The whole idea of homebrew is in the spirit of DnD DM, Larian is making game campaign for us. Sound like you don't like your DM and how they do things?? Do i have to say it??
Anyway, by the sound of things you are telling me that you didn't expect elemental surfaces in the next Larian game, really? You joking, right?
Not sure what part of fictional world gets broken due to poison on touch. Even on earth we have poisons that can kill you just by touching it so why woudn't it make sense in a made up magical universe?? Where you can shot poison rays and fireballs. So funny.
And on a side note, no one transformed "your" monster it's still a phase spider, you didn't even comment on the looks, animations, effects which are way more important than the stats.
After all you can take 5e stats/abilities of Mud mephit and slap on spider model and animation sprinkle it with spider abilities like web or spit poison and vast majority of casual players will still see it as a spider. yes it would even be Immune to poison damage! OOOw, that game braking homebrew! Poor Forgotten Realms the whole realm is doomed!
If you use phase teleportation ability on it then everyone will know it as a Phase spider. If you ask me even you woudn't know those stats were from Mud mephit without triple checking everything.
In old games like BG 2 you can't even look at those stats and the game is still great without that option. I'm sure you were posting back then as well, how they homebrewed mosters?? Give me a brake.
I don't disagree that some degree of adaptation is gonna likely be necessary for the game, but I also agree with the spirit and much of the substance of Tuco's argument (which I acknowledge was delivered far more aggressively and antagonistically than it needed to be). As has been pointed out before, Larian has a whole host of potential monsters to choose from. Sticking with the phase spider encounter example (which I dislike for reasons unrelated to adaptation stuff), why make the creatures phase spiders if you're also gonna give them a bunch of abilities that are already present in another spider monster? As I mentioned in another post, they're just making things harder on themselves without much meaningful gain. Like, what is gained substantively by changing the stats of monsters when there are other monsters that could fill the same role without changing their stats?
Regarding homebrew in principle, yes I agree that homebrew is in the spirit of D&D and TTRPGs as a whole, but this isn't just someone's personal game around a table. It's an adaptation of a beloved setting that is also the sequel to a beloved franchise. I don't think it's unreasonable, with that context, to expect that Larian would take an attitude of "stick with the setting as given unless changing things gives a clearly better experience." A lot of the changes I've seen discussed seem to just be changes for the sake of changes. And when taken into consideration with a lot ofthe other system changes that Latian have made, it's not unreasonable to think that Larian doesn't actually care much for the property they're adapting. Honestly, speaking as someone who themselves doesn't care or know much about D&D and knows literally nothing about the Forgotten Realms as a setting, Larian is approaching this game in a way that makes me think they actually care about D&D either. Not that I think they actively dislike it, it just seems apparent that they're more interested in doing their own thing and bending the D&D acoutrements to fit, rather than making an effort to exemplefy the benefits and strengths of D&D's system and setting. Their approach to monsters is just a microcosm of that.
Does that make Baldurs Gate 3 a bad adaptation? I don't really know. It's too soon to tell where it will end up.
Also just to touch on the poison issue, the fact that poison seems to seep into your boots to affect you *is* kind of silly. Not stritctly world-breaking but another example of them deviating from how D&D works for seemingly no reason beyond that's how they wanted to do things.
