Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Clear Examples That Show We Need Proper Reactions

I've always known Larian Studios to be a company that strives for perfection. Often, at first, they will underpromise due to fear of massive amounts of development resources being needed, such as when they originally said Divinity: Original Sin 2 was not going to be fully voice acted, then at the last minute did it anyway because they are perfectionists. I have great respect for Larian, but I also feel they are either cutting corners or pretending to cut corners again with the combat systems of 5th edition.

Many things are not true to the 5e experience in combat, such as parts of the action economy, cantrips gaining effects they don't have in 5e which increase their power (and step on the toes of spell slot-based spells like Bigby's Hand, for instance), and reactions not working like 5e. One of the biggest is the latter, and I'd like to give some clear scenarios which show that reactions having player agency is a core part of the balance in 5th edition. Changing reactions to not be actual reactions will require reworking a LOT of features in the game from class features, spells, feats, etc, to function differently.

I would like to present some scenarios in which not allowing reactions to have a prompt/interrupt but instead only allowing them to act preemptively with a toggle feature will hamper the experience for the player.


Scenario #1: You are a rogue who has ended up in the midst of combat with multiple foes. Before your turn comes, there will be 2 people attacking you. Let's say in this case, the first one is a Wizard that uses Fire Bolt cantrip on you and hits you, but rolls a 1 on damage. Next, a Path of the Berserker subclassed Half-Orc Barbarian runs up to you and crits you with his first attack with his Greataxe, getting Savage Attacks racial which increases his crit damage by another die roll, and potentially getting Brutal Critical class feature (if the enemy is 9th level or higher) for at least one more die roll of damage.

As a rogue, you have a class feature called Uncanny Dodge. This means you can (read: not must) use your reaction when an attacker you can see hits you with an attack to reduce that attack's damage against you by half. With a preemptive "set it and forget it" system where you use up your reaction the first time it is available to be used each round of combat, in this scenario you would use Uncanny Dodge on the 1 damage Fire Bolt cantrip, effectively wasting the ability. You could have used it to reduce the damage of the massive Barbarian Crit that is probably going to one-shot you to 0 HP.

Since they don't have the best armor, and their whole thing is that they're supposed to be quick and dodgy, Rogue's rely heavily upon Uncanny Dodge for survival, as you are allowed to use the feature when you know you're going to be crit but don't know how much damage it is going to do yet.


Scenario #2: You are a Cleric that went down the War domain path so that you could wear heavy armor and use martial weapons and get into the thick of the fight. Because you plan on using either a 1h and shield or using a 2h weapon, you decide to take the War Caster feat. The War Caster feat allows you to do better at concentration checks to maintain spells, allows you to cast spells that require somatic components (a lot of spells do) while having both hands full with said shield or 2h weapon, and additionally allows you to use your reaction to replace an Attack of Opportunity with a spell that has a casting time of 1 action that targets only that creature. This is a very common feat to get on "battle caster" type builds.

To use the reaction component of your feat would require a dialog option, followed by a player choice of what spell to cast. Otherwise, you would have to preemptively choose a single spell to cast in place of an opportunity attack, and your choice could potentially be wrong in many cases. For instance, you could have preemptively chosen a spell that you now know the enemy you are fighting is resistant or even immune to, but you have no choice to use something else because the reaction just happens without your approval.


I could list MANY more scenarios than this, such as Counterspelling a cantrip instead of a 6th level spell, but I think the point is made. The balance and integrity of the combat experience is severely hampered when players do not get to properly control their characters. In my opinion, it is worth it to make combat minisculy slower to ensure the game is played properly. The majority of time in combat isn't even spent deciding reactions, anyway, even when you play actual 5e D&D at a table. In fact, usually reactions happen rapidly as players quickly state they want to interrupt the DM's action to use it. What takes forever is players deciding what to do on their own turns for their action and bonus action, and that crap isn't going to change regardless.

I'm not a big fan and player of D&D but we talked about this in another thread.
I totally understand your point of view. This "real time" mecanics of the rules really seems to be a part of how battles feels like in p&p.
And this is something that really looks great to me because it gives the feeling you're in something more accurate to the reality of batlles. If someone is trying to hit you, you're not totally an ice cube waiting to take the damages... especially if you have powers I guess

I really think that a Baldur's Gate 3 games using the last version of D&D deserve news in it's mecanics and this looks like the perfect opportunity to bring TB to it's next step.

I only see 2 "realistic" solutions for more dynamic combats using the rules you talked about :
- Reactions are not skills you have to click to enable but an AI you set up to custom the conditions that activate the reactions.
- Something like a slowing down of the time when you're attacked and a pop-up that appears to ask you if you wan't to do something or not.

I think the first solution is way better.
This is something I never really saw in games and this looks like you're more accurate to the rules.
This thing you can read is something that always bothered me when I saw the game are going to be a strict classical TB game.
I think BG3 deserve another great evolution in Larian's combat mecanics, such as DoS1 and 2 were.

Do we know for certain that reactions are only automatic and "set it and forget it?"

I think that's the only things we heard about them.

The mecanics someone suggested in the other thread looks also great to me : something like an active skill bar during the ennemy's turns...

Ideally, being able to genuinely react would be good, but like the OP said, it very well would likely require a whole lot of reworking (i.e too much reworking). We might just need to accept certain limitations, though. No computer game will be able to rival the open-ended fluidity of a table top game. It's a trade-off. But, EA is coming, so who knows?

https://youtu.be/lvBec5nrogw

See question: how reactions work around 11:40. Whenever anything changed since then - I do not know.

Thanks for the link. It's a pretty thorough explanation, and it shows how certain concessions need to be made at times.

Any ideas on how to reconcile reactions with the structure of the game?

I have to point out that Solasta, another game based in 5e, implemented in the kickstarter demo the usual reactions in the enemy´s turn.
Maybe not perfectly in the demo, and the game is still in development, but it shows that you do not need to use on-off automatic reactions to play a D&D 5e videogame.

Usually most strategy games have a "speed bar" "faster turns" "automatic turns", etc so for people that find an eternity having to wait a second more and that way we could have a proper reactions that require player input. I think the tradeoff works well for me. I prefer having more features instead of less delay.
TB combat is not going to be fast-paced anyway. Might as well they allow us to play it properly.

As stated in another thread, instead of predetermined reactions without a player input a pop-up dialogue in the enemy´s turn could be a feasible alternative. Several people discussed some ideas on how to do that there.

In the video the dev made it clear that they don't believe that implimenting pop-up window works as well as it does in table-top.

He brought an interesting thing - they want unique animations for each reaction: which makes sense. D:OS biggest strength was externalising mechanics into the map visually, and it is a good think that they want to achieve the same with BG3 (express gameplay on screen, rather then via log). And you can't play the right animation, if player makes decision on what this animation was after it plays out, no?

At the end he also mentions that they are looking into ways of giving players precise controls over those limited reactions. So, as I suspected, they are very well aware of issues the change to the system creates.

They still not use predeterminate reactions and they allow the player to decide if they want to take the reaction or not or against whom, at least in the kickstarter demo. That´s an ok in my book =)

Well they can play the animation when you decide if you want to block or not, or run or not, or use the shield or not, counterspell or not, dodge or not, or even easier, when the enemy damages you if you want to use hellish rebuke or duelist to retaliate...You always react against the enemy´s actions, ergo the game engine knows what is going to happen, so they can check if you can react or not to the action of the enemy, so they can ask after the enemy attack/spell/etc connects, and if you react, you just play the animation.
that´s how the game "The last remnant" handles blocking and dodging in the enemy´s turn: an input UI appears before the enemy`s attack and you get to react or not. If you react, you block and/or evade and retaliate, if not the animation plays out and the enemy hits you.

I haven't watched the video, but I suspect their argument is about timing of the animations, and their high production values. An automatic activation system means the game knows several ( real-time ) seconds ahead that a reaction will occur, and can choreograph the 2 actors involved in a different way than if there is no reaction.

I'm not sure that I agree this is a good enough reason to break the reaction rules in a fairly fundamental way. Perhaps this is also why they are adding extra in-turn actions to compensate.

No.
You don't know how much damage you take when you use uncanny dodge.


Rules as Written: Rogue chooses to use Uncanny Dodge when they get hit, but before the damage is rolled.





We have no idea if this feat is even implemented in Baldur's Gate 3.
As such using it as an example of how it makes a completely different implementation of reactions necessary is silly.


Early access is 35 days away.
Speculating on imagined edge case scenarios from a build posted 40+ days ago does not seem to be very valuable feedback.

Those of us who are playing Early Access will provide plenty of feed back on the build that we get to play.
If you choose not to participate in Early Access I'm sure lots of videos will be posted that will show you how the feature plays out and you could provide more meaningful feedback then.

Even if the feat is not implemented, we already know that Attacks of opportunity and the shield are because that was in the gameplays. We also know that you automatically use them the first time you can when it´s possible because we all saw Lae´zel doing it.


That would not be possible if you have automatic reactions.

And I´m pretty sure any rogue would have uncanny dodge, warriors would have the fighting style "protection", lore bards would have "cutting words" and battlemasters like Lae´zel have the battlemaster´s parry. All of them and more were discussed in another thread. We stopped counting at 15 different abilities, feats and spells that require reactions, all of them of the PHB so they possibly be in the game.


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So why did you feel the need to start another thread based on things that may or may not be in the game?

The old thread, still on this page, had plenty of baseless speculation on how reactions were going to work and imagined problems that might arise from a 40+ day old build that may or may not be the same as the build we get in 35 days for Early access.

Uh, I didn´t start any thread about this topic. Nor this one, nor the other. No offense, but are you sure you´re posting in the right forum?

And just for the record, it´s not baseless if in the gameplay we all watched there are only automatic reactions applied and Sven confirmed that they are using it the Ea in the Rock, paper shotgun two-part interview. There´s no source saying they changed their mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvBec5nrogw

I never said you knew the damage you were going to take when you choose to use Uncanny Dodge. But, you don't have to know the precise damage numbers you are going to take to know that it might be less worth using it on a cantrip that does 1d10 damage with no damage modifier, or to know that it is more likely worth using it when a Half-Orc Frenzied Berserker Barbarian is swinging his Greataxe at you where he already gets modifiers to damage from strength and rage bonus on top of his 1d12 Greataxe damage. This doesn't even take into account the fact that, if he used Reckless Attacks, the likelihood of him critting is higher than the cantrip.

In my example, I was stating that the damage ends up playing out that way, not that the player knew the damage would play out that way in advance. In this case, the player would have used their knowledge that a Barbarian is probably going to hurt a lot and saw that that Barbarian was going to have a turn before them, so decided to save their reaction for that rather than use it on the cantrip, and that decision paid off.




There's nothing silly about the example at all. Larian has already confirmed feats are going to be included, and while they haven't said which ones will be included, it's not overly presumptuous to talk about any of the feats that exist in the PHB with the assumption they might be in the game. If I were talking about less-often-used feats in supplemental books, it would be more presumptuous, but the PHB is the standard game that Larian themselves have said they're mostly pulling from. And truly silly would be making up my own feats to make a point, but I definitely didn't do that either. I used the most basic version of the game and took a feat that is very commonly chosen as an example. Besides, it was merely one example. There are more feats which deal with the use of reactions, such as Defensive Duelist and Sentinel, which are also in the PHB and could have similar arguments about how much worse they get when the player doesn't have the agency to control their usage. These feats are taken for more than one reason and taken very often by players, so it is an important enough part of the game to foster discussion around worries, even if those worries are unfounded in the end.



They are not imagined edge case scenarios. There will be feats, and these are vanilla PHB and extremely commonly used in 5e games.

Developers need feedback on the minds of the players at all stages in development, from the announcement of features, to the showcasing of features on a stream, to the early testing of features, to the late testing of features, and even after launch. There is no point in which feedback is not valuable, and to suggest that any feedback that is constructive criticism with reasoned examples is not valuable is to simply attempt to silence a narrative you disagree with. Healthy discussion is never a bad thing.

Thanks for posting that. It does seem that there is still some uncertainly at Larian about implementing reactions, and that the rationale for automatic triggering is essentially about aesthetic quality.

When the combat is explicitely turn-based for the purpose of allowing players the best possible choices, it does seem strange to me to be arguing that an aesthetic "sense of action" is important enough to reduce those choices.

From a consistency point of view, this also seems to contrast with how they choose to do skill checks in dialogs ( which are essentially turn-based conversation ). There, when you might expect that a dialog option requiring a skill check might just flash up "passed" or "failed" and allow the conversation to flow, they explicitely give you an overlay window with a target number and D20 image you need to click.

Still, it's their game to make these choices, and they will have EA feedback soon enough.

I don’t think it’s inconsistent. Larian seems to embrace that DND is ruled by dice, rather then try to hide it. When you have critical hit or critical failure it even shows the dice on screen just as it does with dialogue checks. Being concerned about how the mechanics “feels” to use is an important consideration. Whenever it was a good direction or not you will be able to judge by yourself in EA, and give an appropriate feedback.

Speaking of “feeling”. I think rolling dice feels better then just being told that you succeed or failed because of some under-the-hood RNG. One could have a more “in universe” implementation - like FiraXCOM where when taking the shot the camera brings players to the shooters perspective and have them wonder if the shot will land or not. Or take a cue from Disco Elysium which did something similar and it helps a lot in building anticipation and making RPG more relatable. But at some key checks it allow the scene to play out a bit before revealing if the attempt was a success or a failure.

I can't understand why you absolutely have to know if it's a sucess or not...
The story would be way more fluent, immersive and surprising if you just don't know and live the story as it comes.

A success or a failure is a useless informations because whatever you know it or not, it changes nothing and you'll notice as soon as the situation goes forward if it's good or not.

Manuals, tutorials, pop-up windows, textual informations, well integrated animations and so on exists for players to understand how it works.
If you have a critical failur or success during battles,isn't the cutscene sufficient to notice what happen if it's told during tutorial ?