Hello,
To begin, please excuse my poor English.
I am very unpleasantly surprised or even worried by the non respect of the D & D5 rules for this Baldur's Gate 3 with what I could read from Larian and saw the gameplay yesterday.
This gives the feeling that the Baldur's Gate license here is just a simple name used for marketing purposes, a pretext. There, with what I saw yesterday, I especially have the impression that we dressed a Divinity Original Sin with some elements of D&D and not that Baldur's Gate 3 fully respects the universe and the rules of D&D.
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 fully respected this universe and AD&D rules. Why is this not the case with Baldur's Gate 3 even though the rules of the 5th edition have been greatly simplified compared to AD&D?
Beyond that, there are elements of DOS gameplay that have absolutely nothing to do in a Baldur's Gate game; except for ease of development:
- Action points
In D&D, the actions are divided according to a very precise plan (movement, action, bonus action, reaction, etc.). There are no action points.
- The initiative
In D&D, there is no group initiative; except, possibly, for very large groups of monsters.
For players, a group initiative system is very disabling! Goodbye the initiative bonuses of each player and Goodbye the Talents which influence the initiative. How was it really problematic to manage an initiative for each protagonist in a fight and to organize it all in rounds and combat turns?
Uh, The official Dungeon Master’s Guide Chapter 9, “Dungeon Master’s Workshop" has three optional variant rules offering different ways to handle initiative and one of them is "Side initiative" which is exactly what you can see in the video: each "side" in a combat rolls initiative as a group and all acts together.
I also think we´ve seen different types of actions in the gameplay, IIRC. I think they just tied standard actions as a point action to help people to get track of what kind of action they could make in the same round.
So... technically they are following the rules.
