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.

I'll cheer about the "good move" in the moment I will see Larian coming up with something better.
I have no particular attachment to D&D as a ruleset (and I wouldn't probably even list in a top five of the pen & paper systems I'm familiar with) but I DO find mild annoying that a lot of wannabe-game analysts love to bandwagon against its shortcomings while ignoring that when it comes to videogames in particular D&D (or its direct derivate Pathfinder) has often been one of the absolute high points of the genre, while a lot of titles came up with TRASHY rulesets without any resemblance of shape or form (DOS, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, etc).

DOS 2 being Larian's previous work before D&D doesn't inspire the greatest confidence, as they came up with some really abstruse and dysfunctional subsystems there (shitty armor system, shallow perks/feats system, horrendous itemization, massive use of stat bloat, incredibly steep numeric scaling, etc), but maybe they actually learned from past mistakes over the years?

I'm a bit worried that they recently claimed in a couple of interview to "feel creatively restricted by D&D" on what they could do with encounters, but then again most of what I liked the least about BG3 has been their own additions (i.e. "Unstoppable", "Shove as a bonus action", etc).

I don't want to be too unfair to Larian. While I often focus on criticism when giving feedback about their games, I think they have overall a very solid track record and are arguably one of the most reliable studios around when it comes to good quality CRPGs... it's just that they so often fumble on the small details, "tainting their own cooking" so to speak.

Moving to a new IP is a smart move for Larian. The D&D mechanics do have their issues, like how armor doesn't really impact AC as much as it should, and the HP scaling can feel outdated. And yeah, some of the classes and spells are so overcomplicated it’s hard to balance everything.

Yeah well thats not going to happen.

D&D in its fifth iteration is at the core an amazingly simple system that builds a lot of complexity on this simplicity.

Its very close to Einsteins principe "make things as easy as possible, but not more easy than necessary".

But just something thats works decent enough would be fine though.




The main reason why I'm not really interested in the old games of Larian is because I listened to the fans of these games and even they cant name a good reason why I should try them.

Swen made a speech about the gradual build up of "institutional knowledge," pointing fingers at those ultra-large publishers who fire so many people as they try to increase revenue in the short term. But isn't DnD part of that institutional knowledge?

Maybe I'm being an idiot and all of the technical know-how and craftmanship can be carried over to different models of gameplay. And if you have good people that have stuck with you a long time, that is likely a major plus when venturing into new territory. Nevertheless, I have to stress that Larian without that DnD style or something similar, is hard for me to even imagine.

In my view, Halycon Styxland is right and DnD is beautiful simplicity, but it has lots of niggling flaws which can be ironed out in its iterations of evolution. I think Larian should be making perhaps an innovative leap that has its foundations in DnD. Otherwise they'll have to essentially latch onto something completely different that rocks and do it better (well, you can't stop Swen).

Incidentally, this is my first post, pleasure to be here and meet you all.

Yes, D&D's D20 system is so popular (and hence BG3's popularity) because it is very accessible to the vast majority of gamer types. It is very simple (I would say superficial) and easily understood, so gamers can figure out exactly what the numbers mean and what they do. This is in sharp contrast with the system Sawyer created for Pillers of Eternity, which is in my view far superior to D&D mechanics, but it is extremely complex and opaque, and most gamers will have a very difficult time trying to figure out and understand how the numbers work and what they do. This is, again in my view, the key reason for BG3's huge popularity and PoE being very niche. Even I, as much as I love the PoE games, often get frustrated trying to figure out the PoE mechanics.

So yes, there is something to be said for mechanics that are simple and easily understood by most people. My biggest problem with D&D mechanics, though, is not its simplicity but rather that it so very strongly relies on random chance/luck in determining outcomes, so much so that the player's character-build choices don't matter that much. This is what's so great about the PoE mechanics, where random chance plays only a very marginal role in outcomes, and it is your build and level-up choices that ultimately determine outcomes. But then, it is all the more frustrating when the player cannot figure out the meaning of those numbers when making those build choices. So I would love a system that had D&D's simplicy but where random chance only plays a marginal role and it is your build choices that matter most in outcomes.

D&D5 is amazingly elegant.

It is NOT simple. It has a simple core. Which builds on massive complexity.

This to me is the gold standard of rulesystem design. It is the good old saying of Einstein: make it as simple as possible - but not any more simple.

As a programmer it also reminds me of Unix. Unlike any other system, unix builds on very simple principles, which leads to a very intuitive system that can build enormous complexity.

I havent played PoE, or watched any PoE videos, or read through any PoE wiki. But frankly it doesnt sound like a too well designed game.

The drawbacks of D&D are obvious, and they are there because D&D is designed for tabletop. This leads to many restrictions that are not necessary in computer games, like spells per day, or how resistance doesnt stack. These are simplifications to make handling in tabletop as easy as possible. Games designed for computers can easily for example have action points, or can have armor with percentage damage reduction, or can have items which need repair.

Sorry, but I strongly disagree. And I say this as someone who's been playing D&D since the mid-1990s (2e). D&D mechanics are very simplistic, and do not represent complexity at all. And the fact that everything works on the basis of die rolls says it all. Dice determine everything; the rules determine nothing. It is ridiculous that even healing spells are based on die rolls.

Yeah sorry obviously I dont care if you played D&D since the seventies or whatever. Thats a lame "argument".

You dont seem to understand the difference between simple (and elegant) and simplistic (and primitive).

And just to be clear, when I call D&D "simple and elegant", I talk specifically about D&D5.

In the mid 90s D&D was on version 2, or "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" (AD&D). I would never call that mess of arbitray rules that AD&D is simple, even less so elegant. Just for example try to explain why they made the saving throws this way, I cant find any logic in these tables. Or why you cannot have a higher stat than 25. Or why non-warriors dont get extra hitpoints from constitution above 16, and cannot have percentile strength, and why is there even percentile strength. There was all kinds of super wonky stuff going on in AD&D, and frankly the game was way less balanced and less fun. You had to actually know which are the good classes and which to avoid. In D&D5 overall the class balance is much better, you can pick really any class to play. Its not like in AD&D when you like Bards and then find out hey wait a minute, Fighter/Mage is so much better in every way than Bard it aint even funny.

D&D3 was already much simpler than AD&D, and D&D5 is astonishingly simple. Neither system actually lost in actual depth of gameplay though.

For computer games I actually would like to reintroduce some of D&D3 into D&D5, and even have more complex rules, because computer can handle complexity in the background just fine. For example it would be no problem to make a computer add two items that grant 50% reduction to all fire damage to a 75% resistance total, which what they logically should combine into. You can also have item condition, action points, and many other such concepts that wouldnt work well at all in pen and paper.

My group is still on a modded AD&D 2e Player's Option because the WotC-editions were too crude for our style of playing. The main issues were the combat system dropping speed factor and thus the combat phase, which led to combatants apparently queueing up and then performing all their actions only when it's their turn; the botched adaption of the magic system in which a perceived 50% of all spells were suddenly transmutations; and the complete lack of compatibility between editions. While I can convert 1e modules on the fly, I would have had to "re-imagine" hundreds of NPCs and creatures under the new rules. Drizzt Do'Urden and Minsc can tell a story about how well that usually goes.

That said, I wholeheartedly agree that standard 2e still suffered from many tabletop strategy game rules relics and a strong bias to keep player characters small. The original rules were also from before computer games and various film franchises changed gamers' ideas about how a fantasy world works, so they reflect a much more medieval world, somewhere between Lord of the Rings, Prince Valiant and Monty Python's Holy Grail. TSR emphasised that you shouldn't be able to just walk into a store and buy a magic sword, because that would ruin the mystery. In a way, the Forgotten Realms were already a departure from that strict code, because they painted a different picture. To me, it was only a question of balance. If the heroes can wear five magic rings at once, so can the villains.

One of the first adaptions I made, was ditching old style saving throws. While they're actually based on a formula not so different from 3e, I agree that they weren't easy to comprehend because TSR kept that formula a secret and only published tables. And then - as with many concepts in 2e - you had the rules on page 17, the corresponding table on page 60 and further information in a different book you still had to buy. For playing 2e material with 3e saves, the categories still give me the DC, so to speak. If I remember correctly, the limitations to ability scores and many other stats are due to the game only going from -40 to +40, but I couldn't find a source for that. That's also why they decided to insert the exceptional strength block for fighters. This made sure they remained within human numerical limits, but still had the muscle for heroic feats, like thieves could climb even completely smooth walls. Thus, weapon mastery, extra strength and hit points are the boon of the fighter class, since they're undergoing more physical training than clerics, wizards and rogues. Spending less time in the library and more time in the gym would mean multi-classing.

In the end it all depends on how you want your campaign to work and feel. To me, it's more a collaborative effort to tell a story with the players, while Gary Gygax allegedly got mad at Rob Kuntz when he defeated his masterpiece dungeon, the Temple of Elemental Evil, which probably explains where that anti-player bias in the TSR-editions came from. The rules should serve the game and the players, not vice versa. It would really be interesting to see a computer game hybrid D&D that combines the strengths of each edition. I have surely taken my notes from BG3 and 5e for use in my 2ePO games.