Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Reactions and On-hit Effects

I think what Music4Therapy is saying seems like it's needed.

The way I see this, is for every reaction that your character has, there needs to be a toggle (on/off) then a target for some special cases (Counter Spell). If multiple reactions exists for a single type, then only one choice can be made at any given time.

There can easily be multiple reactions on the various actions, so this is why a choice is needed to be made.

Larian has decided to have things automated because they feel it hampers in some way their game, for the overall worse, instead of better. Going as far as having every action that causes a reaction to display a popup if you want to take your reaction is too much control. But, I think having reactions pigeon holed to just automatically fire without any type of control is for the worse, instead of better. So, I think a happy medium would be a toggle and priority.

The way I see this is on a players turn (or outside of combat), said player can toggle on/off any reactions they want to go off. So, if a player who sees a caster type and has Absorb Elements, then they will toggle on Absorb Elements. If a player didn't ready a reaction toggle, then it won't fire, because the player didn't expect it or wanted to save it for a later turn. I think this creates an interesting dynamic that reactions have to be chosen to react a specific initiative/turn orders. Also, some reactions can only be toggled on/off during your turn, so this would allow faster initiative characters to surprise opponents and not be allowed to react.

Now, thinking about this a little bit deeper, a reaction could go off multiple times before your next turn so how do you get to make a choice of when you want to fire that specific reaction? In an example, multiple spell casters and wanting to Counter Spell. Then you pick a target you want to counter the spell from. Now you make a decision to focus that target, and if that target casts a spell, your going to attempt to counter that target. Sure, you don't have 100% control in that you get to see what each caster has casted then choose, but you at least get to choose the caster you want to attempt to block. And if the caster does not cast a spell, then your reaction basically did it's job against that target, no spell cast.

On an software engineering standpoint of view, I see this being pretty simple with a toggle and underlying list of actions. As long as each of those action types have been properly flagged, then each reaction can easily be turned on/off, so the technical details seem pretty straight forward.

But, as detailed here, leaving the current game state isn't an overall good experience but going for 100% control isn't acceptable to Larian's eyes, I belive. So, having a toggle is perfectly acceptable, and it seems they are already headed in that direction with the little window that you can toggle on/off reactions. They just need to allow all spells/abilities that have reactions to be toggled on/off.

Edit: Also, some reactions don't even need to fire, even if the action has been met, if it doesn't make sense. In an example, Shield. You toggle it on. If a fighter comes up and attacks and literally rolls a 1, your not going to automatically cast Shield because the attack was not successful. Again, these kinds of cases are super easy to see and program up front. Same with Counter Spell, if you target a Wizard, that attempted to cast a spell while in combat and loses Concentration, the spell was never casted, so Counter Spell won't go off. All of these are straight forward to see and still automated. Of course, in that situation, some would say to not even target Counter Spell on that Wizard in hopes the AoO breaks Concentration, but that is a gamble that the player would need to make.