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Banned
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Banned
Joined: Nov 2020
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Actually, I was simply parroting what some other DnD players have claimed on the Larian forums ( not you, clearly ) - that die rolls provide suspense, and that this is a good thing. I was being ironic/sarcastic, but I apologise if you felt slighted; it was an inadequate attempt at humour on my part. Oh, no offence taken, mainly because I'm not a tabletop DnD player. I responded because it has become all too common to dismiss the views of others by labelling those who hold them as "purists", or "fanatics", or just being irrational and stupid. So, we're good! As I mentioned in a converstion flow above, I am old enough to have played the original game in the 1970s. Back then, it was genuinely different from the tabletop wargaming it grew out of, and in a way, exciting.
As a completely new concept, DnD was a mix of good and bad ideas. Other games like "Empire of the Petal Throne", or "Runequest" came up with alternative systems that also contained good and bad ideas; but it was a really niche and nerdy market at the time, so DnD with first-mover advantage has stayed the course best.
The DnD system has, over the years, managed to lose the illogical Thac0, and finally updated the magic system in 5e to something more sensible, but, unfortunately, it still has questionable representation of the very basic ideas of combat.
I assume players in the tabletop world still accept it ( although it was heavily criticised, even in the 1970s ), but the DnD notion that increasing armor weight makes you more difficult to hit while not mitigating damage at all, is highly abstract and lacks reason ( and I won't even get started on the notion of the "saving throw" in a computer game ).
When presenting that sort of DnD combat concept in a computer game, you are always likely to get a lot of people who dislike the illogical and random nature of abstract tabletop rules in a medium that can do a more convincing job. A discussion on the finer points of DnD's armour class system would be lengthy enough to warrant it's own thread, so I'll just say that since Larian touted this game to be based on DnD 5E rules, it would be a show of bad faith to renege on this. Not that all computer games actually do provide good mechanics, of course, but the mechanics usually make more sense within the computer game medium. It's not even an argument that there should be no randomness, just that it should exist only where it makes sense, and that it is not actively visible where it doesn't need to be. True, not all computer games get the mechanics right, but Solasta has shown how it can be done. The poorer aesthetics of that low budget game might drive away many, so it won't have as many players as BG3, but for those who know that it is based on DnD SRD, and bought it on that basis, largely enjoy it for what it is and have little to complain about it except for some bugs. Solasta promised a DnD tactical game, and it looks like it will deliver what it advertised. Larian loves it's own cheese, and there's strong likelihood that they intend to keep it in the game, but offering a mode where DnD rules are strictly adhered to is the honourable thing to do for marketing BG3 as a DnD game. The basic difference is between players wanting a more fluid computer game, and those wanting a facsimile of the tabletop experience. You, I assume, want a facsimile of the tabletop expeience, but that seems a long way short of being a majority opinion. The dichotomy may not even exist. I'm not a tabletop DnD player, so the desire for a facsimile of the tabletop experience was never there. In fact, I thought I enjoyed the combat for the first 2 or 3 characters. I didn't understand why there was so much discussion that Larian should stick as closely to DnD 5E as possible. I didn't see what the big deal was. I understood their arguments intellectually, but I didn't feel it. But I arrived at the realisation on my own that the combat in this game is incredibly shallow, with Larian homebrews being more powerful than class abilities and spells, leading to every melee character playing the same way and likewise for ranged ones. So if an average player like me, who is not a tabletop DnD player, could see something wrong with the combat in this game, there may be more who might come to realise this on their own too, once they've played the game enough. There will always be those who just love to cheese their way through the game. But for the ones who desire a more tactical game play, enough time spent on the game just might expose the shallowness of the combat system.
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addict
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addict
Joined: Jan 2021
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Well it would help a lot if the game had representations of block, dodge, or parry. There always seems to be a post complaining about misses and the topic circles back to how it plays out in D&D 5e they aren't actually always misses.
Combat in Baldur's Gate 3 would be a lot more engaging if low rolls weren't only interpreted as miss, just like in D&D 5e. I doubt that whatever will change it in the end, miss is always miss no matter what you call it. How things are perceived definitely impact customer sentiment. This effect happens for businesses in every industry from videogames to utilities, etc. (For their projects, their brand, everything that interacts with a customer).
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addict
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Joined: Oct 2020
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Clearly calling adherence to DnD rules as adult and mature isn't a hyperbolic adjective. You don't plan for missing an Eldritch Bolt, you just press it again next turn. If your character eats a Bulette slam and dies, there is no strategy about the fact your next character hits Healing Word if Bulette won't be dead by the end of the party's turn. You pretending like reacting to random misses makes for a rich environment in high level thinking is nothing more than self deception. There will always be an optimal route to ending combat, and all a miss causes is the stalling out of said combat, not what actions are used afterwards. You limit yourself in how you play, and then assume that anyone who doesn't limit himself like you do, is engaging in "self-deception". This has been the crux of all your diatribes, whether it be dice-rolling, or Concentration spells or the other game aspects you love to be bombastic about when you complain. You think that if something has a low chance to hit, then it MUST be useless. It never seems to occur to you that the low hit chance of some of the spells is to balance the power it gives you if it sticks. So you limit yourself to only the obvious and safe choices, like using only Bless and never Bane, and use only attack spells that target the AC from high ground or are sure-hits, and never any of the maledictions such as Hold, or any other spells that target the saving throws. Good players plan for the event that the Bane didn't stick, or the Hold didn't last and switch up their game plan. Go ahead and limit your own game play if you like, but to say that those who don't are engaging in "self-deception" tells us more about you than you realise. In fact, it limits the combat because nobody will bother to use witch bolt at a 65% hit chance when you can use force missiles and not waste your time.
When a goblin swings at me and takes off a fraction of the pool, I don't recoil because it's unrealistic to RP of how I would react to having a sword pierce through my upper lobes. It's totally irrelevant , because I understand what suspension of disbelief means in exchange for pragmatic, enjoyable gameplay. This just goes to show how dismissive you are of DnD. So combat to you is about one party sticking his sword into another without resistance and you call that suspension of disbelief? And what if the DM just says that the goblin's sword lops off your head and you fall over and die? What then? Will you challenge that, or will you go on with your suspension of disbelief? The dice are there to resolve such conflicts. I can't make it any clearer to you. That's the whole point of HP, ability tuning, and ability combos/layering in encounter design, to add the difficulty by making me figure out optimal ability mixes to deal with an encounter. This dice a rama of yours is no different, no matter how enlightened you portray your argument as. Missing 65% of my wizard skills has not done anything to make me think strategically other than narrow down the set of spells least likely to miss and optimize the one spell with the most damage output and reliability. In this case, force missiles and thunderwave, and when that loses popularity, ray of flame and hex or poison ray cantrip from the staff of the crone after that in the priority list. It just railroads people into monotone gameplay. This right here is the perfect demonstration of your own limitations in your approach to the game. You only look for sure-things, or those with high hit probabilities. And because your own limitations lead you to a combat plan that plays out like a rote, you're incapable of accepting the possibility that a better game plan might involve taking risks for larger reward, and plan for the event that those risks don't pan out. Hold the enemy and all hits become crits. That's a huge payoff. And then plan for the spell to not land or last long enough, and have a backup plan. Don't assume your game plan that is boiled down to your own low appetite for risk is the optimal game plan. The vast majority of people playing this game will be doing it as a single player rpg, and their play experience should not be held hostage to the few who will play a campaign with an acting DM. I'd say the rest of us shouldn't be held hostage to your own limitations on game play. This is cult-speak. "If only you were as precious as I am, you'd see clearly as I do". You can toot your own horn on your own time, I won't waste time with this crap. There is no higher payoff to landing Witchbolt than a Magic Missile Rank 2 with the magic necklace, let alone a Ray of Flame+Hex. You waste a spell slot on a Hold that may or may not land, for what you claim is a guaranteed crit. Congrats, you crit on your next ability while doing no damage on the turn you cast Hold, I'll choose to land two back to back rank 2 magic missiles or Inflict Wounds for far more total damage, not like any current enemy currently survives beyond 1-2 turns at most, and those that would your Hold spell has an abysmal chance of landing on anyways. Yes, Bless is far more useful than Bane in its current incarnation; one is guaranteed on your party and persists regardless of how many enemies you kill, the other only applies at the time of casting to the enemy, is not a guaranteed benefit, yet uses up the same resource. Both require concentration. I don't care what the DM says about the goblin lopping my head off because THE DM DOES NOT EVEN EXIST. Yet here you go on about drumming up this fantasy setting of yours where somehow the player has to arbitrate the outcome with a die or we reach an impasse. Every single PvE game has an encounter with an optimal approach to beating it. This is the nature of any game in which you don't face another human being. Your resort to this is trying to add luck to the mix, but this achieves nothing, the formulation of strategy remains the same, find the way to deplete the enemy's HP before they deplete yours, the less convoluted and more reliable the approach, the better. In the end, it is still a scripted encounter, and nothing short of making the game a PvP game instead will change how it plays out. Your retort is just the equivalent of "this class is not actually better as you say, because your limitation is trying to playing the game with the idea of speed runs, and if instead you didn't care about it like I don't, then you'd see this class is not better than the other; optimization is for narrow minded losers!."
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addict
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addict
Joined: Jan 2020
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The basic difference is between players wanting a more fluid computer game, and those wanting a facsimile of the tabletop experience. You, I assume, want a facsimile of the tabletop expeience, but that seems a long way short of being a majority opinion. The dichotomy may not even exist. I'm not a tabletop DnD player, so the desire for a facsimile of the tabletop experience was never there. In fact, I thought I enjoyed the combat for the first 2 or 3 characters. I didn't understand why there was so much discussion that Larian should stick as closely to DnD 5E as possible. I didn't see what the big deal was. I understood their arguments intellectually, but I didn't feel it. But I arrived at the realisation on my own that the combat in this game is incredibly shallow, with Larian homebrews being more powerful than class abilities and spells, leading to every melee character playing the same way and likewise for ranged ones. So if an average player like me, who is not a tabletop DnD player, could see something wrong with the combat in this game, there may be more who might come to realise this on their own too, once they've played the game enough. There will always be those who just love to cheese their way through the game. But for the ones who desire a more tactical game play, enough time spent on the game just might expose the shallowness of the combat system. Well then, if WotC were hoping BG3 would attract people to tabletop DnD, maybe they will succeed with you  Even though I don't play DnD any more, I also mostly use the available class features rather than exploits. Not because I particularly object to the exploits/cheese, but because I find the encounters are usually resolved quicker and cleaner ( less collateral damage ) if you play that way. That doesn't mean I particularly like the DnD combat rules, as the 5e rules design is particularly poor for implementation as the sort of fluid game I prefer. But it is what it is, and as combat is the least important aspect of RPGs for me, I'll settle for whatever allows me to get through it with the least amount of time spent doing so. I understand almost everyone that expresses frustration at the game, because there seem to be so many different expectations of what the game experience would actually be. BG3 is mostly only a "spiritual successor" to the original games, and is only "based on" the DnD 5e rules, which upsets some members both those communities. And while it is a a DOS-like co-op game, not everyone from that community necessarily likes FR & DnD rules. Larian didn't actually promise any particular degree of interpretation accuracy for either the BG experience, or the 5e rules, but they did appeal to both communities in marketing the game. So I hope that between configurarion options provided by Larian and simple mods, everyone can have a game that they can enjoy playing. It would probably be most helpful if forum feedback is focused on moving towards that sort of win-win situation, but it often seems like it is not.
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Banned
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Banned
Joined: Nov 2020
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This is cult-speak. "If only you were as precious as I am, you'd see clearly as I do". You can toot your own horn on your own time, I won't waste time with this crap.
There is no higher payoff to landing Witchbolt than a Magic Missile Rank 2 with the magic necklace, let alone a Ray of Flame+Hex. You waste a spell slot on a Hold that may or may not land, for what you claim is a guaranteed crit. Congrats, you crit on your next ability while doing no damage on the turn you cast Hold, I'll choose to land two back to back rank 2 magic missiles or Inflict Wounds for far more total damage, not like any current enemy currently survives beyond 1-2 turns at most, and those that would your Hold spell has an abysmal chance of landing on anyways. Yes, Bless is far more useful than Bane in its current incarnation; one is guaranteed on your party and persists regardless of how many enemies you kill, the other only applies at the time of casting to the enemy, is not a guaranteed benefit, yet uses up the same resource. Both require concentration.
I don't care what the DM says about the goblin lopping my head off because THE DM DOES NOT EVEN EXIST. Yet here you go on about drumming up this fantasy setting of yours where somehow the player has to arbitrate the outcome with a die or we reach an impasse. Every single PvE game has an encounter with an optimal approach to beating it. This is the nature of any game in which you don't face another human being. Your resort to this is trying to add luck to the mix, but this achieves nothing, the formulation of strategy remains the same, find the way to deplete the enemy's HP before they deplete yours, the less convoluted and more reliable the approach, the better. In the end, it is still a scripted encounter, and nothing short of making the game a PvP game instead will change how it plays out.
Your retort is just the equivalent of "this class is not actually better as you say, because your limitation is trying to playing the game with the idea of speed runs, and if instead you didn't care about it like I don't, then you'd see this class is not better than the other; optimization is for narrow minded losers!." There you go again, anything that you disagree with, it's "cult-speak", or "crap". I was right when I pegged you as immature, and you prove me right with every reply. So I'm going to treat you as the 12 year-old that you keep demonstrating yourself to be and ignore you. As in, put you in my ignore list, as you've shown yourself incapable of having a discussion. Feel free to reply with more of your narrow minded limitations on how you play while proclaiming that your way is the optimal way, and sprinkling in your usual inane "LOL!", "what were you on?", "you are a purist", "a cultist!", "this is crap!" that might work better if this were a middle school play ground. But unfortunately for you, this isn't. So, I'm going to talk to the adults and not waste any more time with you.
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Banned
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Banned
Joined: Nov 2020
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Well then, if WotC were hoping BG3 would attract people to tabletop DnD, maybe they will succeed with you Well, maybe, but I think I like the general principles on which the game is based more than the details and real-world practicalities of finding a group, meeting in-person and all that. And I've also come to realise that I'm more visual than auditory, as in, my eyes glaze over when Matt Mercer, or any DM I watch on youtube, describes the scenario. "A picture paints a thousand words" is definitely true for me. Even though I don't play DnD any more, I also mostly use the available class features rather than exploits. Not because I particularly object to the exploits/cheese, but because I find the encounters are usually resolved quicker and cleaner ( less collateral damage ) if you play that way.
That doesn't mean I particularly like the DnD combat rules, as the 5e rules design is particularly poor for implementation as the sort of fluid game I prefer. But it is what it is, and as combat is the least important aspect of RPGs for me, I'll settle for whatever allows me to get through it with the least amount of time spent doing so. Oh, I intend to do something similar. If Larian sticks to their gimmicks on release and offers no setting for DnD core rules, I'm going to download a mod that kills everything with a button so I won't have to deal with the cheesy combat here and just play the game for the story. I'll get my fix for tactical combat from Solasta. I understand almost everyone that expresses frustration at the game, because there seem to be so many different expectations of what the game experience would actually be. BG3 is mostly only a "spiritual successor" to the original games, and is only "based on" the DnD 5e rules, which upsets some members both those communities. And while it is a a DOS-like co-op game, not everyone from that community necessarily likes FR & DnD rules.
Larian didn't actually promise any particular degree of interpretation accuracy for either the BG experience, or the 5e rules, but they did appeal to both communities in marketing the game. So I hope that between configurarion options provided by Larian and simple mods, everyone can have a game that they can enjoy playing.
It would probably be most helpful if forum feedback is focused on moving towards that sort of win-win situation, but it often seems like it is not. Someone has already made the suggestion for game settings that determine which Larian cheese you wish to include in the game. It's not a perfect solution, as the map and combat areas are still designed based on Larian's homebrews. But the main impediment to any discussion, especially one for some kind of win-win situation, is the lack of any indication that Larian is listening. You can't bargain with the person sitting on the opposite side of the table if he has earphones plugged in and you can hear the music seeping out of his ear.
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Cleric of Innuendo
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Cleric of Innuendo
Joined: Oct 2020
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Passerby and Zenith.
You both need to tone down your aggressiveness in this thread (and others). If you think that a poster is being insulting or dismissive then report that post(er) to the moderation team. Do not respond in the same tone or you are liable to be judged as much as a problem as the original.
Zenith: you have been on the end of numerous warning about being aggressive and dismissive and have chosen to to ignore them. Take 7 days off to let it sink in.
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