Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG3, DOS and the D&D rule-set

I'm so stupid I thought this entire time they meant actual in game cheese... like the food..
My two cents are that i enjoyed my first play through but it is very reminiscent of Dos2, and even though i personally havent played a proper dnd campaign before it still leaves a lot of 5E to be desired

How does a complete porting of the 5e rules not being fun equal "We don't like D&D combat"? They never said they don't like the combat in D&D. Also, the fact that "There are a lot of people at Larian who play D&D and there are a lot of game sessions going on continuously" seems to indicate that they do in fact like it.

Clearly the "There are a lot of people at Larian who play D&D and there are a lot of game sessions going on continuously" PR lines are intended to address this criticism. In fact this week's interview seemed to be all about addressing that criticism.


It's an indication of dislike because other games have ported the rules successfully without altering them to degree that Larian has -- BG series, ToEE, Pathfinder, Solasta.

it's just a misunderstanding of the rules -- clearly the D&D fans weren't in the room when "it's not fun at all" decision was made. If you are missing you aren't buffing yourself properly. Use a class feature. Use a spell. Find a magic sword. So, so much about D&D combat is about "how can I hit what can't be hit".

Why do people want a +2 sword? Answer: you are more likely to hit. If hitting isn't a problem the value of that sword goes down considerably.

The DOS model -- always hitting something with lots of hit points is simply a different system, clearly one they prefer.

And that interview isn't the only bit of evidence in another (video) interview Swen even offered to tell WotC how they should change the rules to make better video games. I won't be able to find it again but someone else might know where it is.

But, let's hope the most recent PR means they are going to make the rules optional. People who don't like to miss can play with loaded dice.

One second, I have played a lot of D&D 5e ...

This is not 3.5.

Hitting is not that hard in 5e. AC tends to be rather low. Many, many, many 5e games have almost no magical weapons, sometimes +1, often none. Not hard to hit at all. Players can gain Ability points (L4, L8) and gain Proficiency Bonus (L5, L9), while AC tend to be rather moderate.

I am NOT saying Larian implemented the rules well. No, I feel their design feels very improvised and it looks like a very early playtest in terms of stats / combat.
But the argument about +2 swords in not really in line with the 5e tendencies. That varies based on the DMs, some of which might like the older D&D games where characters ended-up having their basic +3 kit (ring, weapon, cloak, etc.) and more.

BG3 will clearly have more magical weapons, at release, than many 5e games that often make them rather exceptionally rare (again, depends on DM).

The main goal of the game is to sell.
Of course, they can make a game that is almost 100% similar to D&D, but that doesn't mean the game will be any better or that it will sell.
The current changes have been made to make the game more accessible for players who do not know D&D.
Comparing BG3 to Solasty makes as much sense as comparing Risen and The Witcher 3. Maybe both games are RPGs, but they have different priorities, budget and design assumptions.
In the case of Solasta, the creators do not have to worry about large sales, thanks to the fact that they have a smaller budget. Thanks to this, they do not have to worry about compromises.
BG3 is a much bigger game and for the project to be successful they have to sell many more copies, which means they have to make a game that is accessible to as many people as possible.

Baraz, I think we largely agree and I think we're on the same side of this issue. You are right, magical weapons have been de emphasized -- the +2 is just one example among many.

But we're really addressing emphasis. Mechanisms like advantage / disadvantage. Inspiration points. Bardic inspiration. Bless. Etc are all buffs intended to increase chances to hit. Right?

The main goal of the game is to sell.
Of course, they can make a game that is almost 100% similar to D&D, but that doesn't mean the game will be any better or that it will sell. -> it will for some of the people here.

They are also the public of this game. Why not make it viable for those who want to experience it without throwing away some classes?
I really don't see why people are stuck in some kind of " it's either this way, or this way". It can be both.

These don't add up. First if tabletop 5e combat is fun, a translation to a video game has to be fun, because its just tabletop visualized. Solasta again, the combat is pretty fun.
Vincke says that missing sucks, but is pretty easy to miss attacks in early DOS and percentages in BG3 rarely go above 70%.

Simply put, I don't want another Infinity Engine game.

As someone who enjoys D&D, this is so far the best translation of the tabletop game to the PC. There's some liberties that were taken with the rules, but none of them really detract from the experience. People complain about the disengage as a bonus action, but if RAW disengage mechanics were kept, every fight would involve half the party being locked down the entire fight because they're spending every turn running away from stuff. The terrain and barrel mechanics were carried over from Divinity:OS, which is a questionable decision, but only really an issue if you can't stop yourself from exploiting them. With so many Infinity Engine successors, I don't get why people are so desperate to have this game be a glorified small-party RTS game(rtwp), especially when they've been released constantly and never reached the success of Larian's last two games, which shows that it really is just a small, overly vocal minority that wants a mechanically similar sequel to that type of game..

Yea, maybe the game doesn't have the same mechanics as the original Baldur's Gate games, but I'm not looking for that. There's been already been 5 of those(and their enhanced editions), and tons of isometric RPG's that follow in the footsteps of the Infinity Engine games, with Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2, Tides of Numera, Tyranny, Pathfinder:Kingmaker, Underrail, and countless others currently in development, but I don't think it was ever the intention of Larian or WoTC to create yet another one.

What we're getting is the closest representation of the table top experience of D&D(as opposed to the RTS engine it was shoehorned into 22 years ago) with the current ruleset. Baldur's Gate is older than the first video games that depicted it, and just because Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't play the same as the first two doesn't make it any less of a Baldur's Gate game.

There's another thread about RtwP. We're talking about 5th ed mechanics in this one.

Aye, I am on the same page here.
You cant deny the fact that BG3 nearly has nothing to do with old games and it feels 99,99% as a reskinned DOS2. So calling it DOS3 is not only fair its actually more suiting.
Hope they will listen to Baldurs Gate fans and do some changed regarding that.
At least some changes in the art design and a Real Time Combat with Pause would do it for me!




No we are talking about BG3 beeing more a DOS3 than a BG game here.

6 of 1 I say. To be BG it needs to feel like D&D and like FR. Right?

The crux of the post is essentially how the game doesn't feel like Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and that many people were expecting or hoping for a game using a modernized Infinity Engine, or at least one very similar mechanically to those games. Essentialy, BG1 & 2 are 20 year old games made in an engine that was designed for a completely different genre(RTS) that just so happened to work with the rules for D&D, and both those games and BG are implementations of the D&D rules into a computerized format, albeit different editions.

Aside from Sword Coast Legends, an isometric RPG in the same style as the Infinity Engine games which was apparently not received very well, and BG3. Even then, I don't see anything in the original post about what edition rules should be used, but even if that was the case, why would anyone release a game using a 20 year old ruleset that has updated multiple times?

The game feels like D&D, and the engine is well suited to it, much better than Infinity Engine was. Even ignoring the turn-based combat vs real-time with pause, the engine in BG3 is much better suited to D&D than Infinity Engine ever was. It feels like Divinity:OS 3 because that series used the engine first, but that doesn't mean people just saying this game is a sequel to Divinity:OS 2 are right, just like Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale weren't "just Baldur's Gate 3 & 4".

That article is from June 2019, well before anyone know knew to what extent the rules would be modified, and hence, the criticism for it.

In any event, going back to the original point ("Well, and we know this for a fact because Larian told us they didn't like D&D combat"), Larian did not say they don't like the combat from D&D. If that is your interpretation, that's on you; but don't try to pass it off as fact.

Then @Emrikol, we've reached the point where we can only agree to disagree. When you have one set of game devs that implements the combat rules as written -- Solasta -- and finds them fun and another set of devs that explicitly says the rules not are not fun when ported to a video game it's hard to conclude anything other than (a) the second devs either weren't fans of the ruleset or (b) didn't understand them.

To me it looks like the 5th ed didn't play like DOS so they made it more like DOS. Which is fine. Which is fun. But isn't D&D. Hockey and figure skating have many things in common and they are both fun -- but they aren't the same sport.

That's this thread:

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=652913#Post652913

BG3 is turn based. Which is an improvement imo. You can't reduce BG feel to this issue. People who want to fight that battle do that on that very active thread. I think it's a lost battle.

It's confusing because this thread was a locked thread that combined three other threads about DOS and 5th ed rules. I was talking about HP bloat / AC reduction & dipping when the thread got merged. You may want to talk about 2nd ed vs 5th or RtwP vs turn based to make you point but that's not the conversation.

No you are not right but its ok. You do you!

A significant difference to the original right there. Bioware would have been happy with shipping a couple hundred thousand copies (which Larian have already way surpassed). They were also clearly communicating to the core D&D audience first. https://www.theringer.com/2018/12/21/18150363/baldurs-gate-bioware-1998-video-games



You're right though. Nothing inherently "wrong" with that. At times I'm still astonished that the blockbuster games market from time to time still produces games as uncompromised as Alien:Isolation or Prey (Arkane).

I don't know why you're getting hung up on the turn-based vs rtwp here, that's you, not me. That's just an aspect of the engine I dislike, but my point is that an RTS engine that Bioware forced D&D into is not as good as the RPG engine that Larian forced D&D into. RTwP vs TB is a part of that argument, but not the entirety of it, and you seem to be reducing my argument that that singular aspect, which is not what I'm trying to communicate here. Bioware took liberties with the AD&D 2e rules just like Larian is with the 5e rules. It's a requirement when converting them to a digital format. I feel that the changes to the rules and the engine that Larian is using are better than what the developers of BG 1/2 used. While the combat format is included in that, there are many other aspects that go along with it.

I'm saying that yes, the game is going to feel more like D:OS 1/2 than BG 1/2, because BG 3 is built using the D:OS engine, and the primary reason for it being better is that the developers of BG 3 are using an engine that was designed for RPG's from the ground up, rather than Bioware who just forced the D&D ruleset into an RTS engine. I don't want another isometric RPG, there's already a ton of them on the market. Even with their alterations to the rules, I'm still enjoying BG3 far more than I have any other digital iteration of D&D.

Larian has been talking about playing D&D campaigns in the office and being huge fans of Baldur's Gate since the Kickstarter campaign for the FIRST Original Sin. This isn't just something they made up now.