for difficult to target items if you are close, especially when there are a lot of targets in one area

In my first attempt at trying out the game, both my Tav and Lae'zael rolled nat ones in trying to free Shadowheart. Big "womp womp" moment lol

2:29:11 Group All is weird. If you only have 1 person I grouped, it first ungroups everyone. Do it again to group them back. You can also do it from afar. Once you get close they will all move to the character you’re controlling

1:17:36 Initiative: Alert feat is actually very helpful in this game

New (and maybe all) DMs should play the first few hours of this game. Level 1 sets the stakes and is a tutorial, but there are still plenty of options to allow players to show their personality and RP Level 2 involves getting into that temple but there are at least 4 distinct ways to get that done that that use the strengths of the party, showing players that there are plenty of different ways to accomplish a goal. Then when you get to your first "town" you get like 5 different quests all to solve the problem established in the tutorial, showing that players are in charge of their own destiny. They aren't being railroaded into a single path, so they can invest in the world. It's some of the best "DM"-ing I've ever seen 😉

@ 2:03:10 "I'm not going to weigh in on this yet, not until--" Just a small piece of non-spoilery advice that'll save a lot of headache later... you can't weigh in on it later. There's several points in the game where, once you've started a conversation, you *must* make a choice, and doing nothing (or, in this case, saying nothing) is a choice in and of itself, and the end result might be something you want verses something you don't want. I think, maybe if you had clicked "leave" instead of "say nothing," you would've just left, able to come back to it, but because you specifically chose to say nothing, you progressed the scene along instead of letting it cycle back as it would if you ignored them. It helps to think about this as less a proper game of D&D and more a video game, because there's a lot of dialogue options and choices that you might not intuitively understand. Another player I watched ended up making a major decision he didn't want to make because he misunderstood what was being said, and I know how shitty it is to have your intentions clash with the game's logic.

Well, you did better against the group of intellect devourers than I did. My party got wiped out and had to reload from save at least twice before I decided discretion was the better part of valor and that I should explore in other directions before trying to take them on again. 😆

Mike I’d suggest for future play throughs turn off the karmic dices off. Karmic dices allows the game to fudge dice rolls to make it easier to succeed rolls if you fail too many times or at least that’s what I’ve heard

couldn’t make it to the stream itself but i had a great time watching just now. looking forward to the next time you play :)

the ui to play this with a controller looks very confusing

Not sure if you mentioned it during CC or this stream. Have you played the original two BG games?

omg it's happening, it's real, it's amazing XD

in future please make the stream layout less intrusive, it's really hard to watch

The title is an orange flag.

Seriously? No character creation?