Half the time, if you don't micromanage them, they do something stupid.
That was my recent experience with rtwp in Pathfinder WotR. I've tried playing tb as much as possible, but some battles had just too many toons participating. Rtwp made the "artificial stupid" quite noticeable due to a combination of bad pathfinding, bugs and everyone ignoring aoes.
Oh my gosh! AOEs! Yes!
I still remember playing NWN2 and fighting against a couple of Red Wizards. Boom! Boom! AOEs blowing up every freaking character who just stood there taking it because they didn't "think" about how maybe they should try to split up so they wouldn't continuously get blown to pieces by fireballs. I can't remember how many times I had to do that fight over simply because I couldn't figure out, at first, what the flip was killing everyone so quickly. Half the time I would die before even knowing what hit me. Good times!
At least with TB, I get hit by a fireball and my team is mostly dead because I kept them grouped together, as soon as it's my turn again, I can scatter them so it doesn't keep happening. I can be intelligent and strategic about it.
So yes. I do like RTWP in theory. I like that everyone and everything are moving at a fast pace and if I run towards a goblin he can retreat from me and keep his distance, making it harder to catch him and hit him, which is more realistic, but ultimately the more characters you have to control with RTWP, the harder it is and the more you have to hit pause constantly so they don't do stupid stuff and die. I'd much rather have TB than pause every 2-3 seconds to try to make sure I'm not dying.
Oh, and another pet peeve... I tell my wizard to cast a spell, then focus on my other characters. I think he's cast a spell and tell him to do something else. I unpause. He starts chanting, cancels the spell and does something else, wasting a spell slot because I didn't realize he was just about to cast his spell.
Again, at least with the cue system in KOTOR, that usually didn't happen because at least they'd complete the cued action first and then move on to the next. If you REALLY needed them to do a healing action or something, you would have to cancel the cued up action first so that the healing action or whatever would take priority. That, at least, made it so that you could track and better manage actions. Most RTWP games don't even give you that much.
The ONLY time I actually prefer RTWP in an RPG is for really baby fights. If I know I don't really need spells or complicated actions, and I just want my characters to default run up and hack things down, I'll switch to RTWP (in games like Pathfinder which have the option). THEN I'm like, "Thank God for RTWP. That baby fight would have been so painfully slow and pointless without RTWP." Most fights in BG3, however, I don't feel like I'd be doing that very often. I'm fairly certain RTWP would increase the difficulty of each fight exponentially, and there's no way I'd survive against the Gith Patrol or the Phase Spider Lair. And I would certainly not want any option for party of 6 with RTWP. No. 4 would be too much to handle especially as characters reach higher levels.
