Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General DMG's advice about house rules.

Of course it is. Larian doesn't care one iota about balance - if said balance gets in the way of their perception of fun.

Add to that, Larian being somewhere on the spectrum between overly confident to pig-headed with regard to defaulting to their own rather clumsily/lazily implemented homebrew over prioritizing actual D&D (or at least using homebrew that has internal logic as not to damage immersion) to achieve similarly fun gameplay while also being immersive and balanced.

The original series added quite a bit of homebrew, but it had internal logic that flowed well with the base D&D rules. Needless to say, my confidence in Larian, riding high with the flawed but excellent DOS2, is shaken as it seems to me they have doubled-down on all the worst aspects of that game. And I'm not convinced even a biased interpretation of the metrics (peace be upon it) support this as much as a rapidly upcoming developer being flattered by streamers doing goofy stuff for cheap funsies to entertain their audience.

I'll be surprised if Larian puts in setting where we can turn off their house rules because having that would make their beloved metrics much hard to gather / use. Just think about it, if you can remove options, how do you gather data about that the player is doing? Let use the example of having an option of disabling jump to disengage, now your data set is split in half. Each option you allow a player to disable, you split that data up more and now start having combo so 2 options that can be disabled, you have 4 data sets, 3 options, 8 data sets, etc.

I kind of wish they were not trying to automatically gather data, there a book called "The Tyranny of Metrics" which explains the pitfalls of this. Data analysis is hard. I have seen examples from Larian's data analysis like that the Bless spell is not used by players because they find it "boring". I am worried that they are looking at their data to just support whatever they want to do.

Did they really say that?! True, I used Bless once in my BG3 EA playthrough. I use Bless regularly in Solasta. #BalanceMatters

I don't know if I can find the quote but I do remember them saying that almost no one in their data was using Bless and they figured that was because buffing was boring and not thinking, we borked play balance so bad, Bless, one of the best 1st level spells, is not needed / being used.

Here it is (click the Wireframe link and download the free pdf if you want to read the full interview yourself. Otherwise, view the spoiler text.)

Here is the quote.


Thanks to Drath for his analysis.

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=756000#Post756000

Well, the options I am hoping for are more "extreme" ones, like actually affecting mechanics and rules.

"One thing that we learned from the statistics is that people are completely uninterested in a lot of buffing and debuffing spells – we have stats where you can see how many people are using what spell and how often they’re using it, and that made us realise every magic spell that we put in an RPG needs to have this ‘oomph’ factor. You have to want to click it, or you’ll never click it. You cannot sell a bless spell to people. It’s boring. They don’t care – they want to see fireworks, they want to see damage."

Wow.... O_O

This is a VERY alarming quote since it shows they re-interpret data without understanding the WHY... not one bit. It's THEIR screwy home rules that made this happen! Like someone stated before, bless is something frequently used in Solasta, as it's quite possibly THE best 1st level spell in DnD 5th. And yet with all wackiness going on in BG3 right now, of course noone's using it! O_O

Umm this doesn't sound like a healthy attitude to balance combat with. But what I don't get is, if it's a spell in the rules then clearly there's only one thing to do: implementing it the way it is in the rules... right? Or am I missing something here?

very interesting, thanks for reposting that quote.

I actually think there is possible value to be had in a statistical based balancing system, IF you have a group of people that understand the reason behind why people are making certain decisions. the beat to dead example is "you guys are horny!". Okay, so the statistics showed that a lot of the players chose to pursue sexual relationships with the characters. A proper statistical analysis would have looked into whether or not the players are choosing these decisions because they're horny, because it's an EA game, because they want any positive interaction with our companions at all, or simply because it was an option, so they were curious to see what the content was. To say "see? That's why we're focusing so much on sex!" is way overkill imo.

With bless, I can very much see how non DND players wouldn't be interested in it when they see something like "You bless up to three creatures of your choice within range. Whenever a target makes an Attack roll or a saving throw before the spell ends, the target can roll a d4 and add the number rolled to the Attack roll or saving throw." it doesn't exactly sound sexy that's for sure. I'm sure part of the reason is it's hard to tell how much of a difference it's making because you don't physically see a dice roll and see just how many times bless would make the difference between a hit or a miss. Also, I do believe that with the ambush nature of most combat in Larian's games, it's much harder to justify using buff and debuff spells when the enemy is spending all their time hitting you with everything they have damage wise.

I'm not sure what a middle ground would be. With Larian's current design, it's become sort of a self-fulling prophecy, they design things to be exciting, so the things that don't look as exciting aren't used as much, and they're "justified" in their decision to make things more exciting.

Since shadowheart is a more dex based stealthy cleric, bless and hiding is actually kinda OP with how hide has been made a bonus action and is currently a little too easy to abuse in combat. Cause now everyone else has an easier time to hit in conjunction with the homebrewed height advantage, making it that it is rare to miss. Add in that changing hide to a bonus action means everyone can do it is basically meaning enemies can not do anything while you melt them.

This quote is talking about DoS's early access but if we're translating this to BG3 he's not wrong.

Who will enjoy using faery fire ?
Who enjoy using bless ?
Who enjoy using any spells and features that gave your ennemies disadvantages or grants you advantage ?

(except players like i.e Alodar and Ragnarok because they're "role playing" their characters of course)

Larian is definitely unable to sell this to players. They shouldn't have said "you cannot sell this to players" but "we". Sad that none of them understand the reasons behind the data.

I enjoy using them BUT I would enjoy them much more if the game actually was closer to 5e so they would have the impact intended for them.

I really hope you're not alone so they won't only focus on damages spells and simply remove/rework/not add the spells and features they consider uninterresting.

(or create other items like the item that allow you to bless your characters for free when you eat an apple).

I heard a lot of streamer/youtuber advising their audience that these spells are great but I never saw them using them.

That the danger of metrics that many people miss, if you are measuring something, that what you end up getting. Example I use when trying to explain this to management is if you are measuring how fast / how many service request are getting / being closed, soon you get staff focusing on just closing requests and maybe giving less good support.

WotC has falling prey to this. They look at their metrics, see very few people play level 15-20 so been focusing on low level adventure and next time they look at their metrics, because they never support level 15-20 play, see even less people playing at that level, rinse and repeat. The next big adventure they are release is now for level 1-8.

Buffs/debuffs are much more interesting than damage, to me. I love Bless and Faerie Fire. I use them all the time in other games. The problem is that Larian shot buffs in the foot, then saw people not using them and made erroneous assumptions about why.

Some of the things they've done to make Bless, in this example, less appealing:
1) It's a concentration spell. All concentration spells are less valuable in BG3 because surface effects make it much easier to have your concentration broken.
2) They lowered enemy AC, making it easier to hit them, making Bless less useful for attackers.
3) They give away Advantage for free on attacks, making it easier to hit enemies. Again, this makes Bless useful for attackers.
4) The UI for Bless is terrible - it picks your targets for you instead of letting you pick your targets. Lack of ability to use the spell how you want to makes it less useful.
5) BG3 does a very bad job of teaching you how to play BG3. In particular, it does little/nothing to explain d20 mechanics, which is critical for understanding the value of bless.

So, they made Bless less helpful, more difficult to use, and more confusing. Then they blame the players for not finding it fun. D&D is a collection of highly-interconnected systems. Larian doesn't seem to get that when you start changing things without looking at how they impact everything else, you end up with a big mess.

Wow. This is missing the point so hard, I am somewhat willing to believe it is an intentional mis-representation of the problem... Of course, if you make attacks unlikely to miss, then buffs that are meant to help you land those hits will be less useful.

I will give them, that it is hard to make buffs like bless feel impactful, if you hide underlying mechanic (that's why I like that Solasta shows dice rolls and modifiers for each attack). But even so, that's a consequnce of them messing up the balance, not original design.

Larian is designing for a surface engagement - first glance impressions. They make a goblinclicker, not an RPG with tactical combat.

+1 Spot on imo.

For the record I use Bless pretty much every fight with more than 2-3 enemies(like the beach Intellect Devourers doesn't really need it imo). As an old school D&D'er it is basically permanently ingrained in my head...in a fight?...cast Bless.

1. While Larian has toned this down some, I still have fights where multiple rounds are spent getting hit with surface effect spells/items. That doesn't even account for the surface effects themselves dropping my concentration. In my last fight at the windmill my cleric got targeted 3 times by surface effect attacks(I want to say all 3 were alchemist's fire but not 100% on that). 3 rounds of combat in a row one of the enemies was doing so.

3. I believe you meant all the easy and free Advantage Larian gives out makes Bless LESS useful since it is so much easier to hit things.

4. Heaven forbid you have any class(or more than 1) with a pet. Good luck trying to just Bless your companions and not any minions they control.

5. This one can be equally applied to a number of things in BG3.

"So, they made Bless less helpful, more difficult to use, and more confusing. Then they blame the players for not finding it fun." So much this right here. It is entirely because of Larian's homebrews and implementation that we are where we are and they seem to have no clue what so ever.

Oh, was he talking about the DOS2 Bless? I very rarely used Bless even in the definitive ed because to me DOS2 combat was all about dps race and perma cc's, and also because how enemies just curse you again every turn anyway... I use buffs like Bless and Protection from Evil all the time in BG2, all the way to the final fight of the expansion. In the end, how much players are interested in what has a lot to do with how the whole system is designed; it's not as simple as because "I wanna see damage and fireworks".

The portion of the quote that's talking about Bless is referring to BG3.
The portion of the quote that's talking about "making [buffing and debuffing] overpowered on purpose" is about the DOS games.