+1 to this
Seems to me like a lot of people just want to play the game the same way they've played others in the past, rather than put the effort in to learn a new system
This isn't the case for me. I love D&D and the OS games individually. Played lots of both on the scale of thousands of hours for D&D with groups of 2 up to 10 people and hundreds of hours for OS. I legitimately think it's a superior way to play D&D type games. The concerns over "playing safe" vs. "trying out novelty builds" are true in CRPGs and TT because of how the rules are structured. Plus, you can take on larger risks with a larger party so you can have more grandiose events. Match that with act 1 which is definitely reaching for scale in terms of enemies and that I don't want to have to just stick to the classics in terms of party comp and build. Interesting choices need some buffer to make suboptimal ones. You exhaust the psychological safety of doing that when the rules punish you harshly for losing a single ally.
But why do you have to play safe? Take risks, learn what works and what doesn't. Is it so important to be able to beat the game completely on your first try? If you have to lower the difficulty on the first couple of playthroughs in order to get your head around all the different ways of approaching encounters then what is wrong with that?
Take chess for example. A relatively simple game in comparison yet for hundreds of years people have and continue to learn and approach it in new ways. The better a game is, the more rewarding it is to put the effort in to learn how to beat it.
I've already learned the DoS system for parties, and 6 characters is still what I want.
You're using the wrong example. 6 player parties is chess, 4 player parties is checkers. Each have their own benefits, but all else being equal, I'd rather play Chess than Checkers because Chess has more variety. So people that want 6 player parties get to have more variety, while those that want smaller parties *can still have those smaller parties*. In a 4 player party, those that want more variety to to try out suboptimal builds are prevented from doing so.
I was trying to avoid a direct comparison between this game and chess because obviously there is a whole world of difference - so that analogy falls down.
My point was more to say that the overall popularity and longevity of a game comes from (in part) requiring a bit of effort and experimentation with new and unfamiliar approaches, the reward you get for learning a new way to be victorious is tenfold in comparison with having all the solutions presented to you.
In the context of BG3, people are saying that with 4 characters they will be restricted to running certain classes, and therefore will be unable to experiment with party makeup. My answer is that they *are* able to experiment, they just might have to work a little harder to find the solution. For me, an encounter feels a lot more satisfying if I have to "solve" it rather than just blast my way through on the way to the next.
This is all just my opinion of course, so don't feel like I'm trying to correct anybody, just add my thoughts into the discussion.
