Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Four is a party. Six is the crowd.

You assume I don't know how to play D&D. I do. Very well, in fact. That's my whole point. There is a core set of abilities and capabilities you need on your team no matter what to do well. A party of 4 is going to tend toward sameness from player group to group. Even if you vary by class technically, play style and magic item use will be necessary to make up for your lack of core coverage. You just made my point for me. Which is this: YOU CAN ONLY TAKE RISKS WHEN YOU CAN GO BEYOND THE CORE ASSUMPTION OF THE SYSTEM. That's not "play[ing it] safe." That's not "beat[ing] the game completely on [my] first try." I'm not in either of those camps so do not try to put me there. If you're advocating for ignoring the system and making blatantly stupid choices, that's not risk either. That's insanity.

I also like the party size of 4. Im reminded now of xcom where i always have more fun early on before i expand the squad size. 4 feels tactical. When you throw in summons even having a single character who can summon brings you up to 5, which feels ok. Now imagine a party of 6 where 2 or 3 characters have summons and suddenly its all messed up. Some people will say "well just dont do that :^)", but what they are effectively saying then under those circumstances is to not use entire classess who would be enjoyable in a smaller party limit but become ponderous in a larger party limit. They will also say "just use fewer people", this would be the equivalent of telling people to simply ignore bad balance. Ultimately the normal way you play a game is with the players guided by the standard mechanics and rules. The normal way to play a game is the expected way to play it, and saying its just fine for the expected way to be something disrupted that you then have to play around is simply asking for a bad game design.

Funny you mention that. I'm an obsessive REplayer of XCOM2 + War of the Chosen (probably my personal "game of the decade" and the single player I have the most hours on in my Steam account) and the achievement about finishing the game without taking the squad upgrade is one of the very few I never took because I absolutely HATE the idea. If anything by the end of the campaign I have such an amazing roster of great fighters I'm always struggling a bit to decide who am I going to exclude from a mission.
I also absolutely LOVE the fact that WOTC introduced fatigue as a mechanic that forced you to use a far larger number of soldiers in rotation rather than sticking always to your same "A-Team" neglecting everyone else.




Another aspect people tend to overlook about the enjoyment of a larger party composition is "putting amazing loot to good use". You are bound to find a lot of amazing weapons and pieces of equipment across the entire game.
It's a terrible feeling when most of them go completely unused because your limited party variety doesn't leave much room for it.

What about those that don't want to play classes that always have a pet or summoned creatures ?
I'd rather play with 5 or 6 companions than 4 companions and 2 pet... But that's just a personnal opinion...



That's absolutely true... I realise yesterday that craft IS implemented in the game...
Yahoo another great and unique spear that no one will use because the only one able to use it is my warrior 1H+shield...

Except that's not how CR balance works in D&D at all. The weight of a given monster's abilities can be thought of as the base value of difficulty. The number of opponents can be thought of more as an exponent and less a multiplier. A given encounter will generally be "unfair" from a system standpoint versus the party. For example, enemies get multiattack first before players. This is because CR is based on a 1 versus "the party" dynamic.

Let's say we have 8 goblins. From a pure "add the CR" standpoint, that comes out to a CR of 2. You could look at this and think "great, a party level of 2nd level adventurers could knock this out of the park." Except this is a large encounter. That changes the math. The DMG says this should be multiplied by 2.5. So this becomes a CR 4.5. If I were designing this encounter I'd need to weigh the individual abilities of the creatures and make a judgement call on whether or not to treat it like a CR 4 or 5. These are plain gobbos so their only real threat is being engaged from a distance with shortbows. EXCEPT I know the terrain and it's going to take the players a couple turns to get setup to actually take these little dudes on properly. Since that's an aggravating factor I decided to treat it as a CR 5 since the group is going to need to weather some damage with no chance to retaliate.

So, how does CR math work on the party? According the DMG it's THE EXACT SAME. The bracket for increasing CR at this number spans from 3-6. The difference being a 6-person party downgrades the difficulty of a given CR. Yes, the same CR has different difficulties. The same CR fight can be deadly, hard, easy, etc. depending on the party. The only thing adding 2 PCs does in this situation is reduce the difficulty from hard to average. You're still going to see PCs drop because level 2 characters can easily be 2 shotted by CR 1/4 goblins. Therefore the level of tension doesn't change even though the party will have a slightly easier time in dealing with the threat.

The same sense of relative difficulty is true regardless of level. For the smaller encounters where you have one or two lieutenants instead of a bunch of squishy mooks you might throw in a couple more fodder or change the terrain slightly just to slow down the party. That's it. And guess what? GMs do this on the fly EVERY SINGLE DAY with ease. You can't tell me a professional game company with hundreds of employees on this single product will have any slowdown. I just don't buy it.

my post was not suggesting that people use summons and other things as a substitute for larger parties, it was showing how you need to consider each additional party slot added as potentially two for balance purposes. Currently already for example you can have three familiars in your party which begins to become kind of cheesy. It would be a shame for things to turn out like pathfinder did with party optimization resulting in silly pet spam once they add mercenaries and the other companions.

When the party is limited in size it shapes the way you must approach each encounter, as you cant have as well rounded a party, nor can you depend on a series of one trick ponys. Thus the differences between two prospective parties becomes much different resulting in radically different approaches to any given encounter compared to larger parties which will have more chances for all the bases to be covered blandly.

In a game designed around smaller parties allowances have to be made which allow for more novel approaches to compensate for this. But in a game designed around bigger parties the expectation of more mundane and direct solutions to encounters can be made. So its not as simple as just 'deciding to use fewer people', as the game as a whole is changed by the alteration of any single element of it.

If they let us have a party of 6 AND custom companions they will need to add harder modes, or veterans of DnD and min-max players will stomp the enemies in every fight.

That's kind of the case now. Browse the forums and you'll see it's full of people who are breezing through combats just like there are people who are taking several reloads to succeed in the same ones. Your argument is basically that people who are good at the game will have an easy time, which is already the case with a 4 person party.

They will regardless, unless they tune difficulty on "unfairly difficult" (which would fuck it up for everyone else and make bad players and game journalists cry for months to come).
There are already videos of Sin Tee soloing the spider queen with a a single character, for instance. And I'm sure that's just the beginning.

It's not really and argument against it, just and observation. The game as it is now would become too easy and the inventory management even more painful.
Imagine manually jumping with 6 characters EVERYTIME, God no.

My point is other things have to change before we can make a party of 6 and have fun.

Which is precisely why I already said several times that revamping controls is basically a prerequisite to expanding the party.
And a necessity regardless of it, frankly. Because "it's not TOO painful if you limit yourself to 4 characters" is a terrible argument in favor of a comically bad control scheme (and a painfully inadequate inventory management, too).

Just to be clear, I'm not assuming you don't know how to play, you made it clear in your post how much experience you have and I have no reason at all to doubt it. And I'm not here to argue with you personally - I tried to address "playing safe" because in your post you talked about the concerns over "playing safe" vs. "trying out novelty builds" in CRPGs - and you may well be right. I don't claim to be an expert in any sense, I just know that this has to be a good CRPG first and foremost. What if the game could be made so that the set of abilities and capabilities needed to do well was broader and/or different to the usual, requiring everybody from beginner through to expert to think outside of the box a bit? I just think (in my own opinion) that there could be a solution to the issues you raise other than increasing party size. I'm not arguing against that, specifically, just trying to introduce another point of view into the discussion.

As somone who has been DMing for like 8+ years

Smaller parties make for a more tense and fun experience.

If we had 6 combat would feel pretty boring and honestly too easy.


Also as a player getting to play with a different party i think is pretty nice too.

Playing more of a frontliner i dont have to deal with the cranky Gith all the time now and i get to experience the pleasure of a bi-sexual vampire who wants to eat me. I would have missed out on that experience when i was a rogue

Once again tabletop experience with multiple players involved and party-based computer games (especially on the single player side of thing) are nothing alike, so I'm not sure why some people keep insisting on that comparison.

I'd vote for 12.

12 Archer Battlemasters with stealth proficiency.

I would like to see a party of 5 (It's what I DM in table top for the last few years either Pathfinder or 5E) I wanted to play a Ranger and I didn't want to be shoehorned into taking disable device and pick locks, but with a Party of 4 I would need a Cleric, Rogue, my Ranger and a fighter, so no magic in a party of 4, with a party of 5 I could bring the Wizard, Warlock or whatever magic class is available. Every DM runs their games differently some run with 4 others 6 to 8 people, I've been in larger party's at GENCON with the right DM running the game everyone can have fun, smaller groups are fun and intense and also potential for early level party wipes, especially since clerics are the least liked class to run among players.

6 players is too much - it's a multiplayer video game not just a Baldurs Gate sequel. The less players the multiplayer has to handle, the better the experience will be. It means that DMing like you can in DOS2 has more potential of happening.

People do not have the choice of playing with less characters - they will see the space for more characters and assume they are missing out if they don't fill up.

D&D5e is based around a 4 player party. Adding or removing characters affects the difficulty a lot, which I know from DMing the game on an open table for a few years.

Maybe 5 if stretched. Not 6 though. I don't care about half of the characters in any of the classic RPGs with loads of characters. I played Disco Elysium last year and only had a 2 characters max and felt I knew them more than any characters from any CRPG I've ever played. And I've played a lot of CRPGs.

That's fine. No one was asking to six players to play it, anyway.

I vote for having a party size of up to six. The original Infinity Engine games didn't need to be rebalanced if you decided to solo the games or take only a party of four instead of filling up all six slots. And being able to experiment and change your lineup was crucial in BG2. I loved hearing different pairs of characters interact. If the party is fixed after Act 1, then that takes away a key aspect of the original games that made them so enjoyable. And if Larian didn't want to honor BG1 and 2 then why frame BG3 as a sequel?