Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides The Turn-Based/Real Time with Pause topic

Agree, in RTWP reactions would have to be a toggle ON/OFF that auto trigger. In TB... oh wait...

The entire concept behind bg 3 was to bring table top to pc which they have done a decient job while the rules implimentation hasnt been as accurate as solasta the mechanics are fine and the turn based combat is very well adapted some of the mechanics would not be as viable if you took it out of turn based and would not play as smoothly or feel close in similarity to DND in anyway what so ever. Real time with pause adaptation IMO is just over done and being implimented into a game doesnt appeal to the audience that does want turn based im not concerned as either way they have already said there is zero chance it will get implimented in the most recient interview with sven which I feel is not in anyway going to hurt the game what so ever with there target audience for the game.

Xcom style and similar games havent implimented turn based combat in a long time so its nice to see someone else focus on turn based games over trying to just do real time with pause because its not something everyone wants in a game. I wish it was being done on a much larger scale with the game like plans to expand the game to crazy levels but its best implimentation of turn based on a long time and i hope they stick with it and add dozens of dlc patchs following the live release with further expanded content.

You couldn't be more wrong. RTwP works (in the present tense, not just the past tense) extremely well in all the IE games as well as the NwN games. It also works fantastically in the Pathfinder games. There is ZERO logic to the claim that if a game's rules come from TB TT, then the videogame adaptation must also be TB. Videogames are fundamentally different from TT games. The TB system in TT games is there out of necessity. Nobody chooses TB in TT games because there is no choice. TB is the ONLY way a TT game can possibly be played. However, there is no such LIMITATION in a videogame. So the limitation of TB in a TT game can be dispensed with when that game is adapted for the computer. It is merely a matter of whether the game's developers are technically capable of pulling it off or not.

..."attempting to adapt a turn-based tabletop system that attempt to simulate real time combats"

On quotes about pathfinder they adapted turn based due to player demand because it was preferred to real time with pause which showed in kingmaker and was later carried into path of the righteous due to majority preference....

While there were people who like real time with pause there are limitations to real time with pause as a tactical stand point vs turn based and its evident when you compaire the clean fights of turn based vs the much sloppier fights of real time with pause. As physically so speaking its impossible for you to perform the actions of 4 characters in 6 seconds cleanly move the to the proper position and adjust there actions turn for turn. Even pausing every 6 seconds you would be taking just as long to perform your actions and being less consistant in your patterns you put a real time with pause player vs a turn based player in the exact same fight the turn based play is going to be cleaner every time. Its not to say that real time with pause is not relivent to different games but they were designed for it dnd rules were not designed for real time with pause.

Show me evidence that it is the majority preference for P:WotR. There is zero such evidence. Yes, a sizable group wanted it, but majority? Sure.

Even with BG3, surveys show the TB preference is a majority but not overwhelmingly so, about 54-46%.

And, a preference is exactly that. A preference. Something subjective. Someone's preference does not translate into whether or not something works well. If people prefer TB over RTwP, that's fine. But don't try and tell me that subjective preference equals TB "works better" than RTwP in some objective sense, because that is blatantly false.

A faithful 5e game would have a hard time with RTwP due to all the reactions which many classes rely upon. But the way BG3 is built I don’t see why it can’t be done. I mean there’s no meaningful reaction system in the game.

I personally don’t care. But with the current state of the game, RTwP is quite feasible. It won’t change though. Like many other requests, Larian will ignore if it doesn’t align with whatever vision they have of the game.

I have to be honnest even if (and you know it) I share your thoughts a lot on this threads.

There were a poll on Owlcat's discord before the beta launch. Something like "which mode do you prefer in kingmaker ".

144 RTWP (I vote for RTWP)
245 TB
266 Both are good.

TB is more popular but a lot of good TB games were created the past few years (both on PC but also on console).
There's not a lot of new RTWP games since a few years except the "oldschool RPG" and exclusive PC games (like the Total War serie). That's probably why players are less interrested.

You enjoying RTwP has no being on the whether or not it is as good system for adapting a turn-based tabletop rule system to the pc, which it demonstrably is not. It was bad for trying to adapt 2E for the Infinity Engine games, causing melee classes to be relegated to auto-attacking tools, and was somehow even worse for NWN, given what had to be cut to make the rule system fit RTwP. Flanking and backstabbing broken, no counterspell, no held action, no called shot, no grappling, no charging, etc, etc.

Then go and compare the adaptation of 3e for NWN 1/2, to Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil. In spite of it being absolutely broken at launch, that game still stands as the best adaptation of any version of DnD to the pc.

Dragonage Origins works because it's not trying to adapt a tabletop ruleset, the entire combat system is tailored for RTwP.

And I didn't get to vote. Because I don't use Discord. That's why such (online) polls are quite useless. They are not representative. Furthermore, from my experiences in recent years, TB fans are way more fanatical than RTwP fans in trying to boost their preference and demanding all games be TB, so they are always more motivated to respond to such polls, maybe find ways to cheat and vote multiple times.

In any case, no worries. We're good. I know you as one of the small group of posters here who are reasonable and open to other people's pov.

Something being the "best adaptation of a TT rule set" is not the same as something being "good." For you, that perfect adaptation of the TT rules is what you're looking for. For me, I don't give a damn about the TT rules, and have no desire to see everything from the TT rules be "perfectly" adapted to a videogame. In fact, I WANT many of the TT rules to be discarded or changed, because I find them to be crap. In an ideal world, Wizards would allow a game developer to license just the Forgotten Realms setting and its lore and not D&D rules and mechanics, so that they could make a game using that setting and lore but with completely different mechanics than D&D.

In pathfinder I use both versions.

Real time with pause when I know the fight is not tough. When I know using abilities and a lot of spells is not necessary.

I immediatly switch to turn based when the fight is tough, some kind of bossfight. It is way easier to position the party in correct place, time the casting and use of abilities.
It takes some time, sure, but it is for me more interesting.

When only one option is available, and not both as in pathfinder I prefer turn based, more so when the whole ruleset is turn based.

I personally dont care if they were to offer real time with pause but its not how the game is meant to be played there are dnd games that do adapt real time with pause and real time play period but there choice to make a turn based game focus is good you cant say it all you want that real time would be good but factually it doesnt play to the core concept of the game being accurate to dnd which was announced months prior to the release. So if you think real time with pause allows that your you really have no concept of the design concept of the game which was stated well before you considered getting it like early 2020 it was stated the game would be an attempt to accurately carry 5e rule to the game which is the entire reason why some people purchased the game. Turn based saying there are lots of turn based games is very inaccurate unless your talking classic RPG's like FF7 in its original version and card games there hasnt been alot of options for people who want to use multiple characters in games since Xcom as a franchise. The 2 most recient games to adapt turn based play outside the current series with Solasta and BG3 both of which released with same concept of adapting 5e rules were Necromunda and Pheonix Point. Both of which lack alot of depth. Nercomunda is no really and RPG its more turn based stratagy and had a horrible initial release.

There are dozens of options to Real time with pause. King Maker was originally only released using real time with pause which was IMO horrible. But hey there are people who still prefer it because they don't like waiting on animations. Which hey if thats your thing thats your thing but a game that is designed to play based on a table top game using turn based combat is never going to be as tactical if you take away turn based combat or as clean and if your telling me you can perform a fight as cleanly with real time as any turn based player id be happy to put that to the test any day of the week. Its physically impossible to perform your turns as cleanly using real time as turn based as you are not 4 players controlling 4 characters. Nor do you have time to think out and play your turns as smoothly as a turn based style. If you want it purely to save time a better way of designing it would be to add an option to skip enemy play where all there actions just happen off screen so you do not have to watch it but at that point your losing key information in how to respond to there actions.

5e Reactions are a key part of the game play and using your reactions is very valid. For example the shield master feat being used to defend a nearby ally vs using your reaction to attack can be a key turn incentive to play. Positioning characters in 4 differnet locations to make your self harder to hit with aoe ect. Real time with pause this cannot be achieved accurately. Even if your apm is super high as a human being you physically cant react as 4 different people. However having real time with pause would be prefectly reasonable if you were playing a multiplayer game with 3 other people however then your taking all pausing on each other so that they have to wait for your turn and the same concept exists.

There are great games that do use real time with pause at the same time like the total war series and dragon age and the more recient ff7 remake. However at the same time those games were designed with that in mind even pathfinder wasnt horrible for people doing it because of the concept behind it however pathfinder it was still proven that turn based play was much cleaner than real time with pause because the core abilitys of the game are designed for turn based play and if your adapting a turn based game to real time with pause it will never be as clean as playing it turn based its just factual unless your purely controlling 1 character its physically impossible to a player to react for 4 people cleanly.

Saying that they should toss 5e rules out the window you clearly didnt watch the promotional trailer for the game where they stated the game was designed to be an adaptation of 5e rule to the game. I think larion is doing a great job of that and wanting to stick to the turn based system as a focus is the best way for them to do that accurately not to say that adding a real time with pause option down the road for people who just want to play the game in efficiently is a bad idea but factually focusing on completely adjusting combat so you can do real time with pause would take away from that as its completely adjusting pathing mechanics. You also have to factor in taking multiple actions with multiple npcs would be much more resource intense than one action at a time that occurs during turn based combat as each npc is reaction to the reactions of another npc and or player. It also messes up sequencing orders of attacks and just does not adapt rules well. Which again before the game was ever released they stated the concept was to adapt 5e rules to pc.

The exception to this being ranger mechanics because they just dont convert well to a pc game. Though they could be adapted and I personally dont see an issue with it but ranger was even stated by wotc needs an overhaul and will probably get a complete overall in the future because the class is just inferior to all the other classes as it is.

3.5 Paladin barbarian and ranger were all inferior to fighter overall as classes. 5e paladin and barbarian were balanced out as melee classes to fighter. Ranger however still suffers being lack luster in comparison as level go up so them choosing to attempt to revamp that i see no issues with that. As they are still attempting to stick to the core rules of 5e.

You may not care about adapting TT rules, but both Bioware with BG 1/2 and Larian with BG3 have stated that adapting TT rules to the pc is part of the goal. Starting with RTwP, that requires the abandonment of several mechanics, because they will not work, is a poor choice, plain and simple.

The mechanics of ruleset, are are setup for turn-based combat, it's not even trying to be "perfect" in the adaptation to realize that they do not translate well to RTwP.

No, what Larian and Swen Vincke have said is that often TT rules DO NOT translate well to a videogame and so things have to be changed sometimes. I totally agree with them in this, and believe the first TT rule that should always go is doing things by turns.

Furthermore, in their early interviews last February right after BG3 was announced, Vincke, the main Larian dev handling BG3 combat, and that guy from Wizards who's always in the interviews all stated for the record that there is nothing in D&D 5e rules that cannot be handled in a RTwP combat system. Nothing. But it was Larian's personal CHOICE to go with TB because that is their thing and what they are good at and like to do in their games.

Finally, Wizards clearly does not buy into any nonsense that just because D&D TT mechanics are TB that all videogame adaptations should also be TB. Not only have they explicitly said they intend to make other future D&D videogames that will use RT/RTwP combat, they are actually doing so with the Dark Alliance game which is RT.

Which is also a likely reason why WotC went with Larian, whose biggest bestseller so far is a TB game. If the system developed for Dark Alliance was so easily adapted for the type of adventure BG3 is meant for, they would have just ported the story, considering Dark Alliance is almost finished and close to release. Or they would have at least used that system as a base to build BG3 upon.

But DA comes with the limitation of having four predetermined characters (with predetermined classes) to play. And if I recall correctly, none of these classes are spellcasters, so likely they will have a more limited skillset, which can easily be mapped onto a controller and played real time. That is very different from BG3, where I can play a e. g. druid who has both several spells at her disposal and shapeshifting. I am not sure it would be even possible to have an ui which would allow to easily control all that in real time, without pause. Which leaves rtwp, but I don't recall any rtwp that have made it to the steam top charts and stayed there for as long as e. g. Skyrim.

WotC is part of a very large corporation, and I doubt they would have made any decisions without analyzing how well games using the different systems (real time, rtwp, tb) have been selling the past few years.

Yeah, that's not exactly what Vincke has said:

BG3 is based on the fifth edition [of D&D]. We started by setting out the ruleset very meticulously, and then seeing what worked and what didn’t work – because it is a videogame, and D&D was made to play as a tabletop game. So for the things that didn’t work, we came up with solutions.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/baldurs-gate-3/larian-interview

From what we've seen so far, Swen is not telling the truth in that statement anyway, because it is readily apparent, that Larian started with DOS, and attempted to add in 5E, and what didn't jive with DOS, they cut or changed.

Notice though, that they didn't cut the turn-based aspect, because RTwP doesn't fit with 5e or DOS.

As to your 'whataboutism' with bringing up Dark Alliance, that has nothing to do with BG3, or adapting 5e to the pc. Dark Alliance is not, nor has it even been billed as an adaptation of 5e rules to a pc game.

Please please please PLEASE do not make this game RTWP only!!!!

I HATE it. I suck at it. The thing I hated most about BG1, 2, IWD, NWN2, and all such games is RTWP. Characters don't listen, they cast spells and waste them on minor or almost dead foes. I miss half of what's happening in the game because its chaos. Characters get killed and I dont know it, and I have to reload constantly to get through anything.

I... I can't even imagine the Spider Lair with RTWP... Or the Hag's Lair... Shaking and crying right now.

How about they just speed up combat a bit instead? Maybe enemies grouped together in ini order could move at the same time. If done right, you can still have fairly fast paced turn based combat with lots of enemies, kinda like the Lost in Xcom2 Dlc. They had TONS of Lost in the map and they moved pretty quickly. Just something besides RTWP.

I love Larian, but I'm angry about it. As in other games, people should be given the right to give a choice. Pathfinder and pillars of eternity offered this choice to people. Larian should also present.

If Dos3 comes out, I would advocate TB but today I'm defending RTWP.

I have always believed in Larian's engineers and the software team. Because they have always been innovative. I believe they will achieve this as well.

A former fan of Baldur's gate and divinity!

Yes, so this is exactly what these individuals have said as well. Some rules and mechanics in D&D 5e are more difficult or challenging to adapt to RTwP, but nothing is absolutely impossible. I accept this. I'm just responding to certain posters here who make these grandiose claims that it is IMPOSSIBLE to do a D&D 5e game using RTwP, because that is just code for: "Every D&D videogame must be TB, because I want every game to be TB and only what I want matters, screw everyone else."