Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Enemy Health Turned Off

What's it like playing with enemy health turned off? From a non-min-maxing standpoint, not necessarily 100% optimized builds.

Has no-one at all done this?

No idea what your question is.

Yes that option exists.

Yes I once tried that. I didnt like it. Not knowing your opponents health is kind of very unrealistic and really not fun.

Thank you for answering.

I don't really understand your remark about realism though. In what way is it unrealistic? I don't see people walking around with health bars in real life?

I'm asking in terms of feasibility and difficulty.

Because in reality I would see if the enemy was hit, and how bad. For starters I'm the one delivering the hits.

And yes knowing the opponents health has a huge influence on what I will do.

If I can see theres only like three hitpoints left, well then I will probably try a weaker attack and reserve the stronger attacks for the opponents with more hitpoints.

If you like this, go for it. I didnt like it.

I think it's pretty cool. You can still see the relative amount of health that's left, so you can make tactical decisions based on that. I don't think not knowing the exact amount increases difficulty that much. The only thing it really prevents is knowing whether you're likely to kill a character at full health in one round. Otherwise, you can estimate and plan based on the percentage of health left.

In reality, most fights are one punch kinds of things, one stab (even though attacker may not give up) or one shot. The idea of health draining away until you collapse is what's decidedly unrealistic.

Even D&D itself counsels against thinking, for example, a high level character somehow has more "life force" than a low level one. Instead, you should think of hp as a generalized competency during a fight, until the one and only actual serious hit lands, taking the person down. Such a mess up would tend to happen earlier for the untrained and later for the highly trained.

That's very interesting, thanks.



Oh, you can still see the healthbar, just not the number? Then I definitely have to do it in my next playthrough. Thank you.

If you can think of a better mechanism than hitpoints for modeling combat damage, then go ahead.

Meanwhile yes hitpoints arent realistic but neither is your own idea of "realism".

Sure, in reality a single hit MAY take you out, but it may also not.

And there are countless strategies in reallife how to handle combat that show that a single hit has no guarantee to take you out.

For example the whole "stopping power" discussion for firearms, where nobody has yet come up with a valid definition of what "stopping power" really means, except that those guns with high stopping power have a better chance to take out an opponent in one hit than those with less stopping power. Even the smallest gun can still kill on one hit though.

A fully realistic simulation of combat would have to model the whole physical body and take all the many factors into account. Also healing would take weeks, sometimes months. I will have to argue thats not practical and nobody would like it over the yes massively oversimplified hitpoint bar.

Other games have systems where numerically everything from nanites to the Death Star can take the same amount of damage, it's just way easier to over-damage a fly than a fully grown dragon. Shadowrun used a very dynamic system until at least 3e, where your weapon would have had a code like "9M". You would roll your attack and each success (roll over the threshold determined by how easy it is to hit the target) would raise the M (for medium) to S (severe) and then to D (deadly/dead) and then also the 9 to higher thresholds. The target would have to roll against the accumulated damage of, let's say, 12D with each success over the threshold of twelve reducing the damage over the same steps again until light or maybe not injured at all. What those numbers mean in the game is up to interpretation again, but it handles firearms pretty realistically.

I must admit that I always took stopping power as the amount of energy needed to counter the movement energy of a moving target. To use a non-living example, a huge walker shooting an adamantium bolt at a charging tank that stops it dead in its tracks so that the rear comes up, while the sentry gun on the automated tower would just mint little steel coins on the armour of the tank.