I am bumping this to highlight something worthwhile I found in the cesspool that is the BG3 subreddit.
Someone actually had a pretty elegant solution to the Smite dilemma, made under the assumption that the engine can't handle proper reactions. In the absence of one, this suggestion is probably the best possible way to handle it, given the known limitations.
Smite could be a free action spell that you can use after you hit an enemy (categorized as a spell so that you can specify what spell level slot you want to use for it). It would be greyed out in normal circumstances, but if you hit an enemy with a weapon attack, you would then be affected by a status effect called 'Ready to Smite', and the enemy would be 'Branded for Smite', which then makes the smite available to use as a free action to inflict bonus damage on that specific enemy. It would copy the attack roll of the weapon attack that made it available to use (hence the buff recording that information), so that the smite damage can roll for critical damage if the triggering attack was a critical hit. Doing literally anything else before hitting that smite button would cause you to lose the buff and thus your chance to smite.
That said, a 'Branded for Smite' status effect would probably realistically last until the beginning of the enemy target's turn, which could let you do things like hitting one enemy and then a different one with your extra attack, allowing you to still smite the first enemy using the attack roll from the second enemy, but that's a relatively minor divergence from tabletop all things considered.
The coding probably wouldn't be able to differentiate between a melee or a ranged weapon attack, but I wouldn't be opposed to the idea of ranged smites, because that would actually be an interesting homebrew rule that expands build variety rather than limiting viable options like most of the other current homebrew. (And ranged smites to my understanding are possible in Pathfinder too.)
Last edited by Saito Hikari; 05/04/21 01:33 AM.
