Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Unconscious Character Focus

They go after unconscious people wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too hard. If I did that as a DM my players would burn me at the stake.

Agreed

Yes, the AI should be reprogrammed to put unconscious people as the lowest priority target.

Yeah this is a big part why some fight feel frustrating. Enemies focus wizard -> wizard gets down -> use one action to pick up wizard -> at least 1 enemy makes sure to down that wizard again and if they dont kill the wizard after that than you repeat the circle...

They could just make you dead when your HP hit zero. How would that be?

It can certainly be a challenge, but I can't say I have so far found that it is outrageously difficult to get an unconscious player back up and into the fray.

Ideally, whether the AI does this or not should depend on the intelligence and/or behavior of the attacker. Animals tend to keep after prey until they're dead. Intelligent opponents might think it best to finish off any downed foe lest they get back into the fight (like you, me and probably everyone else would do). Or maybe they would see it best to go after the next immediate threat. Varied AI on the matter would be best.

Contrary to the ruleset of the game Larian said they were making?




Once someone is down, the ones remaining are bigger threats than the downed one. Sure, maybe some variance on this would work, but generally that should be rare. Such as if a character repeatedly is brought back from Downed, or the one who is constantly bringing people back up. Then maybe target that person for death to ensure that those downed stay down. But targeting someone helpless repeatedly when there are other characters actively attacking doesn't seem to make sense. Flee or Fight are higher priorities to Finishing.

Rarely going after downed players would help make it feel more like a tabletop experience, assuming the DM is not intending to unfairly dick over the players.

Too often, I can't get the unconscious person out of harms way for many turns. Combat can take way too long even without this.

They do it a bit too often, but I don't think they should never do it. Thanks to the new help action, nobody would ever die unless it's a TPK, if they don't target you whe nyou're down.

Just making you dead when your HP hits zero wouldn't fix the problem, it would make it worse. The problem here is the AI targets KO'd characters until they are actually dead when they should stop going after the KO'd character now that they are no longer a threat, allowing the chance for them to make death saving throws and stabilize so you can help them up after the combat is over. Just straight up making them die would have the same outcome as the enemy just constantly attacking until they're dead: they don't get to make death saving throws, and your forced to revive them instead of using the help action after the fight is over. Like you said though, a varied AI system would probably be the fix to this. Almost any creature is smart enough to realize that the enemy that is currently beating them to death is more of a threat than the guy bleeding to death on the ground and not fighting back, but having some enemies just be especially sadistic like some kind of psychopath would give some variety to encounters.

The AI really needs an overhaul altogether honestly, because not only do they feel stupid they also feel super sadistic. Seriously, if the person who designed this AI was DMing my D&D session, we would be having a fight to the death in the middle of the room within an hour because they would just actively be trying to kill the PC's in the most sadistic and brutal way possible. Larian, it's not FUN for players to have to constantly revive their characters because your AI is too stupid to properly recognize threats and aggro accordingly. Plenty of RPG's out there have managed to figure out how to get their AI to aggro on certain people properly, why can't you guys? Currently having a tank in the party is completely and utterly useless because the enemies will just run right past them like they're a Wal-Mart greeter on Black Friday and the wizard in the back who hasn't even gotten his turn yet is that sweet sweet sale they're all after.

It is not fun at all to watch your enemies run right past the person meant to take the brunt of their focus and attacks, provoking numerous attacks of opportunity from your other characters while doing so, just to reach that squishy wizard in the back. It's also not fun to just get outright slaughtered by monsters that you decided to arbitrarily redesign (Looking at you Gnolls, you giggling little jerks). The logic here should be pretty simple: the wizard who hasn't had a turn yet is not as much of an obvious threat to a bunch of low intelligence monsters as the warrior who just beheaded one of their group with a giant axe. The guy unconscious on the ground is even less of a threat. So why are they targeting the characters that should be considered "low threat" right away?

Have you ever played D&D?

They die if they fail enough death saving throws, which can happen fairly regularly so long as you're not just standing around constantly picking them back up just to watch them go back down again.

Its mainly a rare occurrence in D&D. When I DM and start going after unconscious players, the stress level of the table immediately goes up a few levels. You are going after their character. Its impossible to rez at low levels and expensive later. People just hate dying. As a DM the unconscious tool gives me a way to drain player resources and not take turns against the enemy. Wasting your turn trying to hit someone unconscious just means you didnt cast a spell, make 3 attacks with a sword, or any number of things. Its a poor use of action economy and is mainly just a middle finger to the players by displaying that you got this covered. In the game we have scrolls and a rez monster at camp, so its a different dynamic but at the end of the day, dying in video games isn't super fun - and in D&D much less so. If someone dies they want it to be meaningful. Not because 3 goblins just pulled a vial of acid out from under their loincloth and decided to have a melt-the-wizard contest.

When I DM if a player goes to 0hp nothing below counts, and they go 'unconcious'. I then use my 'own save roll' system. 3 strikes and your dead/only one success to get up on 1HP. Theres still a threat of death but not as bad. It still has potential to
keep the player hooked.

Thats actually kind of cool. It gets them up more, but keeps them vulnerable. The party still needs to react to it but it isn't the "This just got real guys, wake up" moment that you can hit.

My point was that most games don't even give you the option of anything but death when you hit zero HP, so you're already ahead in D&D. Yeah, most games also give you very easy ways to rez too, so it remains to be seen how balanced it is between how easy it is to die vs how it easy it is to rez. Rezzing needs to be challenging enough to not make dying trivial, though (as is far too often the case).

Ideally, AI should use tactics a human would. Creatures don't go unconscious, but if they did, you know we likely wouldn't leave them there to finish them off after the fight, lest they get revived. The AI shouldn't either. However, it is fair to perhaps give us more options to protect a fallen party member than just get them up with 1 HP, such as by being able to drag them away or shield them.

As for having to waste your turn or whatever to tend to someone who went down because they are going to get killed very soon if you don't, I don't see the problem. In fact, I think it lends a lot of excitement. You need to adjust your plan for the unexpected. Getting to someone's defense, whether that means leaving off your present opponent to take on others, navigating to avoid attacks of opportunity, using spells or scrolls you didn't intend to have to use, or any number of things is just part of the overall experience.

What I was saying, and I think I wrote it unclearly, was that if you are an enemy and you have 3 greatsword attacks, then attacking an unconscious bard to finish him off instead of immediately turning to the wizard who is about to cast disintegrate on you wouldnt be the smartest thing to do. If enemies ran to heal unconscious buddies, I would abuse the hell out of that. Every person they bring back up to 4 hp is an attack they didnt make on me and a fireball i got to cast on them. That is why I was saying the economy is so tilted. 20 goblins with 1 hp all get a full attack turn. You losing one person, over and over, where you lost your turn helping them, and they lost it getting back up, just took 50% of your team away for 2 rounds. NPCs have a big advantage in the fact they are 100% until dead, and then no one cares. You set up encounters specifically to be attrition battles. Its not the first battle thats hard, its the 3rd, and then you dont have time to rest before you fight the boss. Thats why they are at the end of the dungeon, you have a hard time sleeping without getting jumped and losing almost as many resources as you just got and now you have to fight something powerful that is going to go full force until they die, cursing you with their last breath.

When I DM, again, these are 6 second rounds technically. This is fast paced combat and a rangers bear charging towards you, or a shadow rising behind a tiefling as satan starts channeling energy into their body is going to be a lot more concern than a cross-eyed wizard on the ground who just crapped his robes from being body-slammed so hard. Part of DMing is the narrative you weave in combat after a player's turn. "Ok, Tempest, youre up. You look across the battlefield and see Ardin stumbling back after the orc just slammed his axe into his shield, and theyre squaring off. To your right you see 2 goblins that are drawing their bows and starting to aim towards you. What are you going to do?" that kind of "this is realtime, this is happening now" narrative usually precludes "ok, ill ignore the people about to shoot me or helping ardin and make a dagger poke at this guy to finish him off."

Most of the time, in a constant time flow narrative, it doesn't make sense as the likely reaction given the rapidly evolving circumstances. I say this based on having dialed in which enemies to do what. A goblin wouldn't know that the arrow to the chest merely knocked them out, theyd probably think theyre dead. A lich can sense life, he wants your soul. And then the things inbetween. Players have exclaimed "What? Why would they do that?" in circumstances where I was testing their threshold for that and its hard to justify someone knowing the difference between down and dead in a combat scenario.

I'm mixed on this. I agree generally it's bad AI for an enemy to ignore a threat that can still kill them vs. the one laying on the ground. Some enemies it makes a little sense for them to stay on a target until it's dead though (gnolls for instance). It does get a little frustrating to see mass focusing on a single target and then you get caught up in the one character is constantly down and a second one is helping.

I think they should remove the option to revive during fight or limit it to 1 or 2 and lower game difficulty.
I also agree with, the point, that they should not focus you when you are unconscious.
+Let your characters wake up after fight without a help if the rolls are successful. Seems like, that they want the player to make extra clicks, I am lazy for that.

Gnolls that are up close fighters I think is totally justified. They are in bloodlust from the abyssal lord they worship and it fits their concept. It makes them a different foe than the archers peppering the the party. They wouldn't have that same perception or blood in their jaws that would drive them to that. It gives the party more complex dimensions to work with - a big one being DONT LET MELEE GNOLLS NEAR SQUISHIES! Thats fun, and Im totally down with that.

Are you referring only to pen and paper, or are you including videogames in that statement? Because dying in pen and paper is a lot more punishing than hitting "load last save".




We would if there were still other, more immediate threats. Now, if we knew that they would be revived back to full health, then we'd finish them off. But healing brings someone back wounded, and easy to knock back down.



That's fine, if it happens.

The issue is the AI priority seems out of whack. It's still apparently using D:OS 2's AI 2.0 , which was programmed to ignore high AC targets and go for squishy characters. However, D:OS 2 and BG 3 have very different action economies. D:OS 2 was classless and let any character use healing spells and scrolls, and healing spells were both more powerful than they are in BG 3, and limited only by cooldowns. In addition, there was resource and time-free full healing for all living characters out of combat using bedrolls. Different gameplay styles should have different AI styles.