Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General How accurate is ruleset implementation?

Probably things like "reach", "flanking", "reactions" etc.

I think there's a lot posts before me that go into detail, but BG3 introduces some minor and not so minor changes. Some would be fine and understandable, but the game makes so many of them that in the end pretty much every action, ability, skill and spell work a bit different from tabletop. Core mechanics are still 5e, but it's all heavily modified. This is more of a "5e inspired" type of system, rather than a shot at actual video game adaptation.

It doesn't make the game bad, I'd prefer if there was less changes, but it's enjoyable in its own way. You should absolutely not go into it with a mindset of "I wanna play a 5e videogame" though, you'll be dissapointed.

EDIT: I'd say my biggest gripe with the game is Larian's obsession with interactive environment and surfaces. Nowhere near as bad as in DOS 2, but still too much for my taste, especially for a DnD game. Imagine playing a tabletop game where during every encounter half of the arena is covered in acid, fire, or burning acid.

yes thank you, that's what I meant

Ok so, a day after, I don't think the situation is as dramatic, and I'm definitely enjoying the experience but still, those mechanisms need to be done.

House rules like Firebolt does d6 damage and then d4 burn. This averages out slightly better than standard d10. To me that is flavor as a house rule but fits the RAI.

I feel bad for you. Gigantic Set Piece battles are a staple of D&D, and "Oops, I forgot fireballs fill a volume not effect a radius" leading to entire rooms being on fire is a classic OD&D through 2nd ed AD&D experience.

I mean, any reasonable battle where casters are blowing The Good Stuff is going to be wrecked in a few minutes, and encounter mechanics have been suggested since Metzer, but go off.

No one wants to fight in a white room in person, and even more so when a computer is the DM & could be handling all of that easily in the background. Getting rid of pg. 82 was one of the greatest sins of 5th.
(Pg. 82 was 'suggested damage per level' from 4th edition that was designed to get players to do more than "I move into range, I attack" because trying to do anything other than cast a spell/make an attack was universally sub-optimal. This little one page chart changed all that. It's the spirit of Liarian trying to put environmental effects back in)

but does it scale like firebolt does?

Eh absolve me of my ignorance but what are you trying to say?

I still have no clue.

Seems pretty clear.

Quas would prefer less changes from the 5e system and Theliel is saying that 5e spiritually sucks because (at some point or at some level etc) it fails to capture the (Gygaxian?) experience of giant battles and accidental TPK through a wizard derping with a fireball burning everything and everyone alive (including the tile set).

Furthermore, he reinforces his point by say Mentzer, the creative advisor to Gygax, intends for everything to feel like Armageddon when casters unleash their full arsenal - cue burning buildings, the floor is lava, corpses everywhere, flaming meteors of doom etc.

So far the tldr is that the stuff you see in BG3 is thus far aligned with what Gygax and co intended and 5e was a step back.

Then lastly he is saying that in 4th edition there was a page 82 in one of the books that had a table of what the optimal DPT should be in an effort to guide(?) the DM / or the players to seek out the correct splat books/classes/rules to make that happen where as 5e doesn't have that so combat tends to be fairly stale.

I think it is quite dangerous to make assumptions about "the spirit or the letter" of the texts.

Matter is, what is Larian's position on this?

To me, 5e is a ruleset that is pretty well balanced, it does account for things like surfaces, so i dont think it's wrong for Larian to include them, albeit I think they're far too free with them right now, and the D&D approach to a surface would be an area that 1) probably counts as difficult terrain and 2) would require a save for no damage or half damage, only taking full damage on a failed save.

IMO Larian has a decent enough basis, but changes way too many rules, whilst I get that some rules will absolutely need to change to work for a CRPG, I don't think lots of the ones that have changed had any reason to. stuff like changing what type of actions things are, messing with jump distances, merging jump and disengage, double bonus actions on rogues, everyone being able to use scrolls, messing with spell effects, wizards being able to learn any kind of spell etc.

It's still a good base, but ultimately disappointing right now, at least for me.

That's more or less what I'm saying, what is happening to the feedback?

The short answer is that it depends who you ask

I am also here to +1 this.

Also, on this conversation about 4E and a damage per level chart, is that "Difficulty Class and Damage by Level"? in chapter 3 of the DMG? If so, that seems actually to be one of the things that (with different math rather than 4E's out of control exponentials) got carried into 5E from 4E. It's in chapter 9 now, and the table is "Monster Statistics by Challenge Rating" — see the damage/round column. Here, if you have D&D beyond: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/dungeon-masters-workshop#CreatingQuickMonsterStats

has anyone found a ritual spell?

Wait 5e has immediate actions like 4e?



Starting to wonder what's the difference between 4e and 5e rules.

The differences are enormous. Now, people are gonna jump on my shit for this, but here's my narrative about the editions of D&D.

All of the old classic editions, up through 2e, were a pretty niche hobby for a very different subset of gamers than we have today. 3e/3.5 came out and revolutionized D&D, massively improving it from its older incarnations, and proving extremely popular. But there were still some glaring balance and design issues that make the game drag down, and caused people to burn out on it. Many improvements had been made, but there was still a fair bit of old school cruft from earlier editions that just never really made for a balanced game.

So they took everything back to the drawing board with 4th edition, and pretty much redesigned the entire game, to make things more balanced, easier to DM, and more appealing to players of other types of popular games, like miniatures games, deckbuilding games, and video games. They brought in design elements from every type of gaming to try to fully modernize D&D, while also casting off nearly all of the vestiges of old school Gygaxian unbalanced design. Well, this didn't work out well for them, sadly. All of the people who loved 3.5 absolutely lost their shit, and jumped ship to go to Pathfinder instead (or just kept playing 3.5). 4e did bring in a bunch of new players who hadn't been interested in D&D before, but it wasn't enough to make up for the massive loss of old fans who just couldn't accept the enormous changes to the system.

Thus, the purpose of 5e was clear: bring back those old players, while also making the game so accessible that we can keep bringing in lots of new players to the hobby. So they scrapped almost everything that they had changed in 4th edition, bringing back a lot of that old-school feel (and the Gygaxian cruft, as I call it, that was previously abandoned), while also simplifying the game, reducing player choices and making it very easy for new people to jump in. It was a huge success, drawing back in lots of old players who were happy to see their old familiar (unbalanced) design principles return, and expanding into a whole new, huge audience of players for whom D&D had been too complex and too full of choices before. They kept a few things from 4e (and most of those things, ironically, are very popular elements of 5th edition, as most 5e players don't even know they came from 4e), but mostly they rolled back the balancing and ease-of-DMing innovations that had characterized 4th edition.

5e is without question the most popular edition of D&D ever, and the best edition for the largest number of people. But I think it came at a cost, the cost of bringing back old class imbalance, bringing back difficulty of DMing (prep, encounter design and balancing, challenging the players), and gutting the huge amount of player choice that were present in both 3.5 and 4e.