Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General OMG this update you guyyyyyyys!

I really like it too!

this definitly falls under "people dont know what they want"
5e rules are lackluster. Having an advantage when you got the high ground isnt exactly rocket science.

5e is not nearly as polished, balanced or nuanced enaugh to validate not having something like this simply to stick to RAW

But solastaaaaa

Well, I'd like to know, apart from increased range, what advantage does the high-ground give to archers in real life ? Otherwise said, what does this mechanism aim to capture ? I don't see.

I can see it has tactical implications. But rules whose existence is justified solely because they lead to interesting decisions is the trademark of abstract games (Go, Chess, etc). A game like DnD is usually more heavy on delivering immersion and simulation, even if that means the game isn't the finest strategy game.

Yes, buuuut Solasta. But Solasta is doing it right

Sorry but combat is better now that the cantrips are back to core DnD. Sometimes people know what they want. Granted Solasta is just a dungeon crawl with fugly graphics but people are having lots of fun with combat.

And DnD is a great ruleset that doesn't need house rules to improves it. While 5th isn't as good as the hotmess that was 2nd ed was but it's the best ruleset since 2nd. I just think the "what's wrong with 5th ed" is a bad starting point for any devs -- this has been my problem with Obsidian forever. Great, Obsidian, you've made a ruleset that corrects all those DnD balance problems too bad it's just not as fun as 5th ed.



Obviously the devs have given too much attention to designing high ground spots to abandon height bonuses but they don't need to give it the super power of 5th ed 'advantage'. Give +2 for high ground, -2 for low ground and you have a real incentive to seek the higher ground without the game devolving into a king of the hill.

The lessen of the cantrip improvements should be: trust the existing ruleset, stop thinking about how to improve it.

>I dont see it
My dude.
I dont know what to tell you, maybe we ought to turn it into one of those little maths diagrams for high school.

>DND is a great ruleset that doenst need house rules to improve it

Remind yourself that FEATS are an optional rule in 5e.
Remind yourself that charging does not exist without feat tax, feats that, as i pointed out, are an OPTIONAL rule.
Remind yourself that Ranger exists in its current form.
Remind yourself that the Champion fighter somehow exists.
Remind yourself that the Paladin is considered balanced

And thats just the most basic things. 5e is not a well designed game and it DEFINITLY is not robust, which the entire Paladin / Warlock conundrem illustrates niceley.

This is not about balance. I dont like "Balanceman"s approach either. but 5e just has so many thigns that are poorly thought out.
Why is an entire subsystem of the game relegated to battlemaster?
Why is attacking the enemy first in a 1 on 1 melee encounter discouraged?
Why is are there, now up from 2, 3 different paces of adventuring? how was "20 minute adventuring day wizards versus all around fighters" not annoying enaugh that you also had to include "short rest warlock nonsense" in there to clutter up the group dynamic even more?
How is HP bloat in any way a good idea when you also have stuff like bounded accuracy?
Why is having to cross reference monster statblcoks because they dont just tell you what that stuff does a thing again. Not still, AGAIN, this was resolved but they put it back in!
How are there choatic evil paladins?

5e is a barebones mess of a system and ive not seen it been runw ithout houserules yet. Even those that thought they were running it RAW accidently put in stuff from earlier editions like charging or other ways in which critical hits work.

@Sordak.

I think 5th is right to make feats optional. One of the strengths of 5th is you can play the flavor you like -- you like 3.5 best? Use feats. You like 2nd ed best, DM can say "no feats". 3.5 was fine I guess, 3.75 is better but both are in meh category.

Now you are spot on with the Warlock comments. Warlocks are a 4th edition class and suffer from all the 4th ed problems. The answer is always. always "teleport and eldritch blast". Good if you are a doing tournament play with disposable characters but otherwise boring. So I just keep saying "I hex goblin #2 and use my eldritch blast" all afternoon? I'll add that the easy healing in 5th is completely immersion breaking. Nothing a good sleep can't cure! But both point to the same issue -- if the warlock wasn't included this would have alienated 4th edition fans and they would have made lots of noise. Both of them!

On battlemasters If you are going for a low or medium magic setting you need something to make fighters interesting. IMO 2nd ed did this best with intelligent weapons and the like. In the late game a fighter has a number of items that gives her multiple options in combat. In a medium magic setting like 5th ed fighters need to do something other than say "I slash with my sword" all day.

TL;DR 5th is a compromise system one that allows people to play 2nd, 3rd or 4th as they like. The devs should trust it more.

Amen. 5e purist are the biggest danger to BG3 at the moment, let's hope Larian filters their noise out.

I just wanted to add that one of the best ways to make is a point is make up a disparaging nickname for people who disagree with you. Especially one that straw mans while it disparages. And in this regard "5e purist" fits the bill perfectly. Makes you sound perfectly reasonable, rational and capable of having an adult conversation. "thumbs up emoji"

*looking for like button*

Is "purist" disparaging?

I envision a purist as an angelic creature, dressed in flowing robes and glowing with a soft golden radiance, and speaking with an almost musical cadence of vocal tones which please the ear. The 5E Purist waves a hand over the freshly minted D&D tomes, and with poise and charm intones the rules which are scribed therein for the good of the flock, so that our adventurers may roll the dice of fate and test their mettle. Ahhh, the purist speaks soothe ... except regarding 5E Bards which are totally broken.

Exaclty. Disparaging would be the "F word"... 'cause no one likes a Fanboy (fan-person? just fan?? See, even the gendering is problematic!!)

I could think of many MANY other truly disparaging descriptions for 'purists' that pop up on gamer forums, and trust me, purist is by FAR one of the 'nicest'/least insulting.

Hahaha! Nice!

People keep forgetting your starting companions are lawful evil vampire, lawful evil cleric who worships Shar, "alien" who is super xenophobic and her race is known to raid and pillage most of the time when they are not hunting the illithid so no wonder they are rude, mean and cold to you what I like is how they behave like real people would no longer from super meanie to super nice guy because you got the exact amount of points in their approval you can make them friendlier to you by accepting them and showing them a place where they can stay because your entire camp is full of outcasts. People like Gale and Wyll are way friendlier and nicer because these are good characters so I find funny how people were complaining about your companions being harsh to you.

That's like bitching about Viconia being super edgy, cold bitch who never smile and shadowheart is a big hand for Viconia from the first game as both are evil clerics worshipping Shar, so why no one complained about Viconia, yet everyone has a problem that shadowheart is mean lol. I would love to get more variations for companions and add missing core classes (Barbarian, Druid, Monk, Paladin, Sorcerer, and Bard maybe Artificer?) and maybe more subraces for each race dark dwarf, ghostwise halfling etc.

(With the disclaimer that I don't have my own crystallized opinions on companions yet.)

You're conflating "evil" with "unlikeable", "annoying", "bitchy" and a couple of other things that don't need to go together. From what I can tell from reading this forum, it's the latter that many people don't like: companions criticizing every small thing you do and generally being a pain. No one complained about Viconia, because Viconia may have been a cold bitch, but wasn't bitchy.

BG2 is actually a good example of evil characters being "likeable" (the whole evil cast I think) and good characters being "unlikeable" (YMMV, but let's say Nalia, Anomen and Aerie.)

So the problem isn't generally the morality (or lack thereof), it's how the characters are portrayed; their personality, their writing. On the subject of the latter, several users noted that they all behave like characters in a teenage drama or the like. It's not just evil alignment. (Wyll and Gale have also been criticized.)

But it's also not that I don't see your point: some people ARE complaining because the evil companions aren't instantly chummy with their PC. And since most people tend towards "goody-two-shoes", it's more likely the evil characters won't be happy with how things go.

i wonder if youre just trying to wind me up now
>warlock is a 4th edition class with 4th edition problems

For one thing, Warlock is not a 4th edition class and i dont know how youd come to that conclusion.
Warlock very much was a thing in 3.5, maybe you got confused because Pathfinder doesnt have Warlocks, but they were introduced with 3.5.
Secondly i DM a year long 4e campaign with a warlock in the party right now and there are none of these issues. Thats due to 4e not beeing poorly designed and making sure that this doesnt happen.
AEDU has this entire system baked into the core of the rules and as such the entire "issue" with short rests is resolved by applying it to everyone.

The only "4e" like class in 5e is the battlemaster, and by which i mean its a butchering of a system that 4e applied to all classes.
Battlemasters existance is the reason other fighter archetypes in 5e will always be lackluster.

See, you might not be aware of this but when 5e originally came around, the Battlemasters maneuvers and superiority die were simply a system for the fighter.
And for some reaosn that nobody now understands it got removed again and shoved into its own subclass, making all of these systems unavailable to other martial classes.

The reason for this primarily beeing grognards crying about not all of the special attention going to wizards.

And this just marks the entire problem with 5e. It doesnt know wha tit wants to do, it waters down all the good thigns from previous editions, tries to implement them at the same time and, this is the part where our two analysis are gonna diverge, fails miserably at it.
The quasi short rest focused playstyle of Warlock completley falls apart next to other characters in 5e, especialy if you then abuse the system when multiclassing a paladin.

Instead of a functional system, you got several butchered system that dotn work with one another

Patch 3


Let's face it I don't even have to comment really you awesome guys said it all for me regarding this matter..But I will, because that's me. All I want Is pickpocketting sorted out personally as I'm a live by the rules, works in finance boring life kinda guy so i want to rob, steal and maim in a game. lets face it, three days later your busy vendor is not going to remember a half elf guy who stole a sword off him because: (A) We all know if elves existed they would be bred out of existence within a few years as they are hotter than humans, so many half elves would exist. (B) This just ruined yet another run for me which is getting very annoying when I have got away with stealing orginally," Meh, it is EA " I tell myself and laugh whilst internally combusting. (C) Remember you are Larian and have a large fan base anyway who want a Larian game where we can do such things. Purists will still buy it anyway as they love a moan.

Conclusively, as i like that word. STOP trying to hypothetically speaking please Richard known as Dick the Lock to his mates who wears a wig and hat at the table on Tuesday nights arguing with his mate Oscar the Ogre cause last time the die fell off the table resulting in the cat needing surgery after swallowing it, Dicks angry as he likes his own way so is insistant that it landed on a 16 when it was extracted by the Vetenary Surgeon after she dropped it in an instrument tray, but couldn't have his Iphone on in case it interfered with electronics..Just carry on going down your own path..It's based on DND guys, note the word based, Oh and rember it's EA too some people

Yeah, this rant wins the interwebz tonight @seleniumcodec I can log off now and get some sleep. In the absence of any appropriate smileys I'll tip my imaginary hat of hat tipping.

i dont even think there needs to be a distinciton between "based on dnd" and "dnd"
everyone houserules in dnd.

Its part of DnDs dna, opposed to lets say, wargames or mtg.

i have a distinct feeling that a lot of people who hold up 5es rules as some sort of perfection, actually dont play 5e and use this as just another vector to attack something they dont like on principle.

This may not be a charitable interpretation but thats the internet for you. As i pointed out before, "feats" are an optional rule in 5e. Thats not exactly houserules but that means that in order to play the game "Properly" , i.e. how every single DM seems to run the game at least from my anecdotal evidence of /tg/ and other roleplaying oriented circles, you need to extend the basic ruleset.

Which leads me to the conclusion that people angry about larian doing just that, are just angry at larian and either dont play dnd at all, play another edition of it or simply are only used to ADnD 2E based video games and assume RAW 5e is somehow the same thing.

I agree this is great stuff. I had to read it three times before I really got the story straight, ha! From now on, I am going to leave my cell phone in the car and wear a wig and hat just like Dick the Lock when I go to the veteran to have a dice removed from my cat while inside an electro-magnetically active operating room.