Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Character Creation: Ability Scores Cap

First time I ever played AD&D we did the roll 4d6 then drop the lowest die method. In that one you could swap the roll into whatever Attribute, but couldn't change the individual values. It was also roll first then select Class. Usually that meant that you could play as any of the core classes well enough, though perhaps not as one of the more specialized classes that had multiple prerequisites like high CHA or whatever.

The upside there was that it turned the character creation process itself into part of the gameplay. You weren't necessarily expected to come to the table with a character concept totally locked down, but more to create one based on what you rolled in the moment. The downside was that it often meant characters were just sort of doomed to be "not all that great" mechanically and probably short lived, but so was recess lol. It also didn't really matter, because that wasn't the whole game - just the start of it. Everyone also sort of understood that if a character had a super trash roll, that the onus was then on the DM to sort of make that work in a memorable and entertaining way. To offset an early fail somehow with a boon along the way, and some reward there for sticking it out with a more middling character. Maybe you'd find a cool ring or cursed item to spice things up. The reason it worked and remained pretty engaging was because there were witnesses there to those initial rolls. Like if you rolled an 18 you were pretty stoked and everyone was stoked for you. That sort of thing doesn't really happen anymore under a point buy, or where it's left up to the player in a SP CRPG. In BG1 you could reroll as many times as you wanted, and the game anticipated what that would entail by being a campaign for characters with god-like stats.

I think what it's missing these days is that idea that one leads with some gameplay right from the outset and then builds from that into the creative characterization part. It's basically the difference between adlib and studying your lines. A lot less pressure with the former, and it tended to be more fun for the novice. Sessions that began like that had a different sort of spirit, and one that made it pretty clear that D&D was definitely still a dice game at bedrock, but also a strange sort of dice game that one couldn't really lose so long as they fully owned it hehe. This is lost in the translation to CRPG, and its one of the things that makes that experience rather different than the TT one. There's almost nothing they can do in a CRPG to persuade the player that it's worth playing out a crippling Attribute roll. There's no boon reward and nobody really watching as an offset.

Rolling a sub 8 in intelligence doesn't unlock any cool voice set that makes us sound goofy. Having a sub 8 in Charisma doesn't unlock a bunch of hilarious NPC dialogue to make it feel totally worth it. There's no benefit to having a sub 8 in Strength when the game expects us to clear that first jump on the Nautiloid. But what if it wasn't like that?

I mean how funny might it be if we tried to clear the jump and failed, like with dragging finger nails and then a drop "Nooooo!" but somehow we slid down to the lower level and bypassed all those Imps to meet Gale or Astarion first, instead of Lae'zel and Shadowheart. That might work hehe.

You have to teach the player immediately that rolling a 3 can be just as fun as rolling an 18, or they'll never really believe you. Our DM here can pay it some lip service sure, but they can't make a miss feel like a hit, or a dud feel like a bang, and they still don't have a great way to make Odd numbered stats feel like anything other than a stopgap on the road towards a later boost into Even. It would actually be entertaining if they ever made a D&D CRPG like "Failures of Faerun" or "Legendary Losers of the Sword Coast" or something similar, where the campaign was designed to celebrate the worst of the worst in Stats for all they're worth too.

Another perennial issue in terms of the overall systems design, is how they never really found a way to integrate the Physical Attributes and the Mental Attributes such that Class didn't just equate to a certain Attribute spread. Like needing the highest possible max score in one of the primes or a dump in the secondaries to work. Just as an example, perhaps there's some way to make Intelligence interesting as a Fighter Attribute. Perhaps an arms master with a higher Int grants a the Fighter a greater pool of knowledge and thus additional proficiencies, free access to exotic weapons or some kind of tactics or strategic bonus to advantage or something along those lines that a low Int fighter wouldn't have access to. Basically what they did for the DEX vs STR conundrum, but extended across all Attributes, so there'd be a greater interplay. Instead what they did was to create Multi-Classes or Dual-Classes or combo Kit classes with different primary attribute requirements, as opposed to just thinking about how a Fighter could still be a Fighter, but with a focus on CHA or INT or WIS, instead of just STR DEX CON. In some ways they decoupled, but not really at the foundation such that it would in a crpg sans active DM.

I don't expect much progress there. It took like 30 years for them just to rework THAC0 into positive integers, so the idea they could reconstitute Martial classes, Utility classes, and Caster classes independent of prime Attributes is definitely a stretch. People would probably riot. Now it's down to everyone can get their 20, just takes a few levels. Whereas way back when expecting a 20 in anything was pretty ridiculous. I mean unless it was a Baldur's Gate game and you were the Spawn of Bhaal to justify it lol.