Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

Deathgrowl wrote: ↑Mon Dec 08, 2025 10:53 am A few years ago, we had people arguing for "quality of life improvements", that were bordering on convenience arguments, though they denied it being convenience. Now we have people flat out arguing for convenience, apparently. Personally i find a lot of problems with excessive convenience. Sure, we shouldn't be expected to treat it as a life and geography simulator. But there has to be some limit to this. It's not even just about immersion.

But let's start there, and let's just point at travel as it's such a blatant case of hyper convenience right now. Teleportation isn't a trivial matter in the setting. It is a difficult skill, even if you are capable of uttering the incantation for the spell. You can teleport to areas you've been to in the past, if you are able to sufficiently picture the place in your mind. And you are able to teleport to areas based on a detailed map, if you are skilled enough to read it. And yet we have people with literally no training in spellcasting being able to teleport with barely any difficulty across the surface, let alone any skill in geography or aptitude for focusing on a memorised location.

We have expanded the amount of fast travel opportunities to the point where we could almost just outright delete the areas in-between, because practically no one every goes there anymore. Many of my most enjoyable RP experiences on this server have happened as chance encounters along the road. That never happens now. There's no longer anyone trying to be highwaymen. There's basically no point for a DM to set up a scene for someone to come across while travelling. All such events now have to be announced. It means "RP hubs" are far more difficult to change, because they end up being next to the caravan, as opposed to organically appearing where people congregate (in the past, such places have been the Elfsong Tavern patio with the old BG maps, the Lewd Lyre [Darius Estate], and more - essentially places where one or two players started making things happen and then people gathered around them).

No, this isn't just Deathgrowl complaining about mindless grinding again. But who - and what - does this extreme amount of convenience serve? It doesn't add to the RP of the server what so ever, and honestly only detracts from it. All it does, is make people able to go from an "RP hub" or a merchant hub, to an area closer to the high level PvE content. No, I'm not complaining about grinders (though I would personally rather focus on enabling and encouraging RP, than conveniencing the grinders, but that's another story). This affects also people who go on adventures. And it affects those of us who are also DMs, as mentioned above. It devalues teleportation as a skill, and it makes many of the server areas feel redundant.

There's also a layer of metagaming/godmodding that happens when a sneak follows someone through a fast travel caravan (ignoring the caravaneer NPC, essentially). And I know that happens.

This is a design that only enables and even encourages a lazy approach to RP. There's enough examples in the world of gaming to see that too much convenience detracts from the purpose of the game. Makes things feel boring, bland and meaningless. Some convenience is understandable. Good, even. But there's a line. And I personally feel we've crossed that one by quite a margin already.