Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Question RE: Edition Choice

I want to verify: was Larian pigeonholed into using 5e by Wizards of the Coast or was it a conscious choice?

5e is popular with new players mainly because it is very simplistic and easy for new players to use. 3.5e was much more detailed with a lot more options, but the complex stats and rolls could become burdensome for some players. As everything is calculated by the program and storytelling is what is limited by the medium, not what can be done: 3.5e would be a much better option for a videogame regardless of whether players prefer 5e or not on the tabletop. So this leads to the question of whether Larian was instructed to use 5e by Wizards to promote their current product or not.

Obviously Wizards is going to insist that any games currently being made are going to use the current rules in order to promote their brand.

But I’ve been playing DND since the 90s and I think 3/3.5 was trash, and so do all the people I play with (also long time table top vets). If you like those rule sets that’s cool, but 5E doesn’t just appeal to new players. Lots of older players appreciate that the game is significantly decluttered and less convoluted now.

Precisely as you said that 5e is easier for new players. I've never played any DnD prior to playing BG3, but taking the time to really understand 5e its been pretty easy and fun. I have no history with 3.5e vs 5e but overall I think its been fun.

With the game doing all the calculations and rolling for you, 3.5e mechanics wouldn't be any more difficult for a player to grasp. It would mean you could do a lot more with feats, have levels over 20, upgrade weapons, armor, and other wearable items, and really customize your character - but if you opted not to do it, you wouldn't even notice that added complexity. 5e is easier to grasp, but it also is extremely restrictive on character customization and really stereotypes characters. For example, evil and neutral clerics used to be able to rebuke undead instead of turning them - that put the undead under your control. If you worked with skills instead of proficiencies - which was really useful for intelligent characters who got more skills per level - you could easily make your wizard able to sneak around and after enough levels you could turn them into a steath spellcaster that could cast silently, without movement. If you wanted to make a rogue skilled with dealing with arcana or religion you could do that without sacrificing their acrobatics. Or you could play it vanilla. The complexity had to do with the paper, and you would notice no difference in gameplay. In fact, you would have a lot more cantrips as you had a huge list of level 0 spells.



The people I play with agree, at least the adults, that 5e is trash - just too simplified, though one wanted to play a race that was only available in 5e. But one (a juris doctorate) hadn't played since the 90s and the other (a PhD) hadn't played before and they need to be reminded of the rules when we play. Playing within the confines of a video game, though, no one has to keep track of the rules. 1e players tend to like 5e as a return to the basics, and players do focus much more on storytelling than rolling and keeping track of stats, but all those advantages disappear with the videogame format. Players don't have to keep track of stuff and the storytelling is the same regardless. All the changes would be behind the scenes other than in leveling up and character creation and those changes would only make characters more customizable. You wouldn't see the clutter in the game.

Word on the street is that 6E is going to be the best version ever ... uh, at least until 7E comes out, of course. Savy?

To be fair, 5e is the current edition. I can't imagine why any new D&D based games would use a different edition. It's current, it's the easiest to pick up and play with if you've never played TT RPG's before (or D&D) and it's the easiest to plug into a video game because of the relative simplicity of it. My husband and I said when it came out that it almost felt like it was made for conversion into a PC game.

it was very obvious that WOTC uses this as an advertisement of dnd and as such they wouldnt let them use any edition they arent actually selling.
its not rocket science.

Also note, TAKE NOTE; how it is always 3.5 fans.
Baldurs Gate 1 and 2 werent 3.5, i know a lot of you somehow dont know htis because you assume 3.5 "is" dnd, but it isnt. Its a terribly bloated edition full of class tier lists, riddled with trap options, nonsensical systems that dont work well with each other and tons upon tons of template bloat.
In other words its much like 5e, but a lot more bloated.

its not complex, its stupid. Complex is a word TTRPG players use when they want to make "Bloated" and "Unwiedly" sound like positive qualities. This isnt actual complexity, it is the """complexity""" of GURPS and FATAL.

Note that its 3.5 players that feel like DnD belongs to them.

and to adress your points, because 3.5 fans always act like this (and by this i mean 15 year old Atheists on the internet who constantly need to declare how high their IQ supposedly is), no, it is not about dicerolling and doing calculations. the calculations in 3.5 are not more complex than in 5e.
They are the same. They have the same. You might just get a few more boni here and there but in the end it is a number and you roll against that number, its not rocket science.
No it is unaccessible because it is full of BAD options, TERRIBLY explained rulings and confusing """choices""" that are not choices at all.
The system was deliberatley designed to be somehting you get "better" at, read: you can fail at Character optimization.
Thats a terrible choice for a video game where the DM isnt there to adjust the game to that.
This system would work for a Rogue Like, not for a 100 hour CRPG that you invest time in.
Its terrible for a lenghty game where a newcomer would realize he screwed himself 50 hours into the game. Now i dont have this issue. But holy shit have you actually read the steam reveiws on Pathfinder kingmaker?
Of course you need to know to pick blindfight halfway throughout the game on EVERY CHARACTER because otherwise the lategame is going to fist you.
Get real.


And to conclude: the best edition for a video game is either White Box DnD,but then you better programm a Dorf fortress style simulation around it or use something like AI dungoen as a quasi DM, or 4e because that ones actually balanced around Team play and dungeon crawling.

I agree that 3.5 is simply better then 5, but let's face it, it's a video game. Video games need to appeal to the masses so the dumbed down 5th edition with its painfully whitewashed lore is going to have to be the edition that WoTC allows Larian to use.
Since it's a video game I don't really care much, and I actually think that the proficiency system simply works better in video games then the skill system, but that's pretty much where the advantages end.
The big downside of 5E is that it can't handle epic level play, and your characters are already ridicolously OP by lvl 11. But that's actually a strength in video games because being OP is fun. So some of the bad things about 5E actually translate as good things in videogames. Now I personally dislike that we are going to face off with epic world-breaking forces and meddle in the affairs of the gods before lvl 20, but at the same time it's important to realize that this game has a story to tell, and if they story is well written, many of the flaws will be forgiven by the gamers.

Yes, BG1 and 2 were 2.0; we had no games based on 3.5 and it is unfortunate that there weren't any. Nowhere was it declared that DnD belongs to 3.5 players - it seems like you just have a chip on your shoulder.



So you feel that you need to resort to inaccurate namecalling? 15 year olds were probably introduced to DnD with 5e and so aren't going to be gearing for 3.5e; and I'm 38. The players I DM for are 39, 41, and 14. The 14 year old is the one without an opinion on editions. One of us may be an atheist, but I'm not sure that's true.



No, they aren't the same - the entire appeal of 5e is that it removes all these calculations - see above where an old player (my guess is of the original edition) talks about it removing the clutter. 3.5e was more complex - for example having individual skills you placed points in where the number of points were addressed by class, sometimes race, and intelligence modifier. There were way more classes with more abilities and long lists of feats that gave very specific advantages. There were alternate systems for spellcasting and character flaws that you could add in. Those who don't like it almost unilaterally cite the amount of paperwork involved and that it interferes in moving the story forward.

>there are no 3.5 games
neverwinter nights? toee? Kingmaker?
No i just know my way around the community and i know the posessive attitudes 3eaboos take.
And it keeps coming up on this forum so dont act like it isnt true.

And yes exactly, its not exactly acting ones age.
In case you havent mentioned, it was a jab at you acting as if 3.5 was some intellectually challenging maths exercise when the *maths* based mechanics work almost identical in 5e.

>removes all those calculations
... ok, prove it.
Because those calculations are largley still there. Yes 5e still has stats, in case you havent bothered to check. Yes attacks still hit AC (no thac0 here), yes theres still saving throws targeted by spells.
the primary difference are advantage and how skills are handled.

All those things you mentioned however, are calculations you do on your char sheet.
In the actual game theres bareley any difference in the math you do.
3.5 allows you sto stack more maths beforehand, but thats not in any way making it more mentalyl challenging, i t makes it bloated.

And thats not a positive thing. WHy would you pick a fighter if you could pick a warblade?
Why would anyone want to be a Purple dragon knight?
3.5 was just a bunch of splatbooks full of trap options. Those are stupid systems.

If youd actually read some other posts you might also know that i dislike 5e. But what youre saying is not making any sense.
3.5 has some things over 5e. Stuff like the charge action, 5 foot step and combat maneuvers (Even tho they are terrible). But the splatbook nonsense? thats where you draw the line?


but lets get back to your old argument.
Your argument is that the problems with 3.5 are irrelevant in a video game.
let me explain to you why youre wrong on this.

theres not a lot of calculations 3.5 does in combat that are more complicate than 5e, and the char sheet is perhaps marginally more difficult to manage.
The "Difficulty" comes from the having 400 different options that seemingly do the same, but some are confusingly worded and might not do what you think they do at all.
No ammount of automated calculating is going to explain to you why touch attacks bypass natural armor but not dex armor class bonus, to just give a real mundane example permeating several DnD editions.
OR how psionics work. Its not going to make the Totemist make sense to people.

Ugh, no. They arent going to ditch the streamlined system to go back to the most unbalanced and bloated system in D&D's history. 3.5 is dogshit for vets too. I wasted an hour of my life adjudicating a Mordenkainen's Disjunction dropped on a great wyrm red dragon and the PC party, with the cascading buff effects, stat adjustments, etc. I had run the crap system for over 4 years.... Never again.

At this point I don't believe that WotC enforced the use of 5e, given how unfaithful Larian's adaptation is. They probably just suggested as a baseline.

I don't think he ever claimed that playing 3.5 made him mathematically superior.

It's funny you say that because there is Purple Dragon Knight in 5e and it's widely regarded as a trap option.

I'm speaking about Baldur's Gate and the like. To be honest, I'm unfamiliar with those games - but there hasn't been a Baldur's Gate title in 3.5e.


In 3.5e you have 50+ different skills that you can opt to spend skill points on to reach between your character level +3 and half that for maximums depending on whether or not it is a class skill. There isn't a single proficiency bonus for a handful of things you have a proficiency in, but you get a bonus based on your skill points, your ability modifier, racial modifiers, and item modifiers. You also get skill synergies where having 5 or 10 skill points in one skill grants you a bonus in another. Your armor class actually changes based on whether you are caught flatfooted, or hit with a touch attack. You have different fortitude, reflex, and will saves based on your ability modifiers, magical modifiers, item modifiers, and class. You start with feats - and not just some very plain, vanilla feats, but a wide array of hundreds of possible feats across the books that allow you to do multiple things that just don't exist in 5e. You can get grafts if you find the materials and someone capable of doing them to add undead features or draconic features. You have the ability to gather followers and companions. You have epic levels that theoretically have no limit but seem naturally capped at when you've mastered godhood. You have monster templates so that players can literally play as any monster in the monster manuals. There are way more possible classes, multiclassing, and prestige classes.In the fights, the ability to charge and take a 5 foot step are mentioned - though I'm not as familiar with the fighting mechanics of 5e since they lost me at character creation - so I'm not 100% sure whether or not 5e handles partial hiding, grappling, etc, but I do know 5e lacks the ability to forgo movement to get two attack actions and certainly doesn't have the feats that allow you to trip or disarm enemies, sacrifice accuracy for power or offense for defense, or get special metamagic abilities from being the target of certain spells in your past. Evil and neutral clerics lost the ability to rebuke the dead. I'm pretty sure 5e lacks flight and water speeds.


Details? Yes, I love details. If you don't like the options they offer the great thing about that is that they are OPTIONAL - you don't have to pick it. You are literally arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to have options because those options aren't right for you. Another cool thing is that it is a roleplaying game and so if your choices are flawed you literally can have fun with those flaws. A player in my group created a clumsy ass elf - low dexterity - because they felt like it, despite the +2 dexterity bonus. His wife mocks him in game for it.


There is quite a bit that complicates things more in battle, but my issue isn't even with the battle mechanics. It is with the character customization options. You can fine tune your characters to do what you want them to be able to do. Non-Wizards had a reason to be intelligent. They had all these options so that you could find something you like and the DM Guide helped DMs design more to make sure their players could have a good time. 5e is class stereotypes which detracts from the very complexity of roleplay. 3.5e made it possible to have wizards wear armor if you designed your character right - you could design an cleric that could steal and pick locks or a fighter that was a scholar. It may or may not be a good idea - but you could do it if you wanted to. At the same time, you could very much play the character in a stereotypical fashion if you so chose to. No option was forced upon you - but you had the choice.

Keeping track of all these different calculations - on your character sheet - is what drives people nuts. However, you now have a computer keeping track of it all - no erasing numbers and writing them over. No doing addition for 50 different skills. It wasn't calculus, but it could be tedious, and you don't have that tedium when it's in a videogame. Once again: people who like 5e specifically cite the fact that they don't have to do that paperwork and it lets them focus on the story; people who like 3.5e cite the options that you think no one should have. Yet you keep saying the 5e people are wrong because there isn't that paperwork after all.

I just checked out the tier list for 3.5e on 1D4Chan (which links to the original tier list forum discussion), and the sheer dominance of spellcasters in and of itself is one good reason I'm glad we're not using 3.5e. I don't want to play a spellcaster. I don't want spellcasters to be stupid easy mode while my preferred class struggles a lot. Actually, one thing I loved about DoS2 is that spellcasters, while having their place, were not ridiculously dominant.

I can't comment on the complexity, but at the same time, I don't care. I'm of the mind that having one type of PC (spellcasters, ie wizards, artificers, clerics, etc.) able to run rampant over everything while other, potentially equally interesting options (physical classes, ie fighters, rogues, rangers, etc.) have a much bigger uphill climb does not a great game make. That's one reason I'm damn glad that 5e is being used over 3.5e.

(ps, there is a 5e tier list here, and it seems like even the highest tier classes in the phb don't break any campaign in half, unlike 3.5e)

(pps, google linear warriors quadratic wizards if you want to see this phenomenon explained in more detail)

The only reason spellcasters are not ridicolously dominant in 5E is because the vast overwhelming majority of 5E campaigns don't get into the 12+ level territory. That's it.

I hate to break it to you zyr, but spellcasters still dominate in 5e, just not as much as in 3.5.
And they sitll dont have a role, their role is "utility", which means pretty much anyhting any other class can do. But thats another topic

>Purple dragon knight
ive pointed out that i dislike 5e just as much, it just has less obnoxious fans.
Why do you think 5e has that class? Because the entire premise of 5e is to go back towards 3.5 and its tier lists.

>There hasnt been a Baldurs Gate game in 3.5
Now youre shifting goalposts.
And even then youre wrong since Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance was based on 3rd edition rules :^)

>Boni
ive pointed this out before, all of this is calculated... once.
and you can get online character sheets to do it for you. And its not exactly hard to tally up a couple of +1 or +2s, its realy not as arcane as you make it out to be.
>Different saves
the same is true in 5e?
>Feats
5e has less of them, and its an optional system, hence 5e beeing a bad system aswell, but yes, now youre getting closer to my point. Half of the feats 3.5 has are stupid, redudant or plain old trap options.
No ammount of computer number crunching is going to make that less confusing or nonsensical.
>Grafts
again, bloat.
This does mean you gotta calculate things, once.
Its not complicated mathematically, but it is anohter system that players need to wrap their head around. Id also point out that theres quite a few 3.5 based video games and not a single one has done this.
I wonder why. I also wonder why theres never been a Totemist, or any other of those bareley above third party splatbook rules that make no sense.

>followers ad companions
now i think youve lost me. What does that have to do with your original claim about 3.5 beeing complicated math.
Are you referring to Thrallherds or the Leadership skill?
I suppose you refer to the fact that it has a spreadsheet attached to it what levels of followers you can have. Again i dont realy see how this is mathematically hard, it is more hard to figure out how it would be usefull. hence why, yet again, no video game has implemented this system

>charging and 5 foot step
again nothing to calculate but yes , one of those things that i think larian should implement because its ridiculous that 5e doesnt have it.



Lets get back to what was the actual argument here.
You claimed 3.5 was a better fit for a video game, because its a more complex system, but the Computer does the calculation for you so it removes the barrier to entry.
I think you also implied that 5e is a simpler game in terms of calculation and thus its benefit only comes in the tabletop format.

Then you started talking about Grafts, Monster Tamplates and Prestige classes.
I think you can probably agree with me at this point that the "issue" with 3.5 beeing arcane, obtuse and full of options whose usefullness cannot easily be determined just by looking at it isnt realy resolved by it beeing played on a computer.

All those issues peresist and are made worse by a lack of a mediating Dungeon Master.
Blind Fight could be an entierly useless feat (such as in NWN2), or a mandatory one (Pathfinder Kingmaker) depending on the Campaign.
this is not an issue on the table, it IS an issue in a video game.


>options and details
yeah no. trap options are bad.
Options that arent IDEAL are not a problem, but options that are deliberatley designed to be a Joke (im looking at you purple dragon knight) or to show contempt to a certain demand in the community (again, purple dragon knight) are not an argument about Charop.
Those are traps, they arent called trap options for no reason.
Theres tons of those options in 3.5 that, for someone that hasnt studied the game, appear entierly reasonable, untill the point where the game becomes unwinnable due to your terrible build

>things that complicate combat
Charop is calculations done once every level or when you get a new magic item. I dont realy think this counts as "combat mathematics".
Yes keeping track of it is annoying, and yes computer can alleviate this problem.
But it doesnt alleviate MOST of the problems.
It doesnt adress the problem that comes BEFORE stacking those Boni and options.

>Class steretypes
I like Classes becoming Stereotypes, i dislike that in 5e they arent realy, Chaotic Evil paladins are stupid.
but thats besides the point.
What youre talking about implies that theres only two options, nameley no cusotmization or 3.5 level of spreadsheet simulation.
If only there was an edition that allowed you to stack Classes, Subclasses, Multiclasses, Backgrounds, Themes, Paragon paths and Epic desitnies, feats, racial feats, racial paragon paths and racial epic destinies while also only having a negligible ammount of Trap options, rules bloat or classes invalidating each other while also having the simplest math since the TSR era...
If only...

I don't think your dislike of 3.5E fans is a valid argument towards anything Sordak. You are just displaying how much you hate some people, that's all.
But this, I agree with.

Well i suppose you conclude you ran out of things to say then.
I made a pretty coherent argument why 3.5s issues cannot be solved by beeing emulated by a computer.