playthroughs
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so this is only a partial session but it’s taking me forever to write up,
lol. so here it is.
12/26; I’m in kind of a dark place personally and we’re all tired and
burnt-out, so much drink is taken and we can’t remember how the buttons
work.
I had to look up the last time we played. Apparently around July 4th
sometime, but the last time we were in regular rotation it was, like, May,
so. It’s been a bit. (For a quick recap, this is the Wee Precious Flower
Prince tag where my previous write-ups are
https://dragonlady7.dreamwidth.org/tag/wee+precious+flower+prince+geralt,
and if you don’t feel like finding out the hard way, the tl;dr version is
that at the beginning of the quarantine lockdown when I got laid off I went
to isolate with my BFF from high school, heretofore known as Math Mom or MM
for short (a math teacher and a mom, that’s a complicated backstory), and
one of my college roommates, to whom I introduced her, and who she’s now
been with since like 2000 or 2001 thru his whole medical school experience
and now numerous years as a doctor, who for simplicity’s sake I call Doctor
Friend. He incidentally minored in video gaming, and as a result is real
good at Xbox. He often plays it in the evenings to unwind; he has been
working rather unsurprisingly hard through all of (gestures broadly)
this. MM and I bullied him into downloading Witcher 3 early in the
quarantine lockdown because we’d watched the Netflix miniseries and it
would be more interesting than the shoot-em-up multiplayer he plays most of
the time. (Warframe, if you’re into that shit.))
The kids have been intermittently in school but never more than two days a
week and often less. But anyway, the part that’s germane to this writeup is
that, perhaps not surprisingly, the children have since our last session
destroyed the gaming chair in the living room, and so as I lay our fair
scene, understand that our brave game controller operator, DF, is operating
under the handicap of not having a chair to sit in.
So the first thing that happened is that he sat on— ok I should back up.
They have a trampoline in their living room. It’s a small trampoline, about
three, three and a half feet across. (My feeble American brain helpfully
suggests to me that that’s about a meter if you split the difference.) It
was given to them by DF’s fitness nut father. Not for the children, but
because this is a great form of low-impact exercise for adults; you don’t
bounce on it, you use it to run in place. I don’t know; he’s very
Manhattan, which incorporates a certain amount of trendiness and folds in a
healthy dose of being super neurotic about unexpected things, as far as I
can tell.
SO anyway. They have a trampoline in their living room, upon which their
son bounces for probably six to eight hours a day. He got a Switch for
Christmas, and so plays Yoshi’s Crafted World while jumping on a trampoline
for hours. This child is about to turn eight and could likely run a
marathon; he proudly pulled up his shirt at his dad’s request and showed
off his sculpted, ripped abdominal muscles, which are sort of hilarious on
a child his size. (He’s still just barely at the age where his head’s a bit
too big for his body, but his body is r i p p e d so it’s adorable and
hilarious. LISTEN we all have to keep ourselves going somehow in the
pandemic and this is way less distracting than his sister’s method, which
has been to develop a massive anxiety disorder. KIDDING. wellll sort of.
Anyway that could be going worse but it could be going better, but this is
all a digression.)
So there’s a trampoline in the TV room. DF booted up the xbox, sat on the
trampoline, and while the screen loaded proceeded to go on a 20-minute rant
about Cyberpunk 2077.
He hasn’t gotten a lot of people time lately, so.
Long story short he was disappointed about CP2077. Join the club.
Finally we got Witcher loaded up. It’s raining and we’re in a… Novigrad
maybe? and we don’t recognize Geralt’s outfit and because of the rain shine
effect and the way the tails of his shirt hang it looks like he’s wearing
1) really tight thigh-highs that are 2) causing his buttocks to kind of
squeeze out the tops in a muffin-top effect and 3) said buttocks look as
though they are encased in silver metallic booty shorts.
We paused to look at what the fuck he was wearing, panning all around, and
determined that no it’s like, a short tunic over like, hosen-style
trousers, and his braies are hanging out, and what looks like muffin-top
buttocks is really the short tail of his tunic kind of blousing out under
the tight belt that holds the Guy Fieri orange and black gambeson we forgot
we’d put him in.
Suddenly there was screaming, and we realized that apparently by standing
there in the middle of the bridge in the rain looking at Geralt we were
causing the guards to panic, so we had to leave suddenly.
“Now,” DF said meditatively, as Geralt walked along a rainy sidewalk, “I
have to remember what all the buttons do.” He called up the map, decided on
a particular quest, and figured we’d walk along the way and look at all the
big question marks on the map. Somewhere in there, we’d remember what the
buttons do.
We passed a beggar pissing off the edge of a bridge in the dark, which was
kind of more local color than we’d strictly expected to see, and next to
him a woman was randomly pitching pails of water off into the darkness.
Self-refilling water pails, which was even more surprising.
Contract: Mysterious Tracks. Well, we gotta walk there, so.
“Where’s Yennefer?” MM asks. “She smelled great at that funeral.”
“Before I smell the ladies, I’ve got to remember how the buttons work,”
says DF.
“Press X to smell ladies,” Dude suggests. (He knows nothing of video games
and has only sat in on these sessions a couple of times, so he has no idea
what we’re talking about but is all-in on the color commentary.)
We encountered some bees and remembered that we have a terrible vendetta
against bees in this game. “They need to die!” MM said.
There ensued an awkward few moments as DF realized he had no idea how to
access any of the Witcher powers. He had to scroll around and find the
diagram, but fortunately he had enough presence of mind to retreat beyond
where the bees were stinging him.
He managed to Igni the hive but then it wouldn’t let him pick up the
honeycomb, and in the attempt, he got caught in a little copse of three
trees and rattled around until we were all dying of laughter. Finally he
managed to get out, and we resumed the journey, realized we were heading
the entirely wrong direction, and then were beset by wolves, which was
worrying until he realized they were only level 5. Yes, this is still Death
March mode, but Geralt’s level 17; it didn’t take much to kill a pack of
wolves, surely.
Er, well. Okay, it kind of did. “I don’t…” DF said slowly, pushing buttons,
“remember how to… heal? Uhhh I probably need to figure that out.” Then
after a few moments of waving around his weirdly-glowing sword (we’d
forgotten he had this bizarre sort of scythe-thing of a fantasy blade now)
he said “Uhhh how do I put my thingy away?”
“In some games, you can’t,” said my-Dude, referring to the Cyberpunk 2077
glitch where the character’s dick clips through their trousers unfixably.
DF finally got the sword sheathed, after a bit more fiddling, and then was
set upon by deserters.
“Your ass is mine!” one of the deserters yelled, and MM was like “Oh! Well
if you know how to press the buttons, you can have it!”
“I mean,” said DF, accidentally sheathing his sword and then punching
several deserters with his fists instead, “tempting.”
He did manage to kill the deserters, whereupon there were immediately
guards we were cautioned not to behave aggressively around lest we upset
them. “Where the fuck were they for the deserters,” DF grumbled.
Geralt walked through a campfire and got set on fire and then just sort of
wandered around like that for a bit, which led MM to quip that his
muffin-top-ass was smoking hot.
DF was still intensely trying to remind himself of how the buttons worked,
so there followed an interlude where, sword drawn, Geralt locomoted himself
down the street by a combination of repeated hopping, rolling, and
flailing. Nobody called the cops, and we didn’t kill any bystanders. It’s
not like DF doesn’t use the Xbox all the dang time, but he hadn’t so much
as looked at Witcher since (I looked it up) a solitary excursion in July,
after not having touched it since May. So… bit of a re-learning curve here.
“Sweet,” DF said, “ghouls,” and went to town fighting them. Of course one
dropped the predictable loot, which is the only thing Dude remembered from
last time we watched this game being played— he made up a song about
Monster Bone and gleefully redeployed it here.
“Oh yeah,” DF said, finishing up the fight and destroying the monster
nest. “There was a whole sequence of things I used to do. Like. Oiling
myself up. I need to get back into that.” Meditatively, he paged through
the options. “Potions and food and shit. Yeah.”
He’d picked up a new quest called Tough Luck but then couldn’t find it in
the quest list. Shrugging, he went on with the game, and then suddenly it
made the “AAHH” noise and was like “Quest completed: Tough Luck” so
apparently that quest consists of just whatever you were gonna do anyway.
Good to know?
“That’s level thirteen,” DF muttered to himself, as a new enemy charged
onto the scene. “All right, I need to actually figure out how to fight
now.” And then he promptly put the game on pause and took an intermission
to go mix another drink.
Quite a lot of drink had been taken all around, by all of us, at this
point. We’d had a cheese plate before and during and after dinner, with
many exotic cheeses (MM’s brother had sent it for the holidays), and yet DF
reappeared eating a string cheese, which set my Dude to Judging him, and
sparked a heated debate over the validity of string cheese as a foodstuff.
“There’s a time and a place for different cheeses,” DF said defensively,
“and now is the time for string cheese.” “It’s not even really cheese!”
Dude protested, which sparked a lengthy search for the container so the
nutrition information and ingredients could be read. I absented myself from
the discussion, instead seeking out yet more evil things to put into eggnog.
Immediately after intermission, we returned to strategize how to defeat an
actual enemy with actual stats. DF oiled himself moderately and just hit
the thing a bunch and killed it, but. “Oh EATING,” he said suddenly,
“that’s the other thing that restores health,” and ran down the road
alternately drawing and sheathing each of his two swords.
We hit An Unfortunate Turn Of Events, which is yet another of the many,
many, many bits in Witcher 3 where some poor hapless peasant who in keeping
with the world building should probably be illiterate still sits down with
pen and expensive parchment to write out some incredibly dramatic-ironic
words that by rights he really should not be taking the time in an
emergency to right. Every time, I recite the bit from Monty Python’s Holy
Grail where they’re reading a note scrawled into the rock face and it says
“Castle Aaargh” and they theorize that perhaps the teller died while
carving it.
Anyway this Castle Aargh note was about refugees finding a safe place to
flee too, next to a bunch of refugees who had not arrived safely and were
now dead beyond helping. Nothing to be done but to loot their corpses, of
course.
Then we killed whatever monsters had done them in, of course, and then the
screen froze up for a cutscene.
“Ohh,” DF said, “this is when everyone walks back all burly.” Meaning, of
course, the animation that plays when you clear an area so it’s safe for
its inhabitants to come back— and the inhabitants are invariably these
large, capable-looking muscular dudes and you’re like why could you not do
anything about this situation?? They always look sort of threatening. But
sure enough, a bunch of meathead-looking dudes swaggered onto the screen,
and when the cutscene ended, Geralt was surrounded by small children
skipping ropes directly over the dismembered corpses of whatever thing he’d
just killed, while he’s still in the process of looting.
Distantly, one of the sprites coughed, and DF yelled “HE’S GOT THE ‘RONA”,
proving that we do still live in the current era.
Onscreen, the scenery unfurled into a particularly dramatic sunset, and MM
sighed. “I’m feeling the spice nog,” she admitted, sipping some of her
extremely-boozy eggnog to which she’d added spiced jaegermeister.
DF turned around and said, mock-mournfully, “You used to feel MY spice nog.”
(Hm their 20th wedding anniversary is coming up.)
We went into a village to find out about a contract, and as we stood
talking to a man, a random woman walked up and just RAMMED into Geralt’s
back, knocking him staggering forward. The woman made one of the
weirdly-sexy “oof!” sort of noises people make in these games. “YOU ran
into ME,” DF said, somewhat aggrieved.
Anyway we got our info and ran off into the woods. “Big,” Geralt said, of
the tracks. “Really big.” I love how he monologues to himself all the
goddamned time. We picked up a trail and had to follow a scent. Bear? we
guessed. “Fiend?” A cave popped up on the minimap, so we started doing laps
of it, more or less, trying to figure out what the fuck we were looking
for. We kept being offered crow’s eye, and told to Examine poop, so we
picked flowers and looked at shit.
Abruptly we found the cave entrance, by falling into it. “I bonked!” MM
said, mimicking what her children still say when they fall, and immediately
followed it up with her own line. “Do you need a band-aid, Geralt?”
He did not, and only took slight fall damage, fortunately. Immediately we
found the fiend, who was dead.
Right about now DF began to complain that the trampoline upon which he was
sitting was not super ergonomic. We paused to refill our drinks, and thence
continued our examination of the cave, since it seemed important to know
what had killed the fiend.
“Can you summon your horse inside the cave?” MM asked.
DF pushed a button. Geralt made a “poof” noise and emitted a green gas. [ok
i think he took a potion, is what happened, but this is what it looked like
to us.] “Not that button,” DF said.
“Excuse you,” MM said, affronted.
“Sorry,” DF said, in old reflex.
Since we are old, when we discovered that the fiend killer was a chort, we
all said more or less in unison “The King’s gone mad with power! He’s gonna
eat the Chort http://www.hrwiki.org/wiki/Where%27s_The_Cheat%3F!” (oh my
god kids these days don’t know about that site. we all feel old thinking of
it.)
Turns out we need to make a chort lure, but I believe I’ve mentioned before
here that DF operates under a terrible handicap where he’s from downstate,
so in his dialect the word “lure” is pronounced identically to the word
“lore” so he’s going on and on about Chort Lore.
Coincidentally we need fiend dung and crow’s eye, which were both outside.
Kind of a gimme, but like, whatever man, we’ll take it. So we made what DF,
possibly tired of us mocking his speech impediment accent,
dubbed Chort Lube.
“He needs a good swording,” DF reflected, as he set up his items.
“Put the lore in your slot!” I told him.
“Lube,” he corrected. “Lube in my slot.”
By this point of the evening, rather a lot of drink had been taken, so at
that moment he accidentally de-equipped all the garments on Geralt’s upper
body, and then exited the equipment panel.
Geralt stood half-naked upon the moonlit hillside, looking dramatic and
perhaps a bit chilly.
“Fuck,” DF said, belatedly noticing what he’d done, “where did my shirt go?”
After some struggle he got Geralt’s shirt back on but then we really
struggled attempting to deploy the chort lube. “You cannot do that now,”
the game said at one point. Then DF Igni’d the hillside, then he jumped a
few times. “You cannot do that now,” it said again. “No…. no…. not here…
what the fuck.” Igni again.
It was a regular lil comedy of errors. It had little gold circles we were
supposed to be in, but DF hadn’t played long enough to get un-rusty before
he’d drunk enough gin to be impaired, so.
Eventually, we got the hillside lubed. Then we had to lube the sword. I was
quite impaired by this point as well but somehow still instantly knew that
relict oil was what was necessary. (Why is this what my brain has now?)
We went back into the cave, and found some Devil’s Puffball, as you do. “I
feel like I should use that on my face before I go out,” MM observed.
“No,” I said, “i feel like that’s more of a decollté situation?”
At some point, MM noticed that in the intervening time since DF last got
Geralt a haircut, DF had grown his own facial hair out accidentally to
match. Chops, mustache, soul patch— some of that is to leave the areas
where a surgical mask needs a good fit on the face bare, in DF’s case, but
it did mean it looks like DF got Geralt’s hair did to match him.
while we were distracted by this, we fell into the cave again, which was
good because we had forgotten where it was.
The chort came in, ready to fight, and DF said, nonchalantly, “At a time
like this, I like to have a lil snack,” and equipped himself a ham
sandwich. “Wonder what sign is gonna be useful for this,” he went on,
still unconcernedly paging through his setup. “Well, a lil quen never hurt.”
After a bit, DF observed, “Hm, sword’s not doing a ton of damage.” For
once, for a wonder, he was pretty good about renewing Quen as it broke.
“Eeehhhhhh ah here we go!”
At last, the chort went toes-up, and we looted the corpse and then fiddled
around endlessly in the inventory screen, as one does.
“He needs bits for his stuff,” DF said.
“No,” MM corrected, “he needs stuff for his bits.”
The quest gave a healthy 320 xp, which was nice.
We noted that we still don’t have superior beast oil, which was like, the
only thing MM wanted out of this whole game. Upon inspection, we realized
that we don’t even have Enhanced beast oil yet, which is a bummer. So we
need to get bison grass and bear fat, which sounds like a hell of a party
if you ask me.
And like. A cockatrice stomach, which. Not a party, there.
Quest complete, we fast traveled to Ursten and hit up a few question marks
enroute to the White Lady quest, up next. We passed a really lovely
sunrise, and paused to admire it.
DF got up and un-velcroed his pants loudly. “Uhh,” I said, not sure where
this was going.
“Is there superior beast oil?” MM asked excitedly, still mentally stuck on
the prior conversation.
“Come find out,” DF said, and staggered off to the bathroom. (She did not.)
When he came back, I commented that I hadn’t expected his pants, which
looked like, IDK, regular dude pants, to be Velcro at the waist, so he came
over to show me the fastening and accidentally still had his fly down so I
fell backward off the couch and there was a great deal of hilarity over the
fact that he’d just Cyberpunk’d me.
Next up we paused to look at a scenic lil island full of nekkers, that was
also sort of surprisingly on fire?
Abruptly DF discovered the trampoline was too annoying to lie on any
further, so he relocated to the couch where his wife was, and instead of
sitting next to her, sat on her, after the manner of a very large dog not
quite aware he is too large to be a lapdog. Unfazed, as this has been a
regular occurrence over the two decades of their pair bond, MM moved her
drink to her other hand to rescue it from being spilled.
She said, of Geralt’s onscreen look, “I am still having trouble visually
parsing your muffin top buttocks,” only through the filter of her
considerable consumption of Jaegermeister, it came out “I’m having trouble
with your muffin buckets,” which if any of us are sober enough to remember
this will likely pass into household lore.
DF realized he can’t read the text onscreen from his comfortable seat atop
his wife’s entire person, and asked if she could make out the text. After
some squinting, she managed, but said, “I need my opera glasses if we’re to
continue this configuration.”
Meanwhile, Geralt had gone and stood in a hot cadaver fire.
Shortly thereafter, he discovered a beehive. “AHH IT’S BEES,” he said,
running wildly around.
“Surely he can squiggle them with his fingermagic,” MM said.
“Ah yes,” DF said, “my fingermagic is well known across the land.”
The quest name was “The Things Men Do For Coin” but it popped up with
something obscuring part of it, so all we could read was “The Things Men Do
For C” and MM briefly lost her mind about what C stood for. I’ll leave that
to the imagination.
(I was texting with a friend and in an adorably ace manner they were like
‘i was thinking about sailors needing vitamin C…’ ah, no, that was not the
general, uh, thrust of the conversation in the room.)
Break for inventory management. Geralt tried on some baggy trousers and
smacked his thighs, which in the bulky pants did a strange firm sort of
jiggle. We all laughed quite a lot at that.
I should have switched to water, but at this point apparently filled my cup
with vodka. Listen it is a cold dark fucking winter and I’m gona do what
I’m gonna do.
Endregas showed up but none of us could read the screen at all, so much
squinting ensued.
“The endrega queen just got you with her Thagomizer.”
“Endreg queen? Performs in dreg?” “That needs more workshopping.”
Post-fight, Geralt performed an entertaining series of calisthenics while
DF tried in vain to find the “summon Roach” button. Hop, skip, run, punch,
hop, hop, draw sword, put sword away, throw bomb. Whoops! Nope. Nope? Nope.
I finally Googled it and told him how, so he summoned Roach like nothing
had happened and went on our way.
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