Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG3's... Complexity.

I disagree; i mean, certain spells like stop time and wish aren't in the game BUT the spells that works differently than on video game works BETTER. For eg, Animate dead on P&P require corpses, on PFKM you can create d4+2 CR 7 skeletons that has a lot of immunities, so you can put enemies under cloudkill and similar spells while your skeleton wall tank the enemy.

And Kineticists due enemy AI and lack of fly(they could make wings ignore ground effect) has a wing button called Deadly Earth. I still prefer it over making it useless(like nwn2 did with chilling tentacles, no grapple and a fix +5 to hit when on P&P it has grapple and caster level + 8)

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About "difficulty spikes", people trying to fight great wryvns at lv 2, complaining that Bears can OHK your lv 2 guys with a critical, that can't hit a swarm with a axe...

Did this guys played BG1? You can find Basilisks early on and they can insta petrificate your party members. Stone to Flesh is a tier 6 spell which you can only obtain wish ultra expensive scrolls.

I have never played PnP, so I can only talk about computer games.

You say that combat and skill check is more difficult in PnP?
I would assume the computer game is more difficult because you can save and load the game.
If your char dies in PnP and nobody else can revieve or the whole party dies because some unlucky dice rolls, then weeks or even month of playing are gone.

Most DM allow you to create another character of the same level. Others will force you to (re)start at lv 1 but that depends a lot of the party, campaign and DM. And more hard modules like Tomb Of Horrors encourage you to create many backup characters exactly because you will gonna lose a lot of characters, not so much on 5e which is rigged pro party. And other modules doesn't have any combat and is mostly about social iterations and conspiracy. And if we are talking about high level stuff, resurrection is not inaccessible on higher level gameplay.

Things also change with edition and the classes that the DM allow too. For eg, most DM's din't allowed 3.5e warlock. On 5e, most DM's encourages you to play as a warlock over a wizard.

And if we are talking about adapting something to PC, i honestly rather NOT having something than having something nerfed in relation to P&P serving only to cause frustration on the fans of that class/weapon/playstyle/etc

Yeah, what I meant is that the combat and skillchecks are (generally speaking) more difficult and unforgiving in the videogame than in most Pathfinder Adventure paths (the modules or campaigns),
In the videogame, you can reload to try again the fights and skillchecks and respecialize your character several times whenever you wish, as you pointed out so the videogame can be more hardcore.

I think the difficulty of the videogames is OK, since you can just reload and come back later. And you can switch the difficulty in options middle-game so...

About the difficulty, I do not think you can compare because in the TT you have a human DM, so you sometimes help "behind the curtains" your players because you do not want them to lose their characters because of a nat 1; unless they do something so reckless and astonishingly stupid that you have to or if they are really unlucky and you can´t do anything about it.
I enjoy using curses, diseases, long-lasting crippling wounds, etc but I´m not really a fan of killing a character outright if he fails one save.

Also, you can tune the encounters on the move in PNP: If they are killing everything in auto-combat you just throw harder or different enemies at them the next time and the other way around. If they have a group that destroys any damage-sponge enemies you change to encounters with sneaky enemies, more casters, or touch-based attack-creatures, for example. If they are using repeatedly a combination of debuffs to surpass any encounter you throw some undead at them, etc.

It was more a comment about the IA that directs the casters in the videogame (enemy wizards selection of combos is horrid) than the spells itself, I mostly agree with what you said about the PNP-videogame conversion. The IA of the warriors and creatures is fine, I guess.
It´s usual that they change things from PNP to a videogame.

Yes. To be fair, i liked some enemy traps/spell bombos. For eg, on one tomb i believe on chapter 4, after you enter in a dungeon



On Alpha, there are people saying that the enemy mages are far smarter and that in a optional encounter on chapter 1, the enemy



Most of the "difficulty spikes" IMO is just enemies who the PC should't battle without preparation or smarter enemies. People are too used with "press A for awesome" games.

And Baldur's Gate 1 was extremely more unfair than PFKM. You can fight basilisks relative early on and they can insta petrificate party members. The Stone to Flesh is only available on a scroll and even if you reach lv cap, you can't learn it and the scroll is insanely expensive. If game journalists rage because they can't kill a insect swarm with a sword, imagine they having to fight basilisks on BG1...

Or Even Dark Sun(1993). If you awnser the arena guy, he will throw a lot of strong monsters to teach slaves their own place and you will probably gonna die. I an very glad that OwlCat is not listening the awful game journalists and apparently their second game has smarter enemies and more unique enemies.

In most computer games, a good strategy is to start combat by summoning creatures near the enemy.

In BG1 there is a simple way to deal with the basilisks: animate dead. The skelletons are immun to petrify and your chars attack from the distance.

In pathfinder there were the following problems for me:
- Early in the game you have only a few spells, so it is hard to keep your party healed.
Things get easier when you can give your party immunity to poison or resistance to an element plus you have several heal and restore spells and of course more buffs to use before combat that also last longer
- Later one problem was large numbers of enemies where it is almost impossible to prevent your weaker party members from being attacked. You cannot give super high defense to everyone. Well, at least I could not.
- The worst thing are enemies with touch attacks and enemies that lower stats. Its even worse when both things are combined, like some ghost like enemies that drain your stats with touch attacks. Sorry, but I am still not sure what helps against those.

At the moment I am not so much worried about BG3.
But Pathfinder is the most complex rule set I have ever seen.
For expert players its easy. They know when they face an enemy that against this type of enemy helps feat A combined with Spell B and C.
Players new to this system (like me) die 10 times in an encounter only to learn that it would have been useful to learn a different spell at the last level up some hours ago.

The problem with complexity is that first you have to make an enormous effort to understand the system.
Until you understand the system good enough it is just frustrating. You fail all the time and you have to figure out why.
And when you realize your mistakes it often means you have to start again because you have made this mistake many hours ago.
So the problem with complexity is that you have to get over a giant mountain of frustration before you can start having fun.
I totally respect people who can do this, but I can also understand why the percentage of people who finish those games is rather low.

OK, you can use respec, mercenaries and difficulty settings to deal with the problem.
I think the purpose of these things is not that expert players optimize their char for the next dungeon or they increase the challenge when the hardest difficulty setting is still too easy.
The purpose is to give new players a chance to finish the game at all.
Learning new stuff is good, but most people have only limited time and they want to spend this time playing a game.

I know it is a different genre, but Portal is a great example where you learn the rules of the game while playing and you have fun doing so.
When you play it the first time you enjoy it because you learn a lot and you move forward.
When you play it again you have fun because you know how to do some crazy things and find shortcuts or hidden areas.
If ( and thats a huge if) somebody manages to make an RPG similar to Portal, so that the process of learning itself is fun, it would be fantastic.
The fact that you can do crazy things if you know the system well is already present in complex RPGs.

There are forums, guides, etc in the net today. You do not really have to memorize all the rules and devise tactics by yourself anymore if you do not have time or you just don´t want to...
There are plenty of videogames (and tabletop games) with a far simpler character creation or ruleset, It´s refreshing to found one of the few that has interesting and complex mechanics with lots of options.


Touch attacks only surpass the actual armour and natural armor. You can block it with dexterity bonuses, deflection bonuses (lvl 1 shield of faith, protection from evil, etc), dodge bonuses, monk defense, lvl one shield spell and the lvl one spell mage armor, for example. There are more spells that help on higher levels.
You can avoid the ghost´s consumption with death ward, stalwart resolve and some other spells that turn you into an undead (they are inmune) or just use Jaethal as a tank.

The IA is not very smart, you just need to move away: you can protect your weaker party members with sanctuary, invisibility or simply teleport away (unless against those pesky dweomer lions).

>playing a CRPG wth guides
i already had too much of kingmaker spoiled to me prior to playing.
I perosnally enjoy to nto know exactly whats ocming for me. Kingmaker certainly can be pretty bad in that regard.

Which agian, my issue with that design: trap options.
Which is inherent to video games since you dont have a DM that balances the game on the fly

> n BG1 there is a simple way to deal with the basilisks: animate dead.

Animate dead is a tier 3 spell. Takes a long time until you get it on BG1.

> - Early in the game you have only a few spells, so it is hard to keep your party healed.


Don't play on hardest difficulties. On low difficulties, you can regain health and cure conditions by just resting. Also, potions are your friend on early game.

For spells, some wizard archetypes gives bombs. Some sorcerers gives a might animal companion, others give spell like abilities early on and Kineticist is a elemental 3.5e warlock which is a quite powerful class.

> it would have been useful to learn a different spell at the last level up some hours ago.

If you are a novice, play as a prepared caster, not as a spontaneous caster.

> you have to get over a giant mountain of frustration before you can start having fun.

Or lower the difficulty.

I tried to solo IWD without knowing anything about 2e.

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Anyway, BG3 will gonna be 5e and low level. 5e is far easier to learn and more streamlined. You will not have to face demigods on BG3.

It is hard to compare the different difficulty levels from the IE games to modern games.

In the IE games higher difficulty means only that you take more damage when you get hit.
Except damage taken, everything was the same.
IWD1 (not sure about the other games) had the idiot idea to increase exp when playing at higher difficulties.
I think the hardest difficulty doubled the damage taken and also doubled exp and you could rest as much as you want.
This means playing on the highest difficulty made the game easier (you have higher level) and the only reason to lower difficulty is when you cannot win an encounter because you take too much damage even if you are completely buffed and you use healing spells or items.

Most modern games increase enemy stats, enemy numbers or enemy type when changing difficulties.
Reducing difficulty makes sense when enemies are easier to hit or its easier to to avoid hits.

When playing P:K I switched from normal to story mode difficulty at some point.
The game is great, but it is also huge and I have only limited time for playing.
I finished it fighting the real boss, but I did not get the secret ending.
But even if you lower the difficulty, it would help a lot if the game presents its rules in a way that is relatively easy to understand.

IMO the best way to handle difficulty in BG3 is to use the table in the DMG on page 82. There is an xp threshold for easy, medium, hard, and deadly along with an encounter multiplier to take into account the number of monsters and the multiplier that would have on total xp and, in turn, the total CR of the fight. I personally don't like the idea of just buffing all monsters on harder difficulty because that kind of defeats the purpose of the monster. For example, in nearly all cases, goblins/kobolds,etc are used as fodder. If you pump up the difficulty, I wouldn't want to see ogre-d out goblins with 30hp, I'd rather see maybe larger groups with other monsters added in that fit the story. Orcs, worgs, ogres, goblin shaman, all work great with goblins and add to the overall CR. I also realize they can't just go from an easy difficulty with a group of 3 goblins to a deadly difficulty with 20 goblins because of physical restraints, like the size of the cavern/room/cave/etc, but adding in higher CR monsters without messing with their stats is a better way to go so you still keep the feeling of D&D where goblins, for example, are supposed to feel like fodder most of the time but, in groups, can still be deadly. I get that it might be difficult to do in a game but I really hope that, if they do have different difficulty setting, they don't mess with monster stats too much.

It should have way, way less complexity than Pillars of Eternity. My experience with that series is rather like death by game manual.

To be fair, it being based on D&D will keep it within sane boundaries, but it should not be something you need to read a 200 page long manual to get into.

Actually the DnD player´s handbook has 293 pages, and it´s only the basic player´s handbook

Sure, but a huge part of that is more or less prose explaining what each class and race and such are and do. I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb when I say that most people know what elves and druids and paladins are and don't need that explained. That's not really what I meant. I more meant the math on how combat works.

I should be able to figure out how much damage my weapon does, how much a given stat change will impact my chance to hit and so on without needing a degree in mathematics.

I've only played tabletop D&D once, but I was always able to get into the old Infinity Engine and Aurora Engine D&D games without having to resort to death by game manual stuff.

I'd like this to keep that same threshold intact.

If that´s your concern, in my experience with 5e the game itself it´s very newbie-friendly, there is a 3-page tryptic to show you how to do the basic things and create your character in ten minutes for a casual game or one-shot.
New players rarely read all the manuals (and usually expect the DM to explain everything else to them XD on the fly) and usually enjoy the sessions.

Even if the videogame you do not have an actual DM to do that I´m sure you can pick the basic combat and rule mechanics pretty easily because the videogame will have far less rules (about casting, short rests, roleplaying, crafting etc) and the game engine does all the "math" for you.

One of my favorite memories of Baldur's Gate 2: Shadow of Amn was having that massive spiral-bound game manual that came with the game. I mean, it wasn't anywhere near as large as the Skyrim Special Edition Hardcover, but still, I hope you get the point.

I also loved the spiral bound notebook and in grade school I loved reading unearthed arcana, familiarizing myself with every obscure rule of AD&D. But I think @Ontarah is right -- even if I would put their point in different terms.

The problem with PoE was not the complexity but the way it was complex. It was a game for people who like things like baseball stats and fantasy sports teams lineups. In BG2 I knew what it meant to have a sword that was +1 against most enemies but +4 vs undead. I was even had an understanding of the sword's weapon speed and reach. It was a complex system but the complexity was kewl -- once I got it it felt like I had access to arcane information.

In PoE I needed the back of an envelope to calculate whether it was better to use sword X with its 9 percent increase likelihood to hit vs sword Y with its relatively small 2 percent likelihood to hit but that 2 percent stacks up each round it doesn't hit up to a maximum of 15 percent but then resets to 2 upon either a successful hit or a miss at 15 percent. And if you enjoy that, you enjoy that. But, for me, it interfered with immersion, the player never has an intuitive sense of what their weapon is going to do. It's a game for people who see video game battles as a form of hypothesis testing.

Which isn't to say that I don't have the greatest respect for J.E. Sawyer -- guy is real geek who really gets into this stuff. But I only agree with him about 70 percent of time. PoE was game made the way JE said a game should be made. And that 30 percent disagreement came out. PoE was overly balanced, overly battle oriented and it was a chore to grind through those trash mobs.

(but brilliant plot and the latest turn based version of the PoE engine is really pretty good -- I'd like to see it used on BG4)

I have not played DnD 5E so far, but I think PoE is much easier to understand than DnD.

PoE:
Hit chance = acuracy + 1d100 - defense (deflection, fortitude, reflex or will), the result tells if its a miss/graze/hit/crit so every point acc or defense increases your chances by 1% unless the difference is so extreme that an attack always misses or always crits.
Damage = base value * ( 1 + sum of all modifiers). PoE2 made it more complicated by adding double inversion, penetration and power level.
PoE2: passive effects stack, active and modal effects do not stack

DnD:
- What stat is the attack based on (e.g. str for melee, dex for ranged, int for wizards, wis for clerics, cha for bards, there are lots of exceptions)
- How is the DC determined (which base stat, caster level, spell level, profiency, type of effect, sorry I am confused which DnD edition uses what rule)
- type of bonus ( not sure about 5E, but in 3E only bonusses from different types stacked (with exceptions) and some defenses worked only against some types of attacks (e.g. armor not helping against touch attacks))

So I would say:
PoE1+2 had a few rules that are relatively easy to understand, at least the basics.
Things get more complicated if you want to play on the higherst difficulty, maybe even for solo or the ultimate

DnD has lots of rules and for every rule there are several exceptions.
Most basic rules are relatively easy to understand, but to make a good char you have to understand most exceptions.

Madscientist, i prefer D&D over PoE 1/2 where in order to be able to heal more, deals more damage with a arquebuss and fireballs, you need to invest into might.

"that fireball is too weak. Do you even lift bro?"

And D&D rules aren't hard to understand. Mainly on 5e.

But IMO Pathfinder Kingmaker > PoE 2 > DOS2. I personally don't like managing cooldowns and the item fever of DOS2 where you are constant changing gear and over 80% of your character power is from the gear. In fact, i remember when i created a kineticist mercenary on pfkm and only forgot to put gear on him. Only remembered after like 5 hours playing with him. Other good thing is that no invocation/infusion had any cooldown.

One rule that i loved on 5e is the Attunement rule and concentration rule, limiting how much buffs you can have. You no longer can cast 666 buffs.



On BG2 comboing mirror image + black blade of disaster + stoneskin + haste + tenser transformation can make your sorcerer into the deadliest melee warrior.