Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Party Size Discussion

Unfortunately, I can't find the exact source, though I did find some other people having the same impressions. I could be wrong in some capacity - maybe paople fight with you, but you don't have direct control over them. Some interesting screens I run across but I don't know if they are relevant to the discussion.


First one might be just summons or familiars and such, but second one has a 5th dude in the party. It could be just the Warlock guy and Larian experimenting with 5 men party though.

i think followers refers to "camp followers"

Something was said when discussing party size of 4, that made we think: "oh, so like Shandra from NWN2". Unfortunately, I spend quite some time skimming through videos I might have heard it in, but didn't manage to locate it.

They say that it should be easy to mod, but we don't even know if BG3 will be coming to consoles like XBox or Playstation. And even if it does, do you really think that there will be mod support? How long did it take for Skyrim to receive mod support for consoles? The point is, I would much rather having a party of 6 be included, and then players who want a "balanced" game could stick with 4, while those who are more casual gamers can play BG3 like a real Baldur's Gate game, and have a party of 6.

If such mode is made, and is popular a gift-bag like in D:OS2 could be a fair compromise.

I just think about something about balance.

I don't remember how it work in DoS and I don't know how it works in D&D but in the older BG games, the experience you acquire is divided between the member of the party.
i.e if you kill a wolf that rewards a solo player with 600 xp, every member of a party of 4 would have 150xp and every member of a party of 6 would only have 100xp.

At the end of the game, a solo player could reach a higher level than a party of 6 (if you consider another/no level cap).
You can finish BG1 and 2 with only 1 companion. There are no "cheat" skill like lone-wolf or things like that if I'm not wrong and multiclassing allow a limited team to face many different situations.

If we project this exemple in DoS or in D&D5e : does every (alive) characters after killing the wolf will acquire the 600xp or is it divided the same way ?

That said, I don't really understand why it should be impossible to balance the game whatever the number of companions you choose to play with.

Do you have clues about that point ? Maybe it's related to the rules or something else I don't think about ?
To have a concrete exemple, isn't it possible to play the exact same D&D campaign with 4 or 6 characters if you have 50% more XP while playing with only 4 ?

The unbalance doesn't have anything to do with the XP you get. Even though the 4 characters will get more XP than 6 characters, becoming stronger individually, the encounters are the problem. The initiative turns become much more advantageous if you are 6 compared to 4, no matter how powerful the characters are. Cause with the system in place right now, your chances to get consecutive characters in initiative order and thus being able to play whoever you like to get an edge in combat would be too high.

And there is another problem with relying on XP to balance the game, it would mean no characters in a group of 6 would ever reach level 10 by the end of the game, and so many players would complain their favorite chars were too weak until completion of the adventure. Tricky to balance this.

The more room you leave between full group number and lonewolf playthrough enjoyment, the crazier more difficult it is to balance.

It might be a nice boost for “less characters” challenge, but it is still what it is - game is designed around a certain party size. In BG1&2 that’s 6, in BG3 it’s 4.

I think it is more intuitive to understand that if you take less companions then possible you make things unintentionally difficult for yourself, then that if you exceed 60% of permitted team size you make things for yourself unintentionally easy.

Isn't the fact that you can do the entire old games alone while it is designed for 6 a proove that the balance is not that bad ?
(Even if, of course it increase the difficulty).

We'll also have difficulty level not to increase too much the difficulty. I.E P:K have tons of options so players can create their own custom difficulty level. That could easily solve the problem of "a game designed for" and allow players to custom their experience.





I hear what you say about Initiative even if I don't really think it's a game breaking thing.
About levels, I don't really see why it's a problem that you can't reach the same levels at the end of the game. In every games, only players doing every side quests and combats ande stuff that gives XP reach the higher level. I don't feel sad because I don't reach it. Level 10 is not the cap anymore so everyone will be able to reach it.

I don't agree with this, because the highest level possible you can achieve will be calculated with the least party members in a group in the eventuality the XP would be shared among characters. So if the devs have decided for example the max level is 13, because they haven't implemented any spells or abilities above this cap, and someone wants to play the game solo. In the case it's the proposed shared XP calculation, the 6 party members will have to share the same amount of XP one character can get to reach 13. And honestly, I am not sure they would get to level 10 at all.

Because if some players here want their party to stick to the max available, there are others who want to play solo. And in my opinion, both should be considered valid in a game like this.

That's why I think it's a much bigger stretch to go from 1 to 6 party members than from 1 to 4 in this scenario.

But all things considered, I think the shared XP is impossible cause how would it work with 15 companions that you can switch according to your playstyle?

I am firmly against the shared xp model for games. First of all, that model means that unless the number of companions remain relatively limited and things are designed very carefully, there will be at least a few companions that end up falling behind in levels, which makes for less flexibility in party composition later down the line, plus and more importantly in my opinion, it makes it harder to fully enjoy your favourite character because you have to swap them out to both keep a balanced party and keep everyone leveled equally.

Second, I am of the opinion that the abilities granted at the maximum level a game provides is part of the promise of the game. That by the end you'll be able to enjoy all the power and tools available to you to some degree or another. And I think it's important that any player who plays the game to completion, whether they be casual or super into systems mastery, should be able to enjoy that content. Therefore you shouldn't incentivice playing with fewer characters in order to reach that max level. In Pathfinder: Kingmaker I played through the whole game with a full party at all times and only made it to level 18 or so, which was a big bummer. I think all characters should earn xp at the same time and that for an RPG, you should be able to enjoy that maximum level for a decent amount of time, at least the last 10% of the game, maybe even the last 15%.

I'm not really 'against' either approach per se, but if a gun is pointed to my head and I had to choose, I do prefer a non-shared/entire party based XP assignment vs. whatever XP gain split between all party members approach.

It's probably comes down to what one wants from an RPG - for me the fact that players breeze through BG1&2 with a single character is a sign of the system being fundamentally broken. It is afterall a party RPG with a class system designed to limited what each character can individually do. If single character can do it all, IMO it breaks what the game is about. And to counter argument: "what the problem if you choose how to play it?" - in BG1&2 I usually find 2 or 3 characters being constantly useful, while others (like spellcasters) usually hang back and do little to nothing, and then contribute only to the most useful encounters. That's not something I felt though in modern RPGs (be it PoEs, D:OS1&2 or Kingmaker). I suppose it all comes down to me wanting to play full party micromanagement game, and I want it to be as tight and tailor-made experience as possible. I am selfish like that.

I am always in favour of modular difficulty, though I am not sure if the party size is something that should be part of it. Still, I would happily trade some of P:K flexibility for tighter pre-set difficulties.

One thing id disregard in balancing. is the "Infinity engine-isms"

by that i mean gameplay conventions that arose from the games, but not the intnetion of the games.

The classic Baldurs Gate sinlge character Wizard wank. The same is true for divinity with Lone wolf playthroughs.

I personally dont understand what people get from those min maxed single character playthroughs, to me they just seem like more boring versions of what the game is intended to be played like.
but i dont need to understand why they do it.

The game should not be balanced around those kinds of players. Theyll find a way to break the game one way or another, so no point changing the XP system to suit such an unusual playstyle.

Beeing able to change the party composition midway through the game and have a good expirience one way another is a superior system to allowing some people to build overpowered characters.

If they want to do that, theyll have a mod that does exactly that on day 1.


Also: man i knew this was gonna happen when they said the level cap wasnt level 10. now the high power level wizard masturbators are coming out of the woodwork now and demand the game is designed entierly aorund their power fantasy, like they do with every single other CRPG on the market.

I don't think anyone is demanding that the game be built around solo playing, rather that it remain a possibility. The original games were in no way balanced for solo play, though maybe there's a design doc out there somewhere saying that it was. Most solo players that I've seen are exploiting the system in an intelligent way and also cheesing quite a bit through the game. I like the idea of solo play but have usually just done party based stuff, so I'd like if BG3 was like the originals in this respect. Made for a party but soloable if you know how to bend the game and use it to your advantage if that's what you choose to do. Personally, I like a big party because it brings in all those interesting character personalities, and it was hard choosing who to bring along and who to leave behind. That said, I'm not hung up on the party being smaller. It'll probably give the game a more focused feel, potentially.

Completely agree with this. I feel exactly the same way.

Before falling in the "power level wizard masturbator" category, I'd like to say that I never played such a game in solo (or even without a companion slot empty).
The reason why I want a 6 party base game is because I love more customization and more management.

I was talking about it to introduce the question about balance and difficulty.
I absolutely don't want the game to be designed for a solo character if that means it will be over easy with 4 or more characters. That's absolutely not what I wrote.

No one had an experience with a D&D campaign ?
I.E Descent into Arvernus is designed for 4 to 6 players. What are the difference when you DM it for 4 or 6 friends ? Is that only a question of one or two more monsters in encounters ? Something else ?

Because whatever are our experience with video games, the rules comes from D&D so that could give us (me?) a better overview of what should really be re-balanced with more (or less) companions.

Right now 5e has 6 years in the making so there are many "Encounter" tables or even Apps that allow you to calculate loot and number of monsters, but usually you do it trom stretch.
In most videogames they usually make tougher enemies by adding more hp and give them more damage, but that´s not usually a thing in TT because the creatures have their stat blocks that you don´t tweak unless it´s necessary. You usually play with the quantity and quality of the enemies.
Yo do not only add more minions to the mix, sometimes you use custom monsters (ie. Something sneaky if they fireball their way through any encounter, damage-resistant golems if they excel at one-hit enemies, etc) or change the terrain ( if they´re a group that has only melee characters you put some snipers or mages in a ridge, add traps, make the enemies don´t use skills your players are inmune to, like sleep against a group of elves or put a swamp in the middle),... You know the party composition and the players and you can change some things so it´s different from what someone would do in a videogame.

I do not know if that´s appliable to a videogame, but in my experience when you have more players (or if the players make an above-average strong group) you can tune the difficulty on the fly. You usually plan in advance but you have the advantage of being able to change things whenever you need to.

But if you want to know if you have to change every encounter and add more enemies or improve the quality of the enemies if you have more players? Yes, and you usually have to tweak things the more players you have. The easier way is to add more enemies to the lot, but there are differences. It´s not the same add two melee grunts or a couple zombies more than add another wizard, a gelatinous cube or mephits.

Of course that´s only possible if you are a human DM he he.

By that standard both PoE2 and DOS2 are fundamentally broken. Obsidian has a plaque with the names of the people who successfully soloed PoE2 on maximum difficulty. DOS2 put in lone wolf to encourage solo play. As far as I what I want from an RPG it's replay value. I only soloed BG2 after I tried every possible party combination and heard every line of dialogue -- no other RPG has come close in terms of replayability.

Besides the solo mode discussion is really something for another thread. I want 6 slots and lots of NPCs for all those interactions.

And this is just the nature of D&D -- it's been around for a long time there are many different ways to play it. When I first started playing it DMs were creating "puzzle" adventures. "you need to cross this chasm -- it's 40 feet across. You have a ten foot pole, 20 feet of rope and a levitation spell. What do you do?" The next group I played with saw D&D as a form of acting -- you really needed to respond as your character would. Yet another group was all about positioning and tactics. "No you can't say you cast the fireball in place that only hits the enemies and not the party -- show me on this grid where the fireball lands and I'll tell you if you killed your party or not". (didn't enjoy playing with that last group)

The challenge of making an D&D game is accommodate fans who like different aspects of the game and I don't think it's a flaw that BG that accommodated all three styles. Would have appreciated more riddles but that's just me.

Thanks a lot, I was waiting for you here

I agree that it seems very difficult or impossible to have those custom variations in a video game but as you said at the end, playing on numbers and monsters quality could be the most "easy" things to do as a GM.

If I understood well the Dropped Frames, Sven talked about another thing I didn't know about D&D : CR.
If I'm right, it looks they changed it a bit for it to work like a "monster level".
Correct me if I'm wrong but he talked about that saying that this modifications will allow us to have more variations in encounters.

Assuming I had understood and imagine things like they will be, it could help a lot to easily increase HP/stats/...

On the other hand, I have to admit that the "more monsters" things suits better to me in a TB game.
Not sure it's realistic but I imagine another layer, maybe at the begining when you start the game : which difficulty level (define the overall difficulty) AND which party size for this campaign (define the numbers of opponent) ?

Is that very difficult in a video game to add a monster or two for every encounter or change a goblin warrior into goblin wizard ?
I guess it could be easy for many encounters. I.E it's probably not hard to add a crocodile or two on Fort Joy... But it's harder to add a goblin arround Crusher for the optionnal fight. It's a big job to do anyway.