Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback S&F. Extensive list. SPOILERs

1.4

Natural healing / recovery in D&D happens during Long and Short Rest. Regeneration is something else entirely. BG3 just needs a meaningful resting system and get rid of the healing from food items entirely. Healing potions are for combat.

Your meaningful resting system risks to turn into more rest-spamming, just short rest instead of long, without any additional way to represent the fact that some minor wounds may heal naturally just on their own. You don't have DM to control the situation here, so it's either some kind of "regeneration", either rest-spamming, either wasting potions to heal a few hp.
By the way, that's what for short rest stands in D&D from role-playing perspective:

The rest spamming issue would be addressed by some type of limit on resting, either time or resource based.
-3 short rests per long rest
-long rest costs X food or is only available every X in-game hours or might result in a random encounter or will risk failure of some quests. There's lots of different ways to do it.

Your suggestion of food adding slow regeneration: this would address the issue of eating food during combat, but be worse for out-of combat. Why make us wait for healing? Especially since we can short/long rest and full heal with the click of a button.
I think it would be simpler to just prevent the consumption of food during combat.

We don't yet know if Larian will change the limits, but the part of problem with them is that some classes restore abilities as well.

About the change for food: that's attempt to turn food in nothing more than a weak option for dealing with only very small hp-loss. So it'll still help a bit, but no one would ever think about healing up from 5/50hp to full 50hp with food.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? I'm uncertain if we're in agreement...
I think that this is already a problem: short-rest classes (monk, warlock, fighter) are nerfed compared to long rest classes because of the current emphasis on frequent long rests and the limit of 1 short rest.
If Larian added more short rests per long rest, this would increase the amount of healing available before each long rest. And it would do a better job of preserving balance between classes.


I don't think you should ever consider healing from 5 to 50hp with food. If you're close to unconsciousness from a combination of exhaustion and wounds, then no amount of food should heal you back to perfect health.
To be clear, I also dislike 5e's full heal on long rests for similar "it doesn't make sense for sleep to fully heal your wounds" reasons.

We are probably not in agreement, or halfway there.
I meant that those exact classes may get overpowered if short rests may become to frequent. And the fact that we don't know yet what Larian will do about it.

Yes, about never considering: that's exactly what I'm trying to achieve here, but without making food totally useless. Heal 2hp lost after getting into vines by food - yes! Heal 45hp lost after the fight by food - no!
And about the actual D&D system... loss of hp isn't actually a wound. HP stands not for literal health but your character's grasp for life in general:

Keeping that in mind sleeping or even eating to full hit points seems quite logical. We are not wounded, we are simply exhausted by fight.

The problem is that currently short rest classes are underpowered. Based on games I've played/others' comments, D&D classes seem fairly balanced for ~2-3 short rests per day. So BG3 should have around that many short rests per long rest.
I think that simply allowing 2-3 short rests per long rest would go a long way to limiting long rest spamming. People would feel less obligated to long rest after every encounter, and thus do it less frequently.


Yeah, yeah...I know. I still don't like it.
Even if some HP reflects mental durability, will to live, and luck, that leaves some HP as physical injury. If my character reaches 0 and is unconscious and dying, I would hope it's because of blood loss and not because they've lost their will to live. But, sleep for 8 hours and they're totally fine!

Ok, if experience says this, I hope they will make 2-3 limit.


When this system is treated properly, the last blow, which leaves you with 0hp, is the one that's an actual wound. Everything before is just the exhausting struggle, which leads to be injured. And to return from 0hp you need some real healing or lucky d20 rolls with no modifiers.

Advantage and disadvantage.

1. Already existing ones.
1.1. High ground advantage with ranged weapons should get it's proper relation to ranges.
It's not even partially easier to shoot downwards from most of the medieval ranged weapons. That's why shooting prone characters is disadvantageous. For a character, that stands atop of something, the characters right under are pretty much the same as prone. So here is the scheme of how high ground should affect shooting more realistically.
1.2. High ground shouldn't cause disadvantage on attacks against the character on the high ground, when the ground doesn't work as cover.
Unlike shooting downwards from a medieval weapon, shooting upwards is not a problem. And with the melee weapon, if you can reach your enemy with it, there is no additional problem at all, you can just aim for legs. There is even the Mythbusters episode on the matter.
1.3. Backstab advantage should consider possible enemy awareness about our position.
While it's true that stabbing someone from the back is way easier, it's not true that someone would easily allow us to backstab him in the middle of a fight, if he saw where we were going. Most likely that person will jump away from the possible backstab right after seeing us moving towards his rear. So we shouldn't get the backstab advantage against an enemy who attacked or was attacked by the same character in the previous round or this same round. The exception can be made if we successfully go in stealth between those attacks.

2. Possible additions.
2.1. Would be cool to see cover mechanics fully implemented.
I believe it's possible to make it right by the book.
2.2. Add disadvantage with melee weapons against characters that are standing in fire.
Simple logic, it's hot there and moving close towards fire should cause considerable discomfort. And it can mitigate fire being the answer to everything.
2.3. Add disadvantage on attacks from characters, whose movement and precision are somehow hampered by elemental effects: burning, being on ice e.t.c.

I can see how some kind of food could heal exactly 1 HP just like magical Goodberries.
I can also see how some food would make you lose HP. Raw potato and 1kg of cheese can't make you feel any better or regain your stamina.

I very much like many of your ideas. They are likely outside of Larian's plans, but for a video game: Larian's homebrew < D&D RAW < your propositions.

Thanks for appreciation.
And in their previous games Larian actually had difference between raw food and cooked food. Some raw food was poisonous, some not so effective. So I won't be surprised if eventually they would apply same logic here, there can be seen some bits of not yet implemented crafting system.
I'm not yet losing hope for adjustments, you know.

@Zellin
Advantage and Disadvantage
Good point about height actually making it harder to hit people below you, since they have smaller visible cross sections (~head and shoulders instead of full body) so that players standing up effectively look prone to your vantage point. Conversely, prone characters should be much easier to hit from height.
1.1: Maybe instead of Height giving Advantage to shooting, it
--a) extends the weapon's range and/or just doesn't give disadvantage to shooting outside the normal range
--b) doesn't give disadvantage to shooting prone characters
This solution is somewhere between what is currently implemented and your suggestions

1.2 Why do you say shooting upwards is different than downwards? Shouldn't the enemy's profile be the same either way? (In your diagram, the "difficult shot" should be equally difficult for the elevated guy shooting downwards or the ground-level guy shooting upwards, no?)

1.3 I agree with your "exception" listed here. Since "hide" is a bonus action, this suggestion would still allow backstabbing each turn, but it would actually cost some resource which would prevent also bonus action attacking, jump disengages, etc.
The other part to your suggestion-shouldn't get the backstab advantage against an enemy who attacked or was attacked by the same character in the previous round or this same round-is probably too convoluted of a mechanic. I think its best to stick with always-applicable mechanics, and not have general rules dependent on who you hit last round.

2. Possible Additions
I'm wary of adding additional sources of advantage/disadvantage. Your suggestions make logical sense, but would probably have too significant of an effect on game balance to make them worth the effort.

Exactly. The problem is how this game presents what HP means. For casual gamers it will mean health, losing a lot of blood, etc. because that's what Larian shows. There are plenty of discussions online that ask this question both in and outside of context of D&D, but for me stamina and mental durability best describe HP. Miss is sometimes a hit defender spent no energy on. High level fighter cannot sustain 10 stabs. Not every hit means pointy stick touched their skin. Warhammer hitting armor will make it harder for them to breathe. There might be cuts, bruises or burns from magicks, but nothing that stops them from fighting at full capacity before they reach 0HP. Only the last hit has the potential to stop them or be lethal. This is when they are not able to defend properly anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn36Pb8z3yI - first minute, no direct hits, but does it mean no HP lost?

1.1.
a) It works that way even now, cause advantage removes disadvantage.
b) This may be a good addition, yes.

1.2. Notice this little bit "when the ground doesn't work as cover" - so if they implement covers properly, the impossible shot is still imposible, difficult is still difficult. But we have disadvantage now even for "normal shot". And then comes what I meant first of all talking about shooting downwards and upwards "from a medieval weapon". So happened that I have some real experience with bow and crossbow and I can tell for sure that shooting upwards causes much less trouble then shooting downwards from human physiology and the weapon construction point of view. When you're shooting downwards your own body becomes an obstacle; pulling the string on a bow is a bit harder, when you're pointing the bow downwards…

1.3. That shouldn't be to convoluted for programming. And for a player… welp, depends on the player and how they show it to him. Again I'm trying not to remove backstab entirely and in one of my previous posts I suggested to make hide "bonus action" only for rogues as in D&D 5E, so if they do that and will never allow backstabs aside from stealth, it's only rogues who would ever use backstabs. Maybe a bit harsh towards other classes.

2. That's quite possible. Either Larian will feel the same way, either we will have the opportunity to test it on practise.