Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Homebrewed Conditions and Why They Make the Game Less Fun

The game isn't complex at all. We are not even on the same level of complexity as dos 2 and that game is simple.

Devs do what they think it's good for the game.


Some people will not agree with the way they do things, but i for one welcome homebrew of 5e more importantly smart adaptation and god know 5e needs it.

It doesn't use the Cpu power at all and is simpfied for no good reason whatsoever.
The good news it needs to be adapted anyway.
IF people want somekind of digitalization of DnD this is not it. You would need all sorts of new DM systems different design no singleplayer mode and program couldn't run without a DM AI or human... THis thing is decades away.


In video games you can't just change things by talking with the DM mid game.

Have to agree equiping even (in all other D&D games) weak goblins with all special weapon attacs ans spells is ridiculous. yesterday the last goblin left hit the Githyanki and she was running away like a scared child. This is stupid!

You're probably used to DnD or you played the game a lot. Yes, the game is complex compared to most TB games, especially for new players even if 5e is way less hard to learn than 3.5.

New conditions make it even more complex for a very limited added value.

This game is between Dragon Age (with only 3 classes) and NWN (D&D 3.5) / Pathfinder when it comes to character creation / management. But the interaction with the environment is much more complex in BG3.

According to this logic, we should remove half of the spells from the game to make the game less complicated.

DnD has a long history of combat effects that leave characters unable to act. Sleep, for one. There are stun spells and charm spells and states of confusion.

Saying "it's not fun" kind of ignores all the people who have fun with it.

It's like making an argument that the "Skip a turn" card should be removed from Uno because some players don't want to skip a turn.

Small list of spells that takes away your "tactical abilities" that are currently available in the game. I took only those spells that take your control over your character.
-> command
-> sleep
-> hideous laughter
-> crown of madness
-> hold person
As bonus few not available lvl3 spells
-> fear
-> hypnotic pattern

Lest there be an argument that it is something else because it costs a spell slot, it will not work for NPCs. NPCs do not follow the same rules as players.
In the case of BG3, casters have much more spell slots than the corresponding character at their level.

Unfortunately each shitty gobo can cast these spells or have molotw cocktails as well as arrows wich do aoe damage as well as spiderman power or hit you such that you are scared or hit you such that you fly 10 m away into the abyss

No, actually that doesn't logcially follow at all, and has no grounds for being suggested other than an entirely intellectually dishonest slippery slope fallacy.

Having a short list of clear conditions that always act in the same way and can be learned and understood in a straight forward manner is one thing - having a *new* condition for every skill and every weapon, that does its own little thing, to the point that there are so many things that it becomes impractical to learn or remember them all is quite another. Having every debilitation be a simple 'skip your turn', with nothing else, is equally a bad decision. Where people fall in terms of what they think is an appropriate amount and a good balance will vary. That's why one game system (the system which this game is supposed to use, incidentally) has spent the past twenty years revising and improving that to find the point of balance and complexity most suitable and enjoyable for the largest number of players.

I do not find Larian's homebrew of established status conditions to be fun. I simply don't. I would find the balance provided by the existing ruleset to be far more enjoyable from a tactical decision-making context, and from the perspective of what I may be facing as a player, against my foes.

I also do not find their homebrew of attaching battlemaster effects onto weapons and giving them to literally every weapon-holding enemy in the game to be fun either. It's an interesting idea, poorly executed at the moment. And before anyone else attempts to say that they're much weaker than battlemaster abilities: *Bonus Action To Give An Enemy Disadvantage On Wisdom Saves* There is no describing how ridiculously strong that effect is.


Actually, using the Uno example, it's equivalent to saying that replacing all of the Draw cards and Reverse cards with Additional Skip cards instead is, in fact, NOT an improvement to the game.

Let's flip it around: Taking an effect that makes you consider how to act on your turn, and poses an obstacle without robbing you entirely of your agency, and turning it into "Skip your turn" (which is what BG3 has currently done). Explain to me, this being open to anyone, how that is an improvement to the system? How does that increase fun for you?

It might be broken if it weren't for the fact that you can use it once for a short rest, after which it requires both hitting the enemy and the fact that the enemy will fail the condition check with which most of the stronger enemies will have no problems.

Why is it supposed to be a problem to remember a few effects? Unless we assume that players are idiots who cannot remember 5 effects (ignore the fact that you can always check what it does).
How is this different from the need to remember what color spray or maybe entangle does?
This is a mechanic that fixes what 5e broke, which means that the weapons are really different from each other and not just have different damage.

The issue here is that those spells are clearly defined what they do and enemies will be limited in how many times they can use them. Also spellcasters are usually an archetype that is understood to have such powers and are targeted first in most tactical combat games, including DnD. As it stands now, any enemy no matter how mundane looking could whip out some obscure ability or bomb that the player had no way of knowing about and now they get their turn taken away.

There is also an argument of expectations. It is really frustrating for an experienced DnD player to play a DnD video game and have it not work anything close to the tabletop. People in the DnD community have been starved for a proper CRPG based on the DnD ruleset for a long time. Larian has promised this game would be that and so far it is failing to live up to that promise.

Every enemy has the ability to shove a character as a bonus action on every turn of combat. This shove has been increased in range to allow for easily knocking a character off a ledge that they should be safe from, dealing a ton of fall damage and potentially taking their next turn away to. Add to that the once/combat extra weapon abilities and the monsters that can leap half way across the map and do an AOE prone to your entire party and you can see where we may be coming from.

But some of the D&D guys already spent 60 bucks so it doesn't matter if they are disappointed ;)=

It's not different, it's one more thing to learn and remember.


You don't need new conditions at all to achieve this.
- An attack to charge
- An attack that makes AOE damages
- An attack that inflict the prone condition
- An attack that inflict the blind condition
- An attack that inflict the stunned condition
- An attack that reduce the ennemy speed by 2
- An attack that gives advantage to an ally engaged with the same ennemy during 1 turn
- And so on....

As for the fact that it isnt needed, I agree, however, I dont buy the argument that greater complexity is a problem.

Ofc it matters. unless Larian intends to lose those customers forever. Imagine them announcing DOS3 and in the EA it turns out the gameplay is VERY similar to, i don't know, Warcraft 3. I can promise you there would be an outrage among DOS fans. But them getting disappointed wouldn't matter?

Would never buy DOS3 cause i don't like party cRPGs without fixed classes. In this case BG3 (still) is different. But you are right we have to make sure that BG3 feels more like a D&D game. Unfotunately for me it doesn't feel like Baldurs Gate.

Even for enemy spellcasters, a good DM should be very wary about using these types of spells against players. Looking through DMG spellcasting monsters, many of the common ones (Mage, Priest) focus on evocation/mobility spells and not "take control of character" spells. Which I'd guess is an intentional decision by D&D developers.

Players use turn-losing abilities on the DM's monsters? Great, the DM has one less monster to focus on.
DM uses turn-losing abilities on a player character? Now the player has to sit through potentially dozens of minutes of combats just sitting there doing nothing. Super fun /s

Situations where players lose their turn should be rare.

My comment was in reply to someone who said "it wasn't fun" to have effects that caused a character to miss a turn. Which, to me, seemed like an odd thing to say considering the type of stuff that has existed since conception in this game we're talking about.

Your comment gets closer at articulating the concern, in my opinion. Just to see if I understood you, what you're saying is:

1. The effects in question should be limited, and
2. They should come from obvious sources, like spellcasters.

It makes me wonder. How limited do you think it should be? Obviously, you don't have an exact number of times it should show up in a game, but you seem to have a gut sense of how often you think it should happen. Have you noticed your own game play being ruined by dozens of instances of your characters not having turns? Are you getting a lot of TPKs? In other words, is there any way to quantify your sense that it's happening too much?

And why should it just come from spellcasters? Is your argument that it lacks verisimilitude otherwise? I could get behind that if the effects didn't make any sense. But if the effect makes reasonable sense, and it makes the weapons more interesting and diverse for a lot of players... then it seems like a good thing. Unless it's making the spellcasters useless? Is it making the spellcasters useless?


A rose by any other name....

I agree with Rhobar121's comment about how none of this is complicated.



Oh my goodness, I don't think I could disagree more. This is an issue of personal taste. It's basically a player saying, "I prefer a DM who does it this way." That's certainly fine, but it doesn't speak for all players, and it doesn't define whether a DM is good or bad in a universal sense. From my perspective, these things exist in the game, and I accept that they will be used, both to the players' benefit and detriment, depending.

Players who are hit by these abilities play less of the game. Sure, I guess you can have a personal taste that "playing less of the game is fun", but at that point I would question why you're playing the game at all?

I'm not arguing that there should never be turn-losing abilities used on the players. But these should not happen frequently - slipping on ice shouldn't cause you to lose your turn and low-level enemies (goblins) shouldn't have weapon abilities/maneuvers that make you lose your turn.

Especially slipping on ice. At least for many of the other options (sleep, hold person, frightened), your allies can help end the effect on you by breaking the casters' concentration/waking you up/removing your fear. Prone = unconscious = losing the rest of your turn is just purely a 'fuck you.'