I'm glad they are aware of how much a turn off RNG is in the game.
Keep that crap for the troll tabletop. In my videogames, I want consistency of outcome.
In regards to Larian cheese, they just need to remove fall damage off shove and just make targets prone, and for stealth attacks to put all your group in combat.
And the last thing I want is combat where you can calculate the outcomes. Combat should be chaotic and unpredictable.
Why would they remove fall damage? The whole point in pushing someone off a ledge is to hurt them. And the world needs to feel real when you're telling a grown up story. If the gameplay is a total meme it's hard to take the story seriously.
I'm not buying the "RNG is bad in videogames". It's not about the platform. You can design tabletop games without RNG too. It's a choice.
Maybe action RPG's are more your thing if the RNG is so hard to swallow?
Maybe the tabletop is your thing, and you can stop telling people that you have ownership over a game, which you do not. I'll save chaotic and unpredictable for movies, I'd much rather have my known outputs to any input I make in the game instead of reloading a save because I rolled second in initiative and Bulette proceeded to slam half of my group dead on the first turn and by the time I get them up it's the third turn and he burrows out. Or having Baretha get first turn and 2 shot a member of the team through action surge while dodging the next 3 attacks from the party.
They should remove fall damage because taking out one third of the Phase Matriarch's HP by just breaking the webbing under her is absurd and trivializes the encounter, and the same goes for the Minotaurs.
Those encounters are not an RNG problem.
It's about pitting power jumped level 5 enemies like the Gith patrol against a lower level party. The Bulette is also an overpowering enemy, designed for a level 5 party.
In D&D you won't be at peak performance if it's your second or third encounter after a long rest. In BG3 such concept doesn't exist - every encounter is your first encounter after rest and enemies have to be beefed up to match that. So of course overpowering enemies winning the initiative is a problem. The 5e system is designed more for attrition where you aren't as likely to get one shot by a lucky higher level enemy. It's more of a question how far do you push your luck. BG3 needs to incorporate that attrition through a meaningful resting system that isn't always available or has some cost attached to it. And tone down the power spikes of enemies and the importance of environmental gimmicks. Then the game will play better.
The Matriarch is another good example how an overpowering encounter is designed around one particular environmental gimmick. She always jumps on the web bridges and for some reason takes massive damage from falls, much more than anyone else. And she doesn't learn from the first fall either. If she teleports in melee range she eats two PC's for a snack in one turn. Why doesn't she just do that right away? That's what Phase Spiders are supposed to be doing with the teleport anyway, catch their prey. But here in the Larian version they are just bouncing around spitting gallons of poison and waiting for you to figure out the gimmick to defeat them with. I don't really understand the talk about player agency when an encounter is designed to be won in one very particular way. The Matriarch could be a little less overpowering without such an obvious and overpowered trick to killing her. It could be more a fight of attrition without an exploitative gimmick where you would use spells like Blindness, Grease and Ray of Enfeeblement and drink some healing potions while fighting her in melee.
Larian are trying to make D&D 5e play like another game and that's why it's not as a good as it could be. Yet, hopefully.
