Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Why are stealing and stealth so easy?

Fog Cloud, Darkness, Invisibility, and you can just take whatever you want.

NPC's don't react to you creating darkness or fog, like it's not at all suspicious activity. They don't run or move out of the AoE's. NPC's with magic don't try to remove them. Guards aren't alerted by it.

You can steal Dammon's Breastplate +1 and then wear it in the grove. No one cares.

Why is it so simple and easy?

Stealth doesn't necessarily break from attacking or casting a spell. Even Thunderwave, extremely loud and up close. That's funny. Enemies don't move away from a dangerous position after seeing their buddies Thunderwaved into a chasm.

Playing Rogues or stealthy spellcasters feels like some cheat mode is on. Why?

Mostly because it's hard to do sound related detection with the games systems.

Sight is easy, you just vision cone and things can obscure that cone.

But sound is trickier because you also need a way to highlight how much sound something will make and how that'll be percieved (With things like background noise, other noises occuring at the same time etc)

The combination of sound and sight is what typically waters down the effectivness of stealth in TT D&D. With just sight it's super easy to just cheese everything with a single effect (Also making the "Stealth" skill entirely pointless since it only does anything if you're visible AND within a sight cone. If you're behind someone, invisible or you've neutered their vision cone you don't roll a stealth check ever)

As far as reacting to stuff, it's probably too much of a bother trying to make NPC's react to things like Fog Cloud and Darkness whilst also not reacting to other spells like Longstrider or Aid (It took long enough just to get it so NPC's didn't constantly react to Ranger's animal companions and mages summons...)

Meanwhile, stealing is entirely pointless because gold is not a rare resource so who cares if someone steals something instead of spending some of their 50,000 unusued gold coins that's doing nothing but weighing them down...

I do a ton of stealing and the real cost is time spent clicking. And if you really get into setting up stealing runs there are big rewards but it's debatable how efficient it is. This is because BG3 basically implement tiers of play rewards, time spent stealing low level stuff is not time spent getting mid/high level stuff.

Or put another way, in 50 hours you could be blowing through Act 2 with its better vendors, or still mucking around with Act 1 vendors.

This is "how".

Better question is "why". Why do they design it this way and allow it. It's not fun playing a thief when you can just take stuff.

Just like it's not fun playing combat when you can just decide to win.

They're locked into certain systems due to it being based on D&D rulings. So that's why we have no stealth checks for performing actions while stealthed as they're normally done when being observed/listened to.

With the net result being a non-issue because stealing isn't broken because currency is irrelevant in the game due to how easy it is to come by. Like, CAN I steal that item? Sure, but why bother when I can just buy it and still have more than enough gold to buy every single item in the entire game?

The only actual impactful thing from stealth is combat cheesing... But it's not as if it's even necessary given how trivial combat is anyway, especially with strong builds and various other kinds of cheese.

Why bother putting lots of resources into trying to fudge around a system that they don't have complete control of (Again, because it is based on D&D's existing ruleset as opposed to their own IP like Divinity) when they could just have the retort of "If you don't like it... Don't do it". You don't HAVE to steal things if you don't want to. You don't HAVE to purposely exploit stealth in combat if you don't want to. Just like you don't HAVE to min-max characters so you clear entire encounters in the first round. You don't HAVE to exploit the heck out of Sanctuary.

I mean, personally, as someone who normally plays Rogues and likes to steal stuff in video games... I simply don't even bother with stealth mechanics in BG3 because of how unnecessary it is. Stealing/pickpocketing is pointless as I just buy anything I want (My issue is often that there simply isn't enough for me to buy for me to even be able to empty my bags of loot I've gathered, let alone actually spending the tons of gold I've got...), stealth in combat is not necessary to breeze through the game (It's simply easier to just blow things up rather than faff around with Fog/Darkness/Invisbility shenans. Maybe if I wanted to do a Solo run sure, but what's the point of doing a challenge run like that only to cheese everything with Stealth/Sanctuary anyway...)

D&D is not the reason why BG3 lets the player do whatever and never fail if they put in a 10% effort. D&D rules are stricter and more sensible than BG3 where you can just walk outside some ridiculous vision cone and hide in Plate Mail without any stealth skills.

Larian are just a sloppy DM who run the game like a children's playground.

BG3 does not follow D&D rules. If I recall correctly, the the vision cone is a holdover from DOS2.

BG3 does not follow D&D rules. If I recall correctly, the the vision cone is a holdover from DOS2.

BG3 does not follow D&D rules. If I recall correctly, the the vision cone is a holdover from DOS2.

Stealth in rpgs like this tends to be very fast and loose. I prefer it being too liberal with letting you sneak around and steal stuff as opposed to BG1/2s system where it was overly punishing.

I'm curious to know what D&D you've played, Taril ^.^ Certainly not any system that looks closely like 5e.

- Other games have incorporated sound as an element of stealth before, even contemporary ones, and it's effective enough to do without the need to overcomplicate it. Solasta incorporates sound in their stealth system very effectively. In 5e, your Dexterity (stealth) check contains both the traditional elements of Hide and Move Silently in it; these were more explicit in older editions,but the elements still subtly exist in the background in 5e and are both contained in the single stealth roll (certain magic items call out their affects applying to stealth if the stealth specifically involves hiding, or if it involves moving silently, for example).

- BG3 does not follow much of 5e's rules for stealth at all - it completely perverts them and is built 90% on the existing D:Os2 game engine's stealth mechanic. There is no need for a stealth check at any point and you have zero risk of detection at all, as long as you don't step in the sight cones. This is Divinity's system, with nothing of D&D in it at all... so claiming that they were somehow constrained by the D&D system, and that's why stealth is as it is is extremely disingenuous of you. You know that's not true, so why say it?

A system being broken beyond recognition and stripping all meaningfulness from the system doesn't stop being the case just because "it's not necessary"; the system is broken, and someone who would like to meaningfully engage in stealth CANNOT, because of how broken it is. They either don't use it, or they break the game and push the cheating "I win" button that it supplies. There's no way to actually engage with legitimate stealth play in any proper way.

In terms of breaking stealth with actions: from a game design perspective, if you haven't made a completely inaccessible spaghetti engine, it's a straight forward design concept to put markers and identifiers on abilities or groups of abilities, as to whether they break stealth automatically, or grant fresh opposed checks to all in perceiving range. This isn't a "too hard basket" issue, and shouldn't have been considered one for any dev team, sensibly speaking. Any action that interacts with another object, and any spellcasting, should provoke a fresh stealth check if you do it while hidden. Certain spells will have flags for being 'loud' or 'visible' - which will not prompt a check but automatically end your stealth. In other cases, whole classes of action (attacking, for example), will be in the automatic break category, and not require special flagging individually. The player should be able to clearly see what things will break stealth, and which won't, or will force a check. This is basic level design theory, and given that they had the freedom to make this game the way they wanted (they were definitely not constrained to make it a 5e D&D game, since the most it can claim is a loose "inspired by" - or more pointedly "Painted to look like, because we want the visibility, brand and license to pimp our other games to a bigger audience" - that one is word of Swen himself), it's virtually criminal that we were given what we were, instead.