Larian Studios Forums General Chat Moving away from D&D and BG3 - a good move

Larian moving to a new project with their own IP is a very good move. The D&D ruleset and FR as a setting are very limiting and..well, let's be honest, they got a LOT of pretty big flaws.

MECHANICAL:
- AC system sucks. No real difference between a high dex fighter and a heavily armored one. Armor doesn't behave like armor should (defelction/reduction).
- only every 2 points in an attribute matter. This is supremely stupid. Every point should have an effect.
- HP bloat. There's absolutely no reason to ever increase HP with level (unless you CON was increased). HP made sense in early CRPG games where you had very few stats to track and define a character, so HP was basically combat power. But now, with dodge, parry, armor, defensive skills and all kinds of other stuff you can use, increasing HP by level is pointless
- too many super-special classes, subclasses and abilities which makes it a nightmare to balance.
- spell system that makes lower level spells useless. Furthermore, given that spells are limited unlike weapon attacks, a big damage range for them is absolutely terrible. Instead of example 4-40 damage, spells should have MUCH higher minimum damage (20-40 minimum)
- the system for weapon skill leaves much to be desired. While a broader damage range for weapons does make sense (perhaps your edge alignment was off, of you didn't compensate for the target movement well enough, etc..), there's a missed opportunity here. Yes, you get +1 to hit, but there could be so much more. How about with weapon proficiency increasing, your minimum damage increases - sword goes from 1-8 to 2-8 to 3-8 or 5-8, depending on weapon mastery (basically showing your blade handling is getting better). You do more damage on average.


LORE/WORLD/NARRATIVE:
- revolving door godhood just cheapens the gods and makes them silly and underwhelming most of the time.
- a hodge-podge mix of every random thing from everywhere (including different cultures and eras) that just ends up looking disjointed
- resurrection cheapens death and introduces a problem where you have resurrection spells, but they only work on your party members.
- teleportation trivializes distances. Magic has to be heavily scrutinized, because once it is established that magic can do something, tons of sensible uses for that magic become apparent, but never used - effectively making the citizens of that world looking stupid. Note that NPC being stupid/incompetent so that the PC can swoop in and solve the issue is a common trope.



There's more, but this is just from the top of my head. So I for one am GLAD Larian is doing it's own thing where it will have creative freedom. Even if it's just "FR and D&D, but better".
With that a few more thoughts:
- RPG parties often end up looking like a circus, with the most unique and rare individuals with the most convoluted backstories gather. I suppose a lot of writers thing that unless a character isn't some super-rare race or has some super-unique/quirky story, that he won't be interesting. I consider it a weakness of a writer.
- If your new IP/setting will have elves, just let them be elves. Don't fall for the "our elves are different" trap and just add horns or weird proportions to make them look alien or something. There's no point in calling them elves, is there?
- Keep the scale smaller. No challenging god and attaining godhood. Personally I'm sick and tired of it (also cheapens the whole goodhood thing)

Meh. Frankly your points are either just plain wrong, caused by Larians implementation, or pretty irrelevant in the bigger picture.

D&D is an excellent rulesystem that provides an enormous depth, flexibility, and balance, after it was finetuned over 50 years by very talented people. Its main strings here are really the company attached. You dont get full control of what you're going to do when doing a D&D game. Larian was told they have to make a mind flayer game. The only other problem of D&D is that its designed for tabletop, so there are restrictions to what can be done. All computations have to be designed in such a way that people can easily do them by hand.

But yeah Larian is moving on. If they can get their own rulesystem working with compareable quality, nobody will complain, least of all me. I strongly doubt they can though. The only rulesystems I know that can really compete with D&D are MMORPG ones that have been tuned and tuned again over years by the developers. There we have some that work really well, like World of Warcraft or VSoH. Of course even there some games are hopeless, too.

But selfmade rulesystems for non-MMO roleplaying games, like for example in Dragon Age: Origins (I didnt care for any for the followup games either, so I havent played them) or The Elder Scrolls more often than unfortunately just plain suck.

About TES alone, I could make a wall of text about the many fundamental design errors in TES which make these games a total PITA to play. The whole idea of monitoring the players every action is fundamnentally wrong and retarded. Just because my mage uses a bow every once in a while doesnt mean he ends up a master archer in the end. Thats fundamentally inbalanced by the very design, and only the first really retarded problem of the whole system. And the rulesystem is really primitive. Before TES V Skyrim offered only three classes really, and nothing would stop you to get all three combined either. Even with Skyrim you can still get every feat in the game, but at least now you have to really work hard on that; before it was basically automatic. The magic system is absolutely minimal and really just has a couple of damage types that all work the same way and very few effects that are actually original. D&D is of course loaded with original spells, so much so that Larian refused in BG3 to implement higher than tier 6, because too complicated. Etc.

Some of these systems work okay. Like the SPECIAL system for Fallout. Not as good as D&D, sure, and quite limited in regards to archieved balance (some characters are much stronger than others), but fundamentally balanced in its design principles and perfectly fun to play. I dislike Fallout for other reasons - the whole idea of a postapocalyptic game world is simply too depressing for me. I far prefer a fantasy, steampunk, or science fiction setting. Although of course post apocalyptic is considered a variant of science fiction, but I rather want a more positive one, like Star Trek or Star Wars.

So yes I hope Larian will find good new rulesystems that are fundamentally fun to play. I havent played their other games so I dont know what the status there is. I hear they have the physical stuff they have in BG3 there, too. That alone is too gimmicky and doesnt really attract me though.

Your personal opinion. I very strongly disagree. D&D is a very shallow and superficial system, extremely centered on random chance at the expense of reactivity to the player's character-build. It just plain sucks.

Not even remotely; many people like D&D. Its basically THE roleplaying rulesystem since half a century and even makes it into Hollywood productions. For example Stranger Things had heavy references to it recently.

Something being popular and something being "good"/"excellent" are not at all the same thing.

So apparently everything thats popular is, as a rule, bad.

Either you lack the ability to comprehend very basic statements or else you are deliberately being an ass. Either way, I've no interest in engaging with you.