Originally Posted by Milkfred

(As an aside, Baldur's Gate 1 had this exact issue and people rightfully hated it. Don't keep those rose-tinted goggles on, people.)

I didn't hate it. I want a game that recreates tabletop gameplay, and my tabletop gameplay was always simulationist. If the dice said you died, you died.

Baldur's Gate (the original, not the sequel or remake) is one of the 5 best CRPGs ever made. It's not quite Ultima IV, but it's close.
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I think BG3 is bit too heavily loaded towards the dice roll.

That's literally my favourite thing about the game. Dice rolling gives the player character tremendous agency without transferring that agency to me, the player. That's how RPGs work. You're not playing a game; you're playing a character (or multiple characters, in the case of a party-based RPG).

The character's interaction with the world should be be influenced by what outcomes the player wants.
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3. Players Want to Experience Everything

A solution to the Nettie thing is to just not talk to her. But players generally want to experience all the content they can in a single playthrough. Having a consequence be 'you just don't get to do something' is related to my first point. I'd put a few other things under this umbrella - like Perception checks as you're exploring - as being similarly annoying. What did I miss? Who knows, but now I have this feeling in the back of my head that I'm missing out on something. Was it something that I'd think was cool? A neat bit of lore? Something to make Lae'zel like me? I can tell myself that it was probably just two gold pieces and a fork, but my brain will insist otherwise.

Those players are playing it wrong. They're trying to play a game.

RPGs aren't games. They're toys. RPGs don't have winning conditions. Playing an RPG successfully involves making in-character decisions and... that's it. Whether the character succeeds or fails isn't relevant to whether the player succeeds or fails.

This is why I do reload games if my character dies due to player error, but not if he dies due to a poor decision on his part or even just a bad dice roll. The world is unforgiving; that's what makes achievement worthwhile.
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-snip-

Throughout this post, you refer to "players" several times as if they are a homogeneous group, but I don't recognize the group you describe at all.

Last edited by Sylvius the Mad; 11/10/20 08:32 PM.