Alright, I figured I'd pop in and give some feedback on the game from my experience right now, as most of what I'm interested in isn't in the big list. I'm going to specifically try to avoid mindless "make this more like BG1/2" and "add more [THING]" suggestions, as well as requests for shifts to things like party size that will be easily addressed after launch by modders and that aren't necessarily set in stone yet. (Certainly wouldn't mind 6 character parties and 1+1 custom character and NPC in multiplayer as a default, though.)
General Stuff
1) It would be very nice if part of building out the character creator moving forward included the ability to build characters outside of a campaign via some type of character sheet style system and then bring them in to a campaign instead of creating them at the start. Especially since ideally GM mode in this game would ideally be closer to something along the lines of an Adventurer's League experience to me. This could speed up starting new multiplayer campaigns and allow for characters to be carried across inevitable later user generated content or add on campaigns without having to recreate them from scratch.
2) In addition to the character sheet, including the option to write a custom character's backstory and maybe a system to set more detailed background flags for the characters than the standard 5E stuff would be very nice. Along with the ability for these to be exposed to other party members in game. The 5E backgrounds are great for casual play, but they tend to be one of the first things abandoned by more experienced players. The option to at least create a custom background for the purposes of the benefits provided by them would be nice.
3) Some kind of visual representation of how stats are effecting non-combat rolls would be nice. Unlike a lot of people in this community I understand that the combat in the game works from a fundamentally different starting point than the TTRPG and that this is unavoidable because video games are not people at a table with pieces of plastic. I'm more talking about the actual dice rolls that pop up. It'd be nice if when I rolled it showed what my stats and proficiencies are adding to that, as right now it's all presented as base D20 rolls. I find that having to work through my stats in the TTRPG helped me better understand their context, so it'd be nice to have that here.
4) Please let us see other players' inventories in multiplayer.
5) Add an option, or make it more visible if it's already there, for conversations to pull in all party members in a certain range. Ideally this would allow adjustment of the range and whether or not players that are pulled in can leave the interaction.
The Vital Stuff For Me
The biggest things for me involve one thing that's already been suggested, allowing selection of speaker, and one that hasn't. The one that hasn't is allowing multiple characters to influence an encounter and shape the response to it in multiplayer.
My example for this is the Mindflayer encounter with the thralls after the crash. The first time I encountered that in multiplayer, the other player took the lead. Their choices and rolls for that part of the encounter lead to their death PLUS a free turn for the Mindflayer, and ultimately a one turn party wipe. Even though my character had just persuaded the thralls to leave they had no part of this interaction and there was no recognition of their existence. This to me seems like the primary failing of the game in its current state. D&D is a collaborative party-based experience, BG3 is currently not, and that is highlighted in MP. There are multiple ways this could be solved but I feel like two make more sense than the others when accounting for complexity and controversy.
1) Pull in all party members in range with the parameters that I suggested in the section above this one. As with a standard D&D interaction, let the player that initiated the interaction lead initially. Allow the lead player to delegate control to another member as part of making a choice. This seems like the least invasive to the current dialogue system assuming it's basically just a tree of conditional statements. It shouldn't require too much structural alteration to break into the conditional tree of another character, and doesn't require a new interaction system. It's just switching between what already exists.
2) Leave the basic system as is, trust players to discuss choices and interaction, but include all players in rolls that make sense and allow players to assist. For example, there is no reason that my Dwarf and his big sword would stand next to his Drow friend while she gets enthralled and then murdered by a mindflayer and not at least try to whack said mindflayer with said sword unless he too was being thralled. My Dwarf is an idiot who likes to hit things, but doesn't mean he's going to stand around mouth agape waiting to be murdered. Allowing assists and including other characters in rolls is more invasive systemically, but removes the situation where one player is purely along for the ride without breaking the current interaction structure which probably leads to less potential for bugs since it doesn't need to access anything other than character sheet info from other characters (ie no need switch to another dialogue tree). This could be combined with option 1, IE, lead player is thralled / incaped / etc, second player finishes out a conversation / non-combat interaction.
3) I think this is the most controversial solution, and thus I set it aside from the two above, but it is one I think is worth considering, and that is refactoring the entire conversation system to account for the whole of the present party in every situation. I think this would provide benefits to single player and multiplayer. A system that does this would likely require a mechanic that either delegates control to the initiator, a preselected party leader, switches between present players after each interaction, or randomly takes a response from one of the present players' controlled characters. I don't think a vote system is appropriate for a game that supports play with just two players. It would, at least in multiplayer, necessitate taking some considerable amount of control out of the hands of someone at some point and even potentially putting it directly in the hands of another player, I.E. giving them the ultimate control over the selection of which character rolls for something, but I feel like it would create a system of conversation that is most representative of the collaborative experience that is core to D&D. This could be something similar to SWTOR's system or potentially something significantly more complex. A more complex option that puts control into one player's hand would also allow a party of players more control, albeit with the potential for creating a different variety of negative interaction than already exists.
Whatever the solution, I feel this is the most important area that needs to be addressed, as right now the game feels like a bunch of people that happen to exist in the same space, and not like a party of adventurers working together.
As an aside in this section, I feel like there's enormous potential for homebrew style expansion of this game, but that's not going to happen unless y'all actually follow through on documenting the tools you release this time around. OS2's modding resources were incomplete both in terms of explanation and basic documentation, which in my opinion led to less ambitious mods of that game than the tools allowed for. You gave us some very powerful stuff, but then neglected to tell us how to use most of them last time and when you did tell us you often didn't finish the tutorials or skipped over vital basic information.
Echoing Other Stuff Just For The Record
- Too many scrolls, maybe break them into utility stuff like silence that everyone can use and actual proper spells that are gated by stats or class
- Jump too strong
- Too many empty containers
- Cantrips feel too strong
- Fog of war is something I wouldn't normally advocate for but here it seems necessary because it's too easy to just fly around and scout stuff.
