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With that much power, it’s easy to look at the tools and get overwhelmed. Create new items? Our GM made me wolf-skin armor, with custom stats and bonuses. Kill enemies and paint blood on the ground to represent a particularly gruesome murder? Sure. Create new Vignettes and new Vignette options? Easy. There are dozens of plates spinning here, and anything that can be done in preparation for a campaign can also be done on-the-fly. It’s quite a bit of work for the GM to keep this all moving.
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That was enough for a success, so the GM then 1) Rolled dice for damage 2) Subtracted that damage from the affected goblin’s health bar and 3) Removed the beehive from my inventory. Our GM had the in-game dice roll tool pop up, I clicked to roll a D20, and I got a 16. Like any tabletop game, the GM can fake it though. Divinity has no rule for this, no bespoke means for throwing bees on an enemy. Here’s an example: In our campaign I wanted to attack a goblin by throwing a beehive I’d found at them. Combat technically abides by the Divinity rules, with Divinity classes and powers and movement (at least until someone mods in fifth edition D&D). The visual representation is there to guide players, to give them additional information, not act as rule of law like in Sword Coast Legends. It’s less like playing a computer game and more like an incredibly elaborate bunch of miniatures. This interplay between the in-game representation and the more tabletop-esque act of players sitting around and debating what to do next is really what made my Divinity demo special. Players then vote on what action to take and the GM resolves the situation. Our party wanted to feed the wolf some of the ham we had in our wagon, and the GM was able to edit the Vignette on the fly and add that option. Players can diverge from the GM’s path though. For instance, we came upon a wolf in the road, with options to leave it alone or attack it. They’re bits of text that pop up mid-game (at the GM’s prompting) that add some flavor to the environment and then prompt players to choose what happens next. But Larian’s aimed to make Original Sin II’s Game Master Mode function a lot more like actual tabletop with a visual component, not just an on-the-fly multiplayer session.
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