Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Party Size Discussion

This is actually a good point. It wouldn't even be difficult to up the challenge rating on the fly by adding additional specific CR monsters to an encounter based on how many toons you have. There are calculators out there that already exist that would tell you exactly what to add based on Character level, Party size and the actual difficulty level you are trying to achieve.

Like this one.
https://kastark.co.uk/rpgs/encounter-calculator-5th/

As long as there is a hidden value of CR on the monsters then adding an additional 1 or 2 is no big deal.

Heck, I'd love if all encounters scaled based on level.

As I keep saying, they can simply NOT increase/scale/tweak anything.

Just a toggle to increase party size with the following note next to it: Combat encounters are scaled and balanced for a party of four. In choosing to increase your party size, you should understand that encounters may become considerably easier.

That's it.

Strong 'no' on this. A big part of playing an RPG is knowing what you can do, when you can do it, and avoiding encounters that may be too much for you to handle and coming back to them later. Furthermore, it is nice to occasionally be able to beat an encounter that you are not supposed to be able to beat at your level. Similarly, it is also nice to sometimes be able to wipe the floor with your enemies because you are now over-leveled for that encounter.

Yes, but that is like repairing a road full of potholes by putting out a roadside sign saying 30km/h (where you normally would drive 90km/h)

Would I prefer a game balanced around the use of a bigger party? Sure.
But if Larian is going to use that as an excuse "We are not willing to tweak the difficulty for six players, too much work, yadda yadda" then my answer is "Fuck it, just give me the option anyway".

I'll take the hit in terms of challenge (or I'll just consider playing at a hardest difficulty setting, if I feel like it*. That's my problem, not something for Larian or any other forum user to worry about.

And about the fact that "you didn't see any argument of what of a party of six would make the game more fun", I can only wonder how many of these 60 pages you actually bothered to read, because even ignoring everyone else here who did the same, even by myself I spent a unhealthy amount of time arguing about it.
Amount of companion quests accessible, characters interactions, party banters, more interesting group synergies, more possibilities to free a spot in your party even for sub-optimal classes or somewhat redundant ones without feeling shit about it, better loot distribution and chance to make use of greater equipment variety, etc, etc. There are countless arguments aside of just caring about "challenge" to advocate for

If your point is that you are purposefully going to ignore/dismiss any argument for it, that's another thing entirely. I can't force you to care about what I care about. But I'm not going to let you claim they are not legitimate reasons.


* About this point in particular: it depends a lot on how Larian will handle higher difficulty settings. I'm all for an increased challenge as long as monsters will stick to canonical values and difficulty will come by other means (their number, for instance).
I'll fucking NOPE out of the "additional challenge" if it will come through HP bloat and increased damage for the enemies. I just don't like these as ways to raise the difficulty. They are cheap, lazy solutions that don't make me feel like I'm actually playing with the ruleset at end.
Even for Pathfinder Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous "Core rules" is the only legitimate difficulty that exists and matters for me. Anything easier or harder is trash as far as I'm concerned.

Nah. The metaphor would be more like:

There's a perfectly good 2-lane road with a 90 km/h speed limit (balanced 4-person-party gameplay).
Larian adds another lane, with a divider separating it and the ^ lanes, that has a bunch of potholes and a 130 km/h speed limit (unbalanced 6-person-party gameplay).

You can still drive on the smooth 90 km/h if you want. All Larian has done is add another option for people who want to go faster, but they'll have a very bumpy ride.

It's like this. Whether 4 or 6, difficulty has to be based on one or the other. You can't balance the game for both unless you write in some logic that takes into account character level and party size. You just can't. If I create an encounter for 6 party members that are at Level 4 and they only go into that encounter with 4 at level 3, the encounter is going to be undoubtedly more difficult because I as a DM built the encounter based on 6 party members at Level 4. Likewise, if I build an encounter with 4 party members at Level 4 and they go into that encounter with 6 Level 5 characters, the encounter is going to be undoubtedly easier because I built it for 4. So you HAVE to take character level and party size into account when attempting to balance the game. Right now, the balance issues are because you as a player have too many choices to be able to face encounters at various levels and with various numbers of characters.

Level and Party Size versus enemy Level and Party Size is how you balance D&D. I use the CR tool for D&D 5e for all my encounters. There's a nifty app that does it for me. All my encounters work out pretty darn well when I use the app. I set the encounter Challenge Rating to Medium, I select the characters going into the fight, and boom, the app tells me how many of what type of monster I should throw at my heroes for a Medium difficulty encounter based on their level and number of party members. Regardless of 4 or 6 heroes, the app tells me how many enemies to throw at them, and the encounter works relatively well almost every time. Try it yourself. Go to Google Play Store, download 5e Companion App. If I want an encounter to be Hard or Deadly, I set the encounter level to Hard or Deadly and the app does the work for me by telling me how many of which enemy I want to throw at them that I should use. I don't even have to do the math or nothing. If this app can do it, Larian can do it in BG3 and make the battles more fun and rewarding.

I'm telling you, every time I enter one of the BG3 battles into this app, EVERY encounter is Deadly for a 4 party team. Even 6 party members often has the Deadly CR rating. It's ridiculous. THAT is why Larian has to often nerf the enemies in the game, stripping them of their WotC-given abilities to make them weaker so they can actually be defeated by a 4 party team that is way underleveled to face such encounters. I'm telling you, a single Imp in the Prologue would be more than challenging for Lae'zel at Level 1 and your Main at Level 1. Throw in a few more Players for a 4-player Multiplayer, so you have 5 party members in the Prologue, and a standard imp would become a much easier foe to kill. Therefore, in the very first battle of the game, if you have 2 PCs, Lae'zel and the Main, Larian has to make it so you'd only face like 1 Imp. If you had Us with you, maybe they could throw in 2 Imps. If you have a party of 4 players in Multi-Player, plus Lae'zel plus Us, then you could do 3 or even 4 imps in the first encounter. That would make the first encounter more fun and more true to D&D 5e, making imps actual imps and not some nerfed down version of them.

And this can be done in simple ways. They could still have 3 or 4 imps in the first area. If you move towards them after meeting Lae'zel, and you only have 2 party members, have an explosion suddenly kill all but 1 imp. If you have 3 party members (like Us is with you), have an explosion kill all but 2 imps. If you have a full party of 4 players + Lae'zel + Us, or whatever, have all 3 or 4 imps involved in the fight. You could do this same thing later in the game. Allow a party of 6 to fight at the gate when you first arrive at the Druid's Grove. With the Tieflings, Wyll, and the adventurers aiding, this battle would normally be too easy. So, the game could be programmed to spawn goblin reinforcements to come to their aid. Allow only a party of 4, the fight is a bit more challenging by itself. Maybe Larian doesn't spawn any additional enemies and just lets the player continue as is.

Facing a single owlbear with a party of 6 level 3 adventurers is likely to be too easy. Spawn an additional owlbear, the Papa. Have it come from behind, or something of that nature. Suddenly, two adult owlbears is a challenge for 6 party members. Allow only a party of 4 level 3 adventurers, then yes. 1 owlbear is probably enough for a Medium encounter.

But honestly, they could simplify all this by making it standard for the party size to be 6. Allow the players to generate up to 4 Custom Characters so that whether you play Solo or Multiplayer with 4 players, you can have 4 Custom Characters in your party giving room for at least 2 Origin Characters. Your choice, though. If you want a more challenging game, create only 1 Custom Character and try going through the game with 1. You could limit yourself to only 4 party members or less for a more challenging experience as well. Boom! There's all your difficulty settings without having to make Larian go in and create all sorts of crazy Difficulty settings to nerf or buff enemies. Balance the entire game around 6 party members so that each encounter is Medium or less with a few boss battles that are Hard or Deadly. If players want a more challenging experience, they can create a party of less than 6. And for crying out loud, use D&D 5e stats so that you have a foundation to work with!

So to summarize:

1. Easiest difficulty settings for this game would be to allow Party Size 6 (4 Custom and 2 Origin, 3 Custom and 3 Origin, 2 Custom and 4 Origin, or 1 Custom and 5 Origin). This would be considered Normal mode. Balance all encounters around this party size. Make most encounters Medium or less Challenge Rating with bosses being Hard or Deadly. Use correct D&D 5e stats for all enemies except maybe custom-bosses who might have varied stats (but again, base them on standard 5e stats. Otherwise, they aren't true members of their race. A Matriarch Phase Spider who was a magic user might be able to use Ethereal Jaunt to Misty Step across the board and then reappear as if she's teleporting from one place to another clear across a chasm, but her minions have no such abilities). Then, if players want harder fights because they feel they are too easy and not rewarding enough, they can choose to have less than 6 party members to make the game harder on themselves. Doing this would make it so Larian could focus on other, more important aspects of the game, rather than on all the crazy Difficulty Settings we've been throwing at them and telling them they need to implement. Normal Difficulty = 6 party members. Hard = 4-5 party members. Deadly = 1-3 party members. There you go. Difficulty settings resolved. No nerfing needed and no buffing just to make it work for everybody. You, the player, choose your difficulty by choosing your party size. Want the most deadly challenge setting of all? Go solo through the whole game with 1 custom character. Good luck!

2. If they aren't going to do 1, then they need to implement a Challenge Rating tool within BG3 so that the game assesses the difficulty of the encounter and adjusts the encounter to match the Party Size and Level as described above. This is the more complicated approach, if you ask me, to creating balance in the game because they'd have to do a lot of programming to add or remove enemies for every encounter in order to ensure that it was going to be a rewarding fight. Then they'd have to implement a lot of difficulty settings so that players could adjust the difficulty of the game to Easy, Normal, Hard or Deadly or whatever, or put in a ton of all these little difficulty settings that aren't really needed.

D&D 5e is supposed to be simple. That's one of the reasons WotC created it. It should be as simple as option 1 above. Want an easier encounter? Allow more PCs and allies to help the PCs. Want a deadlier encounter, restrict the party size and number of allies helping the PCs. Simple as that.

Punxsutawney Phil's Phylactery of Woe? The Groundhog Lich-King casts a pretty long shadow! lol

CR and XP tables/scaling handles everything, provided they approached the various combats as "encounters" rather than as set-piece battles where the enemy is all prepositioned like it is currently.

Not to get too sentimental again, but it's funny to me that two of my all time favorite games Axis and Allies and Baldur's Gate, both suffer from the same set-piece design sensibility in the starting conditions (and now the two have kind of merged into this strange mirror universe nostalgia with the Enhanced Editions in BG functioning sort of like Special Editions in SW, by adding stuff that we now have to accept just to play in a modern format heheh.) But the thing that strikes me about A&A is that it suffers from a lack of variety due to not having enough variation in how the board is set initially, or randomizers to make the opening play patterns more unique from game to game. And in BG you get something very similar with the way combat encounters are designed. With the same starts, and the same sequencers, same enemies and positions and loot. So the game becomes stale quickly like that, because the play patterns become so similar over time and coalesce around whatever the most OP play might be for that encounter. It becomes about breaking the game through the meta of already knowing the script, when the basic systems and rules could allow for much more (probably an unlimited level of replay if it just had a few more randomizers built into it on the fly). Clearly not an identical dilemma, but its similar.

By using CR tables with randomizers you could do a lot to make each playthrough feel unique without having to put a thumb on the scale for everything. I mean you can still have the main NPC Opponents and boss fights that drop the known Loots and such, but they could easily mix it up in the trash mob cascading combat parts that they seem to enjoy toying with. They could do the same with arena environments and instanced encounters, even on the aesthetic front with unique gear. Done properly it could scale from a party of 2 to a party of a dozen, since that's why those tables and systems were created to begin with.

I'd still prefer 6 as the default for the single player game.

I'm just saying, allowing a party of 6 would just simplify the entire balancing issue. Use normal stats, a party of 6, balance everything to that, and whether you play multiplayer or solo, the game is balanced right. Then you can go wherever you want and have as many in the party as you want up to 6, and the game would be either more challenging or less depending on where you go and what you choose to do. Steal a bunch of magic items from the tieflings to buff yourself up? Fights will be easier because you chose to steal better items. Play it honestly, and it might be a bit more challenging. Choose to travel with 4 instead of 6, the game will be harder. Rush to the Gith fight, and the game will be harder. Fight every minor battle first and level up higher and do all your little background quests and such, and the game will be easier. Then you can do away with all the Difficulty settings nonsense and just let the players play however they want.

And, again, you have to consider multiplayer with all this as well. If you play the game with 4 players, all 4 character slots are then full. There is no more room for origin characters. So, you never get scenes like Shadowheart at the school or the statue with her hand glowing all weirdly, or Astarion with the Gur, or anything like that. The only interactions you get with the origin characters in multiplayer is in the camp. I can't tell you how unrewarding that is. I've played the game several times through now with 3 Custom Characters and 1 origin character and even that is frustrating. I have to switch out the 4th party member whenever I'm about to trigger an event that would include one of the origin characters. Fight the windmill scene, switch to Wyll first by porting to camp, talking to my 4th member and dismissing them, talking to Wyll so he'll join and then going back to the windmill. Such a pain in the butt, and if you play the game with 4 players, that isn't even possible. At least with a party of 6, you can play with 4 players and have at least 2 origin characters in your party at all times. Then you don't have to play the switch origin characters game as much. AND, on top of that, if you are playing solo, you can have 1 custom character and ALL of the origin characters in your party so you don't have to switch them out at all. You can utilize ALL of their abilities and such in every battle and trigger all the cutscenes for each of them as you journey. SO much more fun and less annoying.

And why doesn't 4 players account for difficulty? Because you don't have room to breathe with a 4 player party. With 6, you can take all 6 with you for a more balanced and easier gameplay. Want harder, go 5. You've just increased the difficulty by 1/6th. It's not too severe, but it's definitely harder. Want even harder, go 4 party members. Harder still, go 3. With 4 party members, even taking 1 less is severe. There's a big difference in difficulty when you go from 4 to 3 party members and the game is balanced around 4. You've increased difficulty by 25%. That's huge! Drop only 2 members and you've increased difficulty by 50%. There's a huge difference in balance at that point.

You are correct, @mrfuji3. I have no idea what @NemethR is talking about with his analogy. They and others still seem to be having a very difficult time understanding the concept of something being optional that the user can use at their own peril.

I think we just need to keep bringing up the need for a party of 6 and not 4. A party of 4 takes away a lot of the choice or roleplaying because if forces you to have the tanked fighter, spell caster, thief, cleric. Subclass that add different class abilities just aren't good enough as if having the full class in your part. Also if you wanted to play not a tank fighter but one that uses a short sword and a shield because that is the character you want to play, you can't because the one fighter you have has to always have the highest damage weapon equipped. A party of 6 opens this up for you so that you can play the character you want and not the one you are forced to need.

Another (recurring) argument we had in the past is also... For god's sake, this is a DAMN EARLY ACCESS.
Would there be any better time, at any point in development, to just *TRHOW* the option out there to your user base and check what people actually prefer to do, which percentage of players will pick one over the other, instead of going to base the entire development on shaky, questionable assumptions of what's simpler, more streamlined, more balanced and what "many would prefer to do" even among a casual audience?

Fun fact: some time ago we had a thread about Felicia Day playing the game for the first time few weeks ago. Trust me when I say that she's basically an incarnated Avatar of Casualness in terms of playstyle, and i shit you not when I tell you that two of the very first complains she had while moving the first steps in the game were about the horrendous chain/unchain control scheme (yes, I feel partially vindicated about it) and about how disappointing it was to learn that her party was already full when she tried to group Lae'zel.

I'd guess it would be an optional thing like POE2.

However, I have been running play sessions where we beat all encounters - without any exploits - with just two people in Multiplayer and no companions.

Its not easy, no mistakes tolerated kind of thing.

I don't think Soloing is possible without exploiting stealth heavily.



I recall Asmongold also said something similar in his playthrough.

Odd that they made adjustments to the chaining system but didn't say anything.

It definitely doesn't limit you to anything - none of those are necessary in BG3, it ain't BG2.

In generally I would welcome an extra spot or two in the party, however, the battles already feel overpopulated at times, and I wouldn't want extra 1/3 of enemies added.

Not to derail on the "other" of my personal crusades, but did you see how people on reddit reacted when someone made a thread to inform them of the new keybinding?
A large part of the comments was "Oh thank god", "this makes things a bit better". "I don't really like this system" etc.

And we are talking about a place where people would cut their own arms if Larian said that they have too many fingers to enjoy the game.

Yeah, I saw the reddit thread - you got name dropped also. haha.

I think the Chain system is in the same boat as barrelmancy in that it's something that Larian - or a faction in the company - wants to fix but they don't want to talk about it. I suspect that people are sentimental about these things but they are indefensible systems.

Solution, get rid of it - but quietly.

I also don't want to derail this thread, but what were these adjustments to Larian's chaining system?

Bottom line. If I play multiplayer with 3 friends, that's it. No chance to bring origin into party. No chance for story dialogues with them while traveling.

6 Party members means multiplayer can bring at least 2 origin in at a time. It also means Larian could use real stats for enemies instead of grossly nerfed down ones.

Yes, but then again from my 2player D:OS2 experience watching your friend go through companions conversation tree isn't terribly fun. Also probably all 4 of you should be playing Origins to begin with.