I agree with most of your feedback but I'll highlight a few things
1.) I am very confused why Larian set the "threatened" range different than the range that provokes AoO's. It seems to run contrary to Larian's philosophy of increasing chance-to-hit, since threatened imposes disadvantage to ranged attacks.
Thanks for providing your thoughts! I agree its strange AoO's and threatened are completely disjointed. It make planning movement for your actions far more difficult when you must consider a large invisible automatic debuff for ranged and spellcasting characters.
4.) BG3 was in development and released in EA before Tasha's released, so it makes some sense that BG3's ranger would be different. However, it would have been nice for WotC and Larian to coordinate on this...
Your absolutely correct with the timeline but even with this information here is my problems.
1) The stated openly they were working with WoTC in fixing the ranger. But ended up with something completely different?
2) Larian decided ranger should be released with the first group of classes. They could have waited for near Tasha's release as cross promotion.
3) Tasha's has been out for months. So the ranger can be changed to match.
5.) Not sure if you're saying that Fog Cloud should block line of sight but doesn't in BG3, or the opposite. There's some debate as to its function, given the somewhat contradictory definition of heavily obscured areas in D&D 5e.
Let me clarify:
BG3 Fog Cloud |
1) It blocks sight with the blind condition for those inside the cloud.
2) Those outside the cloud can't target those inside the cloud.
Tabletop Fog Cloud |
1) Those in the cloud can't see in or out of the cloud
2) Those outside the cloud can't see those in the cloud
3) You can not see through the cloud to those on the opposite side.
BG3 fog cloud is missing the third piece. I can give my attempted use of the third option in BG3 and it failing.
Near game start after getting most of the companion, the first ruins area you enter from the door (the entry above where you meet shadowheart). This room has only one door going further in where most of the enemies are located. So I cast fog cloud with the intention to force them closer disabling their range by placing it in the doorway. But they keep shoot me as if the cloud didn't exist. They didn't even have disadvantage.
I do agree there is enough grayness around fog cloud. You technically should have the option to shot an aimless arrow guessing the enemies location. But implementing this makes it hard when they have other characters giving the players or AI line of sight. Taking the guessing away only leaving possibly disadvantage.
10.) This point is especially important for a) re-creating PnP characters in BG3 and b) the (hopeful) DM mode in BG3, as more spells/abilities/etc will add so much to any user-created campaigns.
Completely agree and Larian went through the effort to get a main stream dnd franchise game title. The game is a D&D brand but they can't seem to leave DOS2 behind.
BG, Neverwinter, Icewind, and such all were able to implement nearly core rules for their respective D&D versions. Don't understand why Larian think they can't.
They have competitors that are doing a better job implementing 5e rules into their games. And those games are limited to only uses the SDR forcing them to create additional new spells and classes since they lack the rights. Its really a strange situation.
