Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Halfling Player in Grymforge - You Must Be This Tall To Ride

I fixed that for you to better match my tabletop experience

XD
In my experience, low-STR characters argue for using Acrobatics to parkour past large gaps/up a wall.

That is why i said cruicial places ...
Like i have no problem with 8Str character being unable to get high ground, loot some treasure chest, or get good sniping position, since there is jump he simply cannot make ...
But if my 8Str character simply cannot complete Quest, that simply dont feels right.

I play with low strength characters fairly often. I'm sad that I can't recreate some of my existing characters with 6 Str in the current game. Overall, I have to agree with Rag here:


I would also like it if our strong characters could throw halflings again, as I miss that, and currently I can only still do it by use of the reduce spell ^.^

I think it sounds like a great argument. I'd love to see Acrobatics stand in for jumping distance.

Sadly, no amount of artistic ninja flips actually allows you to jump further than the capacity of your actual muscles. Being more flexible, more acrobatic and lighter on your feet does not mystically allow you to jump ten feet further over a gap than someone else. Having stronger leg muscles does. Explaining how you're circumventing having to do the big jump by way of other smaller elements that require acrobatic skill to string together - now that's a fine argument and that works perfectly well, if the situation allows for it - but you can't acrobatically explain your way across a blunt, broad chasm.

^ What should actually be done in these cases is use an Acrobatics (Str) check. Or I suppose an Athletics (Dex) check. Either one could reasonably describe parkour. As Niara said, muscles are certainly involved in jumping, so str or athletics should be involved somehow.

But yeah, if you have no walls to run along or rails to propel yourself off of then the argument for something other than an Athletics (Str) check gets more difficult. Maaaaaybe you could use an Athletics (Dex) check - you've trained in long jumping giving you proficiency in athletics, but your key to success is exact proper placement of your feet when running and for the final launch.

Another option is more wall climbing spots in the terrain. Wall climbing in old pen and paper DnD never required specific locations to do so, just different difficulty levels depending on the surface one climbed on. In a video game setting that's much more difficult to implement. So the developer could compromise by adding more "climb" locations, and just restrict some of them to those that have the proficiency to climb walls. This would allow high dex acrobatic characters the ability to jump across and grab a wall (finger holds) and climb up said wall or cliff. Then let them throw a line back to the rest to have them cross or climb. Heck.. even ropes are useless in this game. We cannot tie someone up, or climb them atm.

My character is carrying multiple suits of armor, leather and ring, along with 4 short swords, 2 great swords, 29 potatoes, and a couple of backpacks, in addition to a nice, framed landscape painting and a half dozen goblin bows. Oh yeah, I've also got some daggers and crude maces stuffed in a pocket somewhere. In addition to all that, I have a personal shield that I use, and when I'm not using it, it disappears into my back along with all the other stuff I'm carrying. Nothing about this makes sense, but whatever, let's go with it for now.

Meanwhile, Astarion is beside me. He's carrying next to nothing, just a potion and a couple of scrolls.

I can still jump much farther than Astarion. Because he's so weak, and I'm apparently so strong, and the weight I'm carrying doesn't seem to matter too much.

What I'm getting at is that none of this is real world physics, and none of it makes sense under a magnifying glass. I don't want to say it's necessarily disingenuous to talk about how a Dex based Acrobatics skill wouldn't work, but it's maybe a touch misguided, imo.

Sure, in the real world Acrobats are pretty good jumpers. Sure, in the real world, Acrobats have trained their muscles. Sure, in the real world, you could measure the muscle strength of an Acrobat.

But in this world, Acrobatics is a Dex based skill. These skills are only an approximation of things. It's a reasonable call to say that someone with a high Acrobatics skill but a low strength isn't a power lifter, but does have some measure of strength in the right areas to accomplish the impressive feats that acrobats are known for.

It's also nice to have a lithe, Dex based fighter being able to jump around and leap from balcony to balcony while fighting the extravagant battle. Because it's cool and it feels fun, and it's at least as realistic as anything else going on.

Now, if the argument is that it unbalances the game and lessens the value of Str by too far a margin, that's an argument to be had. I don't agree, but I understand why someone might put that forward as a concern. But saying jumping requires muscles? Shrug.

Just my opinion.

The character carrying a load of equipment is doing so because they are strong enough to do so without the weight of it impeding their ability - that's the metric that a strength score describes, and the carry-weight realism relation is marked out by that relationship - so if you're not carrying your encumbrance limit, then the weight of what you're carrying isn't enough to have a notable impact on your abilities. Carry enough that you dip into the yellow, and suddenly Astarion with no encumbrance *CAN* jump further than you... further more, if Astarion tried to carry as much as you are he couldn't jump at all, and could barely even walk under... because you are stronger than him. This makes tractable sense, and if you were keeping track of it in a table top situation and using the handbook values for variant encumbrance to give it more realism, then you'd find out that, actually, it makes rather a lot of real-world coherency (at least while dealing with Medium creatures).

Dex Based acrobatics doesn't let you jump further or higher - it lets you jump more precisely and retain your balance to jump again in quick succession and perform other related feats of dexterity and acrobatic skill. Real-world acrobats do not make shows and displays of how far or how high they can jump - they make shows of how artistically they can control their body through complicated movements and precise action and balance. The real-world people who make shows of how far and how high they can jump are olympians... and the acts of jumping far and high fall into a specific olympic category - Athletics, incidentally, not Acrobatics, which is a different olympic discipline...

It IS nice to have a lithe and dexterous fighter leap about from balcony to chandelier to opposite balcony with dramatic flair! That's a great use of acrobatics, because the individual distances are not challenging, and the trick is in the balance and precision of the activity. The Barbarian running up behind doesn't do this - The barbarian runs at the edge, ploughs through the balcony in one great leap, clotheslines the chandelier as he goes past and crashes through the opposite balcony to land on the other side all in one go - it's not graceful or dexterous, it's purely athletic. This is a perfect example of where both athletics and acrobatics might allow a character to make the crossing, from one balcony to the other - and most DMs would have no problem with the dex player asking for acrobatics and describing their balcony-hoping, chandelier-swinging crossing. If there WAS no chandelier, however, then I'm sorry, but it doesn't MATTER how graceful and dexterous and well-balanced you are, or how perfectly precisely control of your own body you are - that's a straight jump and you're going to have to put some raw physical oomph behind trying to make it the distance: that's Athletics.

Encumbrance rules no matter the edition never stand-up to much scrutiny. Best leave that out of the discussion. Using Dex to 'jump' should be like watching Jackie Chan get around, over, and up walls gaps etc. He needs multiple things to work around because the distance is too far for him to Athletics(Str) his way across. At least that's how I see it.

Something like that doesn't seem possible in BG:3, most heavy duty platformers don't even manage it.

Mmmmm while strength and athletics are causally related in 5e it just triggers my reality button. Elepahnts are strong and can walk 100's of miles sure but they weigh upto 6 metric tonnes. They could throw a car, even a truck and as they are so incredibly strong can jump over a building...... Buzz buzz buzz DOES NOT COMPUTE!! They are incaapable of making 4 feet leave the ground.

I knew a guy in the army who was about 5 foot 3" tall and could carry INSANE (like 125kg) weight on his back and tab (march) 20 miles. He could do 200 weighted pullups on his fingertips, he was a professional rock climber. He only had problems jumping/projecting distances because of his body mass and short stubby legs.

Ever see someone do the tripple jump? Fast, light weight and tall = jump high/far. You need to be athletic to be acrobatic. You don't see 350lb body builders doing anything other than lift stuff.

In BG 3 there is no tightrope shimmy stuff or balance or rock climing or any practical use of the acrobatics skill. I would love it if a thief could climb a wall without the need to jump/climb on boxes, like spiderman. People can do this in real life. The underdark would gain a new dimension if you could climb round rather than jump over.

Picture this, you enter the abaondoned village and spot the gobs waiting in ambush. You send a thief round the side who sneaks to the front, climbs the wall and sneak attacks the first goblin on the first floor alcove from below while still attached to the wall trowing him in the street. He/she then sneaks round the back of the building, climbs up behind the lead goblins and does a John Wick.

This is one of those examples where something clearly does not translate from pen and paper. I don't care how much strength you have you ain't jumping 40 foot from a stationary position. World record standing long jump is bit over 10 foot. If you were running at 70 kph maybe but when you landed you would be using your face as a brake for the next 20 meters giving you the bruce jenner look.

The distance is too far for anyone with any amount of human strength to jump. It's a game where things are larger than life and real world physics are set aside in favor of a version that is stretched and slightly warped to accommodate for fun and entertainment.

The encumbrance rules showcase this perfectly. All the arguments about "muscles in legs" are out of touch. It's a cherry picked moment to appeal to real world physics, nothing more.

The game is designed around the element of having fun, within reasonable boundaries. A character can't, for instance, jump over a building, but they can jump over a table. Okay, that's still an incredibly long jump, but whatever, it's more fun for positioning during combat and such, and it's not breaking the bank of verisimilitude.

But once someone starts going on about "muscles in legs," things get inherently pedantic and boring. Again, completely out of touch with the system and what it's trying to accomplish, which is to say that it's trying to provide an encumbrance system that both limits and allows.

It's fun to have a character with high strength jumping around the map. Equally, it would be fun to have a character with a high dexterity jumping around the map, in the tradition of swashbuckling heroes leaping here and there and swinging from chandeliers. One character can hang their hat on Athletics while the other swears by Acrobatics. Whatever. We're working with an imperfect system and just trying to have fun.

How do you guys understand Bull's Strength to work.

I kind of remember it doubling carry weight, does it also double jump distance? Having advantage on Str rolls is almost the worst thing to buff, but it also doesn't translate at all, as far as I can tell, into the one Skill you'd think would benefit from it.

I was just thinking about something similar with regards to realism and the Sleep spell, be put to sleep, but take any damage and wake up. For anyone who has ever just fallen over even just standing, I think you can tell where I'm going.

Also we have professional jumpers, they're called basketball players, and for anyone who recently watched the Olympics you can easily see what type of body is doing 'long jumps'.

it does not, 3.5 edition did since it was a flat +4 to your strength score but 5e really hates it when you do math with your math rocks... the spell's code is "Advantage(Ability, Strength); CarryCapacityMultiplier(2.0)" which, to be fair, is a bit more than just +4 to your strength

Off topic on topic, but I'll throw in for the Quarter Staff vault. Doubt it would work here, but I think that would be a fun movement in a video game. Just doing a Tremors move from boulder to boulder, avoiding the lava. Making the quarterstaff slightly more interesting in the process. That'd be good fun hehe

The D&D grappling hook is another one, or just some basic rope-play (since swashbuckling was mentioned). They let Link have all the fun, but can't figure a scheme to get this working in FR? Alas. If it's going to be all Supermario, I wish I could kick jump off a wall on occasion, or go all Ninja Gaiden style. But whatever the associated ability or skill, the games environment and internal physics still can't make any of it feel 'real' enough to give the super reality the appropriate sync up. Its caught in a weird place between the wargames it developed out of with grids and hexes, and the more imaginative narrative it indulges that has us flying and leaping and bounding around (but not really hehe). I wish a D&D CRPG could totally dial the non com exploration movement with features like that, because it's hard to imagine how they'd work in combat without that kind of architecture already ready to go. They should look more to the Action FPS tradition for inspiration on that front, even if it moves in a bit of a different direction than the Strategy game inheritance.

ps. this is an even bigger drift, but just to elaborate further... So when Gygax and Arneson and those dudes built the initial framework, they were looking to wargames. Stuff like Kriegsspiel or the big bible "Strategos -the American Wargame" 1880, or stuff like Little Wars. Rulers, dice, maps, toy soldiers in miniature etc. Where the Player Character and RP as a concept started out as a General basically, and then grew from there. I'm sure they couldn't conceive at the time something like a platformer, a breath of the wild, or a madden football in a video game, but that's nevertheless where we've arrived. Even though I love the transparency of dicegames and mapgames, what we're still waiting on is a real hybrid I think. Basically something that can take the platformer type FPS 3D pseudo-reality environment, and integrate that with all the regular TT style rules too. Something that can seamlessly transition from one to the other, more or less. BG3 is almost certainly not that game, but it does move the ball a bit in that direction compared to some of the more recent CRPG predecessors. Where it can, I'd like to see more of the "real world" physics taken up to superhero heights. Still you need an orbital cam for that right? And levels where the point and click is along more than one plane on the ground heheh.