veteran
Joined: Sep 2017
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I try to give examples because I don't feel I'm explaining myself well because, well, frankly, I read someone's response and think, "How the heck could they think that way? Surely, I must not have explained it right or something. Maybe examples will help."
But they don't. And, you're right. Most of the time, they make people think I'm saying that those examples are the have-all-be-all instead of just an example of something I'm trying to demonstrate or display. Yeah, I understand. Metaphors and examples probably aren't always bad anyway, but the first chapter of DIA isn't very good as the first encounter contains eight bandits, where one is a captain with 65 hitpoints. For a party of level 1. 😅 To be fair, there are several ways to circumvent/avoid combat there entirely, and likely is the most common and recommended resolution to it. If engaged in combat, I genuinely think it's a really bad first encounter in a campaign too, because it's a big long and tedious fight, with at least one friendly NPC involved that is probably stronger than the player party, taking the spotlight away from the players. It has many similar issues to a DM taking on a PC of their own and making a session about them, not the players IMO. Comparing that to the first fight in BG3, which is a forced combat encounter tutorial, with no aids or other approaches involved, just isn't comparing apples to apples. And is a poor combat encounter in terms of challenge rating to player party level in vanilla DIA. On a side note on that, several early DIA encounters aren't challenging; They're ridiculous. They're poorly designed, but are challenging to experienced players who can tell a good combat build from a bad, and how to coordinate in combat well. Basically if DIA was explicitly advertised for veteran players, it'd be pass-able. An encounter *can* be designed that way by a DM PoV if they know their players are very experienced with TT combat and are building optimized characters and personal player skill. But it's not an objective "The way to design an encounter". On a tangent, I don't even think all encounters should be skirting life and death levels of challenging. Going on with further examples loses in how it's in a combat log format You CAN have more than 2-3 fights per long rest Agreed. And a healthy D&D adventure should naturally revolve around adventuring to resting balance, and it should feel natural to the player. However the examples were poor to make the point, particularly by extending it to 12 encounters before long rest for exaggeration (while maybe based on personal experience in a DIA playthrough?) and I'll give you some examples, ironically enough, to why 😂 To not make a wall of on-and-of quotes I'll instead just inject my comments in blue color in the spoiler box below. This part isn't strictly relevant to the post at all, just a curious discussion between you and me because it interests me in how we think differently. Descent into Avernus. Cultists. 1st fight. Kinda quick but the first real fight, so kinda like 3 imps on the Nautiloid. In the dungeon. 2nd fight. But tougher. Monk was hurt the most. Cleric uses Cure Wounds and heals. level 1 mind you, so not a lot of slots. 3rd fight, Banite cleric and companion. Tough fight. Party suffers much more from this one, and Warlock and Wizard and Cleric use up all spells. Short rest. Hit Dice used to heal. The fighter and the monk suffered most. Wizard uses Arcane Recovery to get back a slot but no Hit Dice. Cleric no Hit Dice. Fighter gains cool flail. They still continue. Warlock gets back spell slot.
First fight (Assuming players haven't avoided Captain Zodges inevitable henchmen if refusing his offer and trying to fight them) is kind of meant to not be a combat encounter (but can be) at all. You present it as a fixed combat encounter. It's a terribly poorly designed combat encounter on its own, even poorer because of being the "first" as mentioned before, and has a broad range of possible results for a player party's health. It can easily TPKO an unfortunate group that didn't have their wits about them.
The rest of the examples lose weight already there because it's incredibly situational and describes some unrelatable set of events that are hard to follow and keep track of, making a lot of assumptions and misses on game design cues as well. This is me stretching a lot because I don't think PNP and video games should be compared at all, I have some hot takes on why D&D in video games is a bad idea (but also good) and I'd love to elaborate on that in another TED talk, but... As you know, every table in tabletop is different, from playstyles to preferences, experience, if they're RP heavy, combat-heavy, etc. The best an adventure can do is try to lay down a natural ebb and flow of when to adventure and when to rest, but ultimately it's up to the players how they go about engaging with the adventure. Some will push on for longer, some will for less. Both are fine.
Regardless, the bathhouse also is pretty terribly made. I rank it just over Tomb of Horrors, which I play a meme campaign with at the moment on off-nights with a group, just to enjoy how hilariously bad something can be and how not to make an adventure. (I am aware of the allegedly middle finger it's supposed to be) It suffers some of the issues the first fight had, as well.
The reason why I don't think these examples are good is that I don't think they do the argument any good (an argument I agree with, to remind you). If I were to rewrite it, I'd place it in BG3 and use exact examples so that the target audience has more likelihood to actually relate and understand. I doubt many people here are intimately familiar with DIA. You could take some other examples in BG3 as well, but the swamp is the first that came to my mind because it's relatively linear. And linear combat is the only thing we could even remotely consider on this topic because it's a segment of what could happen between one long rest and the next. Every tabletop session is linear, because a DM can change, adapt and prepare different things between sessions. A video game can't. With the swamp, you could lay out the possible combat encounters in order, propose a rough estimate on how difficult they are and what a party's health might look like after each fight, and what resources they have in-world and short rests that are fixed and not random drops. (This excludes any use of potions, scrolls etc.)
From there you can get a feel of when a long rest seems natural, and start arguing what and why needs some changing. I don't think you or any player really should make this argument, rather I think Larian should. Because they actually have telemetry for this, and can pretty much put actual numbers on average performances per encounter.
4th fight. Crazy Myrkul necromancer and zombies. Tough fight. Fortunately, wizard had a spell and so did warlock. Myrkul necromancer has potions of healing and spell books. PCs use potions to heal. Wizard now only has cantrips. 5th fight. Couple more cultists. Because no spells, fight is challenging. Fortunately, found a few more potions. PCs, however, risk another short rest. Fortunately, no cultists find them during that hour. Warlock regains spell slot. Some use potions. Others Hit Dice. 6th fight. Zombies. They win, but tough fight. Hallelujah! Level up. New abilities and spell slots unlocked. Also, 1 more Short Rest Hit Dice each. Fighter now has Second Wind and Action Surge.
While I pick up on the point you're making here, I don't think most would. The fact that the necromites have some potion and scroll supplies is a static and fixed loot table, in an enclosed linear dungeon that needs to sustain the player party through its corridors. This is good. But it, and 'fortunately found a few more potions' comes of as very situational and untangible for argument.
In your examples you also mention the usage of hit dice, which is presented from a tabletop PoV where it can be used individually, disregarding the fact that this isn't the case in BG3. So it doesn't help the argument because it's not arguing apples for apples. If you were to put the first chapter of DIA into BG3 using the series of events you describe, the party would run out of hit dice at levels 1-2 halfway through the examples.
7th fight. PCs have more HP and abilities. Fight cultists. Tough fight. Short rest. Fighter uses Hit Dice and Second Wind. Others use Hit Dice. Cleric uses last spell slot to Cure Wounds for one person.
8th fight. Save people from torture room cultists. Tough fight, but found more potions. Short rest. Warlock regains spell slot. Fighter gets back Second Wind. Still going. No long rest yet. Players are really feeling it though. Wizard and Warlock mostly using cantrips. Awe. Poor babies. It's almost like their fighters who keep using their single melee weapon or something. Big deal. Encounters are unique a d different each time and challenging... Oh yeah. And I forgot. Wizard and Warlock keep finding spell scrolls so they CAN periodically mix it up and use more higher level spells.
How convenient that the casters happened to keep finding spell scrolls to keep being able to cast more than just cantrips. Again very situational, and only ever plausible to be decent design in a linear dungeon such as the bathhouse. However, if you think of the context of the argument that is attempted to be made, is in relation to BG3. A mostly non-linear adventure where you have no idea where a player is going to go, in what order, if they'll see it through or go into the swamp, then back to town and diverge into the goblin camp instead.
And it'd be very poor to make a fixed loot table that starts dropping scrolls all the time based on caster spell slot availability in a party. It'd essentially neglect spell slots and how they balance casters entirely once a player figure out scrolls will become readily available if they run out of spell slots. It promotes degenerate gameplay. Though in a video game, those who are likely to opt into "degenerate gameplay" for a lack of a better term, such as long resting after every fight when most spell slots are unused, only one character has lost like 20% of their health, then they'll always do that. Doesn't matter how much you move the goal post, they'll just move with it.
Basically what I'm saying is I don't think it's a good idea to compare tabletop with video game under design circumstances, in pretty much any case. Instead what Larian should do is design BG3 as if a tabletop adventure in terms of how sections are laid out (it mostly is on paper, but it's not how it plays out in reality for most), and as far as combat balancing goes, determine natural long rest points for each segment (such as the swamp being one segment), and make some supplies be available to sustain along the way. Though none of this will actually change anything in how long rest works in BG3, because again... Degenerate play will be done if it can be done, by those who would do it, always. That's fine, good for them.
I don't think there's much Larian can do for combat specifically besides that. I don't have a good silver bullet answer for how to fix long rest, my main irk with it is how it's disconnected from the narrative flow. I know that companions make somewhat easy-to-miss comments now indicating there's something of interest at camp, but I'd like that to be clearer. I think one step that could be made to make people spam long rest less, is to remove the fear of missing out on story content that happens in camp. Either move the companion dialogues from camp to just in-world as reflection dialogues (this is the exclamation point companions get in Larian games when they want to talk while wandering out and about) - Or rework the timeline to be stackable events based on acquisition (technical lingo on how things work backend, but basically there's a 'timeline' that helps guide how things should happen and in what order, but right now some content can be missed under certain circumstances)
Day & Night would have one cool effect to tap into for it as well, in that players can be trained to the idea that once the sun goes down, it's worth considering long resting. But unfortunately, the engine and how atmospheres work aren't really made for non-static lighting. At best Larian could make a night, and a day, to switch between. But gradually transitioning from one to another would result in pretty massive fps drops on some systems, cause hick-ups in how scripts execute because the transition is constantly ticking on a timer which takes up overhead space, etc. And it'd be jarring to just jump from night to day in an instant.
As for Descent into Avernus, I was referring to the Cult of the Dead Three lair. First fight meaning the Bath House. The entire example was based on several sessions my players and I did in that campaign. Maybe my memory's off. It's been months since we played that part, but they went through the entire bath house, dungeon west and dungeon east without a single long rest. They fought many cultists and took like only maybe 2 short rests. And they did just fine. Yet the encounters were challenging. Sure, by the end, they were like, "Man! Are we done yet? Our characters have gone through Hells," pun intended. But I didn't think the fights were boring trash mob fights. Each one had different scenarios and enemies and so forth. I'll put no censor on the fact that I genuinely find certain parts of DIA's first chapter to be incredibly bad. I homebrew it heavily as a result of that. Granted it has a bunch of cool ideas, it also has some bad ones like how to discover the way into the bathhouse (which can be rectified by a good DM, most things can). If you translated DIA chapter one into a single-player video game, I think it'd have a very poor reception in the starting bits, it's mostly saved in tabletop because everything is more fun with friends and a DM can steer it to work. XP To lvl 3 is very accurate on my opinions on DIA chapter 1 here, and not to my surprise their experience with Tomb of Horrors were close to my opinions on that adventure as well. Am I just remembering incorrectly? Am I truly making up "arguably unrealistic" scenarios and "self-constructed random examples"? Is that not how the adventure went for real and it's all just in my head? I mean, I was trying to use a legit, real-life experience so that it WASN'T that; not some fantasy scenario I created in my own head for argument's sake. I remember the PCs not being able to long rest for the entirety of the dungeon, and I was trying to say that it's possible to create such a thing in a video game without totally trash mobbing the whole thing.
I don't know. Whatever. Here I go again. Another wall of text trying to respond to someone and explain myself, and like you said, none of it's on topic anyway. So fine. Enough said. Thank you for your responses. No, I just don't think it helps the argument. It's sort of unclear whether it's based on real experiences, it also assumes that the reader has experience with DIA to be able to relate at all. If they don't, then it means basically nothing other than "source: trust me bro" which you know... Can swing both ways. It's a tangent topic stemming from a very fragile foundation, to begin with, so I'd be pressed to fault you tbh. And to be fair, I am heavily biased. I have some very strong opinions on D&D in a video game and how that synergy works with gamers, and tabletop players' expectations and views going into it. Maybe I'll make a thread on it someday because I think it's a pretty interesting discussion to be had. Preparing for family dinner now though. Also, I hope you read my first reply as me replying as just another guy, not as a moderator. It struck me as I was going to bed, but too sleepy to get back up that "Oh crap, maybe he feels I'm trying to shut him up!". Not the case😅 Just trying to help a topic that I strongly agree with to not get sticks in its wheels.
Last edited by The Composer; 29/06/22 11:21 AM.
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