I fully agree they need to heavily tone down the "fun gameplay" additions they've made to 5e.
This includes:
- dipping weapons into fire (somehow metal catches fire and wood isn't destroyed?) - eating mundane food items as a bonus action to heal while fighting in melee - every cantrip creating surfaces (add an option to target ground if you want to create a surface) - jumping in combat (Rogues and Monks have these abilities, not everyone) - jumping ridiculously high - the sheer amount of barrels, explosives, elemental AoE arrows, acid pools etc etc. gamey fun stuff
It's mostly a question of tone. While DOS can be wacky and tongue in cheek and go over the top, Baldurs Gate and D&D can not. BG and DnD carry a more realistic expectation. Original BG, IWD, NWN, all DnD games before have got this right. So let's respect this tradition please.
I pretty much agree with all of this. At first I was super averse to any surfaces that weren't explicitly mentioned in the player's handbook, but I do think there's wiggle room for explicitly targeting a puddle of water with a ray of frost to change the environment (as a DM, I sometimes feel excited when players combine their spells with the environment creatively, and I think there's room for that). And when I say target the puddle, I mean the player making a conscious choice not to target an enemy, but to sacrifice their action to perhaps turn the battle in their favor by interacting with the environment. I don't think that if a player targets a creature, the ground at their feet should change over a single target spell.
I'd love to see spells like Bonfire have a place. It seems like the perfect setup to create a new surface while adhering to the 5e ruleset, but instead they gave that feature to firebolt.
