Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What's the meaning of "cheese" or "hide cheese"

My definition of cheese mostly consists of mechanics or environmental factors that end up overpowering traditional strategies so much that you're pretty much expected to take advantage of them if you want to have an easier time. Even worse when the game happens to be balanced around said cheese, to the point that approaching an encounter with a traditional mindset and without any foresight means you're paddling up shit creek and you can expect a reload.

High ground advantage/low ground disadvantage isn't what I'd consider cheese, it's just a highly questionable design decision. Taking advantage of it by itself isn't cheese. But what pushes it into cheese range is the existence of bonus action shove, which further emphasizes control of the high ground by rewarding players with an opportunity for bonus damage via yeeting things that try to pursue your party. Not to mention that the existence of an ability that anyone can use which can outright result in instant kills when used at certain angles really shouldn't be a bonus action to begin with. There's a very good reason why the high ground/low ground advantage/disadvantage system as well as bonus action shoves don't exist in tabletop DnD, and BG3 is basically proof of why.

Stuff like barrelmancy is also low hanging fruit in this regard, but probably the absolute biggest offender is the idea that you can have a single character start a fight and roll initiative, and the rest of the party can just sneak around the whole battlefield doing whatever they want as long as they don't use an action that breaks stealth or walk into a sight cone, while the one character in combat just stalls their turn. That is what pushes barrelmancy into 'neat environmental prop' into 'highly abusable mechanic that can potentially delete most encounters'.

The game currently isn't what I'd consider legitimately hard, and taking advantage of the cheese mechanics doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you learned how to flip the chess board to play checkers instead.

It's kind of telling that the vast majority of advice on how to tackle fights in this game ultimately boils down to figuring out how to abuse the homebrew mechanics and/or the environment, instead of being character-specific or advising on effective use of abilities.