Let's Play Arcanum, Part 3: Fail! Fail! Fail!

Oh boy, y'all. Going to briefly depart from the chronological narrative approach, here, to tell the story of Amaira Grayson's No Good Very Bad Day, or, An Arcanum Comedy of Errors.

When You Ask People for Build Advice, Read Carefully

I'm not sure when or how I realized this, but I totally blew off part of what Caelyn suggested I do for this character! She said Explosives and Therapeutics, not Explosives and Herbology. I think I had it in my head that "Caelyn always does Herbology" because back in the day, that's how she and I always built our folks for those early Healing Salve and Fatigue Restorer formulas. So I read "Therapeutics" as just a fancy word for "making healing items". But actually Therapeutics is its own tech category that starts with a Persuasion booster, which would probably be helpful for talking my way past everyone's hatred of half-orcs??

Says it right there, Sabey-doo. There-a-pew-tics. Learn2read.

 
I'm sorry, Caelyn! Maybe I should start over? >.<

Speaking of Hating Half-Orcs, Don't Mouth Off to the White People

Let me be plain. I mentioned off-hand in the first post of this Let's Play that Arcanum's gender politics are kinda dubious. But the racial politics are much, much worse.

It starts with the banally offensive fantasy game nonsense of implementing fantastical species as race stand-ins while flattening and whitewashing actual human ethnic diversity. There are no Black humans in Arcanum, so far as I can tell. There are white humans, white gnomes, white dwarves, white elves, white halflings, green orcs, green ogres, and swarthy half-breeds. To get a character portrait that looks Native, you have to play a half-orc. Half-ogres are the only race option with anything resembling African or Black, which includes a whopping -4 Intelligence penalty. So, yes. In the world of Arcanum, Black folks are canonically, demonstrably stupider than everyone around them.

Imagine following the natural impulse to create a character that looks kinda like yourself, and getting... this.

 
Ugh. Need to wash out my brain. BRB.

But, OK. Part of what's interesting, even if not well thought-out, about Arcanum is playing a character of an ethnic minority, dealing with the uphill battle that entails. It's like a video game implemented John Scalzi's "difficulty settings" analogy of privilege and marginalization eleven years before he wrote that blog post. You roll into town and have to trudge through a gauntlet of aggressions, micro- and otherwise, which sucks (and man, I can imagine if that's stuff you deal with on a daily basis in the real world, you'd have NO interest in playing through it for funsies), but if you're a privileged sort like me it could be a mile-in-their-shoes experience, right?

Except. Get this. The main way you overcome that, in game? Bowing and scraping and being a complete kiss-ass. By begging and rolling over, you make NPCs' distrustful Reactions go up to the point where they'll do ordinary things like sell you supplies. Yes indeed: the game codifies the racist notion that if marginalized people just fawned politely enough, white people would like them better and everyone would get along. After enacting this "OwO pweeze tweat me wike eekwo?" script with two or three NPCs, I'd had enough, and stood up for myself when the town doctor started slagging on me. This prompted him to pull his gun and try to kill me, and my ensuing self-defense locked me out of a major quest.

It makes me want to do a Kill Whitey playthrough, where every fucker who won't show human decency gets an axe to the head.

 
That was my first reload of a save file. Now I click through the mandatory abasement, trying not to read it.

The Spinning AI Bug

Just a quick note, here, but I almost had to quit this Let's Play due to a technical issue. When a fight happens near NPCs who might react and join in, like town guards, sometimes the game gets stuck calculating what those off-screen actors should do, and never advances to the next turn. Thankfully, there's a simple workaround: skip one turn by flipping the combat into Real-Time mode for a split second. Thought I'd mention it, in case someone tries following in my footsteps.

Molotov Cocktails in a Crowded Room: Hilarity Ensues

All right, so I sucked up to the doctor and got his quest, which is to join him in fighting off a bunch of bank robbers. Cool beans. Plus I'd just gotten the materials needed for that Molotov Cocktail recipe I'd had from the start of the game per Caelyn's advice, so I was eager to give those homemade bombs a try. I kick in the bank doors, light a bomb, and huck it at a criminal head.

Ladies, gentlemen, and noble enbys. The chaos!

• I get a "destroyed armor" result with my hit. So the bank robber is now robbing banks in his boxer shorts.
• The area of effect damages some furniture in the bank. This upsets local townsfolk, who turn hostile.
• My AI companions therefore start beating the crap out of the town guards and bystanders.
• "My AI companions" at this point include Doc Roberts.
• Put the above together, and Roberts, gunslinging badass, a more dedicated lawman than the official town constable, starts murdering people. Guards, passersby, the bank teller.
• Roberts is, however, still part of the town faction, so with each townsperson death he gets more angry at me.
• When everyone in proximity is dead, from bank robber to gnome on a stroll, combat ends.
• Doc Roberts leaves the party thanks to the conclusion of his "defend the bank" quest.
• Doc Roberts immediately initiates combat against us, owing to his Reaction being ground to 0 from all the murder. We thus have to kill him too.

Eventually I reload my game, once my laughter calms down enough for me to navigate the menus.

To Make Explosives, Train Chemistry

After those memorable fun times, I knew I needed to keep this Molotov thing going. The ingredients for Molotovs are Fuel and Rags. (I would have thought that a bottle would be more of a limiting agent than rags, yet that gets manufactured in the process somehow.) Rags you find everywhere; Fuel takes a little more doing. For my first few bombs, I bought the Fuel, but that'd be an expensive way to go, long-term. Lo and behold, a shopkeeper in this first town sells a schematic for the making of Fuel. Brilliant! With Wine and Brewer's Yeast, I can make my own Fuel. I didn't have the expertise at first, but thought that'd come as I level up my Explosives. Right?

Whoops. Wrong.

Why couldn't they just put it on the Chemistry tab? My brain... I don't understand...

 
Fuel is an Explosives schematic, found on the Explosives tab of your crafting screen, but Explosives training helps you not one bit in creating it. Instead, you need Chemistry. You see, it's misleading to think of a schematic as requiring a specific level of tech skill to follow. Rather, the ingredients have skill level prerequisites. In the case of Fuel, the Wine ingredient is a no-brainer that can be used in a recipe without any specific training, but Brewer's Yeast needs Rank 25 Chemistry. Its inclusion in the Explosives playbook is just a conceptual grouping, with no game-mechanical impact--a total red herring.

Maybe next time I'll fail a little less and make some progress. In the meantime, why not check out the SteemGC tag for more gaming content?

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