Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Proper Reaction system please

I've been messing with character creation lately, decided to look through fighter styles. And I saw a strange tooltip when you hover onto "Guard" fighting style(don't remember the exact name) - It says that it is a reaction, it has a specific pictogram(burning hands doesn't have any of that, and it is a reaction either).
The description was following(not exact quote) - "It is a passive-activation spell, that will act AUTOMATICALLY once you activate it"

Larian, please. Do a PROPER reaction system, when you have to react to your enemy's turn manually, not activate a passive spell beforehand. It is a huge part of dnd and it will ba such a waste if you don't implement it

Swen allready told us that they are curently "working on better reactions" ... whatever that means.
But yeah, the curent system is often highly insufficient. :-/

i didn't see that tooltip before, it seemed as though they did it for further patches(

that's great news. larian better have. else they are really tarnishing their own reputation with the dnd franchise. solasta already beaten larian in terms of a dnd5e game.

I don't particularly like the simplistic Solasta mechanism of continually interrupting you with questions; it gets annoying for me pretty quickly.

I would prefer a system where I get the *opportunity* to trigger a reaction, without the *necessity* to constantly say no. So, maybe, an area of the screen "pulses" to prompt you to the possibility of a reaction[ if you click it, it displays the Solasta-Like reaction dialog, if you ignore it, it does not.

You could even have something akin to the existing on/off system for automating reaction types, but instead allow a choice between auto-trigger ( existing mechanism ), prompt-to-trigger ( my preferred mechnism ), ask-for-trigger ( Solasta mechanism ) and off. That would allow everyone to set up reactions the way they want, without adding too much development work.

The most difficult part of the reaction system rewrite would probably be players using their action to set up a contingency reaction. Larian may just give a limited palette of contingencies and reactions, or may just not bother at all!

+1 for point to trigger system, it will make stay focused through the entire combat, and also it is probably the closest adaptation to the tabletop, because DM will never ask you something like "do you want to use a reaction?"(this is how solasta mechanism looks for me), but instead you yourself observe and pick right moment to use a reaction
As for contingency, i can't even imagine how to implement it, it needs to be a system built around this spell alone to work properly, and i'm not sure larian will go this far

Oops. I'm not a 5e player, so I used the wrong term. It's called a "readied action" in 5e, but it is actually the same principle as the contingency spell, except even MORE general ( e.g. a readied action might be "if an enemy comes through the door, I shoot it with my longbow" ).

In a D&D videogame, both readied actions and contingency spells would necessarily have a more limited set of trigger events than a human DM might allow.

the question is the same, how it could work? if it's a set of triggers, they must be very abstract to be apllied in combat in different locations, circumstances, etc. But if they are abstact, we somehow need to be sure that this particular trigger will fit my combat plan, or else we'll never use this action again because of its unreliability

As far as i know ready actions work with "use immediatly when possible" ...
Basically similar to our curent reactions.

The way I see it, you’d mark an area on the floor and select an offensive action. The next enemy to enter that area would instantly be the target of whatever attack or spell you chose.

hm, an interesting thought! thank you

Yeah, I think that a purely automatic reaction system has too little flexibility, and a full interruption system could potentially get too bogged down.

I do think there's a spot in the middle where parts of both could be combined. Reaction toggles could still exist, but instead of automatically triggering the first use of a reaction, an enabled toggle would actually enable prompts asking the player if they want to use their reaction on that trigger. So for a wizard, you would turn the Attack of Opportunity toggle off, but the Counterspell toggle on, so that if something leaves the melee range of a wizard, the wizard won't automatically swing. If someone casts a spell - ideally, there would be an automatic Arcana check to identify the spell (like Solasta), and you would get a prompt asking you if you want to counterspell. If the arcana check failed, you're just told it's an unknown spell. If it succeeded, you are told what spell it is.

a great idea, hopefully we'll see something like that, it sounds well-balanced

3-way toggle: pop-up prompt / use automatically / don't use

Ideally with the ability to change that toggle even if it isn't your turn, in case you accidentally forget to put it on the right setting.

In this implementation using triggers, ideally you'd also also be able to select a character for the trigger to proc on, even if they're currently not visible or targetable from your position. I.e., "I only want to counterspell/attack this enemy. If they remain behind cover, then I guess I can't do anything. But if they move from cover into my sight...gotcha!"

Yep, sounds good! I’d love that in situations with invisible enemies. The moment they pop back into view, I want to nail them with Scorching Ray (if I’ve line of sight, of course). That could mean wasting turns waiting for Invisibility to end, but that’s what happens anyway when the last enemy drinks an Invis potion and you’re left twiddling your thumbs while the game prolongs the inevitable.

+1 this is how it should work

Sure, that sounds good.

Agreed!!!!! Please let's have that!!!!!

It does work better in in table top. "Ready an Action"

You use part of your action to set up what you want to do...such as attack if an enemy comes in range.


Perhaps something more general like:

If trigger is met, then "you're up", and get to finish your turn. If not, then you loose those actions.