- Congratulations : On gameplay design, for now i like it better than divinity 1 & 2. Don't hesitate to do your own interpretation of the D&D rules you were inspired by. Im part of the people who think you should just do what you guys feel the best for us, for game balance and fun. Some people might get pissed at you for not respecting D&D this or that version of rules, well … screw that ! it's your game and you are doing a wonderful job so far imo. Just make sure each class is as much worth as any other and has its own perks, which seems really hard, don't hesitate to update them a lot of times, we don't mind testing the changes.
I agree with some parts of that, though I think it's a poor job rather than "wonderful job" so far. I think there are 2 closely related issues here, on the topic of asking for the exact DnD 5E rules.
a) Advertisement and communication : what Larian said vs what Larian does.I have no acquaintance working at Larian and have never played a Divinity game, so I have pretty much zero a priori reason to have trust and faith in Larian. That being said, I don't want to allege the worse when I can make sense of things without making assumptions of them purposefully lying. Larian did say there were making a DnD 5E video game. And they did say that they would bring tweaks to the rules where needed, notably if they needed to modify them to make the game more fun or if some TT rules don't work in a video game setting. It is possible that they said this in good faith, truly believing that the changes they made were mere tweaks and indeed making the game more fun.
But it transpires from a number of interviews that Larian has their own vision of what is more fun, and they intend to make combat heavily influenced by this vision. There is no right or wrong here : "more fun" is relative, not absolute, to each their own tastes. In addition, Tactical Adventures came up with Solasta, which Larian probably didn't anticipate and which is a lot more faithful to 5E rules. I haven't tried it myself, but most of what I hear is that it works, and it's obviously in a video game setting. So Larian's claim to a faithful adaption of the 5E rules really cannot stand anymore.
And so players understandably feel that they have been lied to (as Niara carefully and correctly said).
As I wrote
here, I haven't played TT 5E. I don't believe it is absolutely and intrinsically superior. So I don't really want 5E for the sake of having 5E, and I initially bought the "tweaks" talk. I was excited when I heard that BG3 was coming. For a large part, I'm excited to be back in the Forgotten Realms, and I'm looking forward to a game that encourages roleplay and where players' decision are meaningful. I was also really looking forward to trying 5E. I'm gradually mourning that hope, and this is made easier by the fact that I know that Solasta exists so I'll satisfy that 5E desire elsewhere. So I'm personally not requesting the 5E rules (just a ruleset that makes sense).
But I can understand that some people came for the DnD 5E rules, are perhaps very fond of these rules, and are asking for these rules. That's what was advertised.
Side note : Larian hasn't been great at communication since the start of EA, and this is an issue where they would really benefit from having a dedicated community manager, from communicating more, acknowledging the issue, and reformulating what they intend to achieve.
b) Building and balancing the ruleset : starting with 5E and then tweaking vs starting inspired by 5E.Large chunks of the BG3 ruleset is missing. If Larian had started by implementing a first-order decent rule for every single thing (say, the 5E rule with minimal tweaking), to get a global first draft, and they had released that for Early Access, then players would have experienced something that at the very least flies. Because the combat-and-adventuring system would have been complete. Instead, they started modifying plenty of rules locally (action economy, sources of Advantage, etc), before every thing in need of a rule had received one (last-minute decisions and out-of-turn decisions, the passing of time, the rules surrounding rest, etc.)
As a result, the balance in combat and adventuring is largely "broken", and certainly doesn't not feel much like DnD.
I believe Larian will bring the game to somewhere playable (and hopefully very enjoyable) in due time, with sufficient iterations, additions, and fixing of previously-introduced problems.
But it is very understandable that some players have no trust in Larian's ability to provide a DnD experience and no trust in the Larian changes to the rules doing anything good. So they are asking for the 5E rules. Indeed, the 5E system is complete and is certainly ok-fun to play at the very minimum, so implementing these would at least yield something that flies.
Here again, more communication would have helped. In particular, communication about how combat-and-adventuring feels presently, the fact that it's perhaps not representative of what they intend to do at the medium-and-large scale (days, Acts, campaign), but only meant to provide an idea of how things could unfold at the local scale (one encounter). For now, if anything, they have demonstrated that they don't understand the DnD resource economy (spell slots, Ability Dice, items/scrolls, rests, etc).
