Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Reactions like Solasta!

Does it?
Because it doesn't really read like it.
In fact it seems to make my case that it would be a tedious mess.

For a start, as I assumed in my previous reply, we are already moving away from a system where you set just the target and going into the territory of scripting "conditions".
Which takes a lot of time, tedious UI juggling and pre-planning.

That aside, it's also a narrative that is moving under the assumption that things will indeed go as the player planned. Which is NOT a given on multiple levels.

First of all... Why the hell would you only plan counterspell VS a single caster if there are 2 of them ?
Maybe I could just target both of them and tell the game to trigger the reaction against lvl 3+ spells ?
(because for this specific spells its something we should be able to custom. At least we do it once in the variation window then the game keep our preferences in mind so I don't have anything to change but the targets during all my playthrough)

But maybe one of them is a boss ? If the boss is attacking first I'll target both. If not I think I'll only target the boss... Hard choice !
What would you do if the minion is casting a lightning arrows first ? yes ? no ? You should probably have clicked no because the boss is now casting a fireball... Hopefully I've only chosen to target the boss !

Giving specific exemples to make your point more valuable doesn't make sense.
We all know that pops up give you more control. But in the end I don't care of having FULL control because it doesn't mean that you are bound to make the best choices.

I just want to have fun with my class features/spells and I had more fun casting one more things during my turn in BG3 than I ever have when I clicked "yes" in Solasta.

For the third time: THIS IS NOT JUST A TARGET SELECTION ANYMORE, this becomes a system of "conditional" scripting. Which (AS I ALREADY POINTED) is more effective* but also exponentially more slow and complex to set up.


*also, arguably STILL not as effective as having just direct control over every reaction in several scenarios.

Are you guys genuinely failing to notice that all these "solutions" are significantly worse than the "problem" they are trying to address?

Your "clever trick" to avoid clicking on two or three confirmations prompts in one turn basically involves taking minutes predicting and planning an entirely hypothetical scenario and then setting a script for it.
Sometime even setting MULTIPLE possible reactions per character.

And then crossing fingers because things could still turn out to be very different.

To Tuco's point, if you select both spellcasters, but one uses Magic Missile while the other uses Fireball, if you do presets, and the Magic Missile mage goes first, you waste Counterspell on Magic Missile. Then the Fireball mage sends his Fireball at you. You have to make sure that you set it not only to trigger on the Leader but also on certain spells. You have to have very specific presets.

Another example. You set your Counterspell to Level 3 or higher spells and you target 2 Mages and 1 Cleric. The cleric goes first and casts Beacon of Hope. You Counterspell it. Mage 2 goes and casts Fireball. Mage 3 goes and casts Fireball. You COULD have stopped at least 1 of the 2 Fireballs, but you actually stopped the Beacon of Hope spell because you chose Level 3 or higher spells, 2 Mages and 1 Cleric.

But, what if the Cleric actually cast a spell that you did want to block, like Mass Healing Word to heal up a bunch of his allies near him? Well, then you'd still want to make sure you had him included in your list of enemies. You wouldn't want to just have the mages. You'd want to stop that healing.

The point is, the presets might require too many nuances to make them effective. That's the flaw with the system. For Counterspell, you'd have to probably pick the select spells you'd want to actually counter. You wouldn't want to counter Beacon of Hope or Major Image, but you'd want to counter Melf's Minute Meteors, and Fireball, and Lightning Bolt, and maybe Pulse Wave, and... The list would just go on and on.

Yeah. I'm leaning towards the "Reactions" Button suggestion I made a few posts up. Like RtwP, which would make the RtwP folks happy, you'd treat Reactions like as if you are playing one of the older BG games. See a spellcaster casting a spell? Hit the "Reactions" Button and then select your Reaction. You control the pause.

Again, some would have to auto-pause, like AOO. I don't know how anyone could react fast enough to hit the "Reactions" button before an enemy fled from melee without Disengage. Either way, the "Reactions" Button would keep players on their toes, and it would leave it up to you to decide whether you want to stop the flow of combat to trigger a Reaction.

Seriously don't make me laugh.... what is so complicated and takes so many time ?

Everything is toggled ON by default, you just have to remove level 1 and 2 spells (and 0, I forget them on the picture) ONCE then the game keeps your preferences in mind.
Next time you'll click on counterspell you'll just check and click "manual" target to select them.

I'd say it's more intuitive than complicated...




I agree GM.
IF the cleric doesn't do this.
IF the first mages does this.
IF the cleric is the first one in the initiative order.
IF the second mage is ...

You don't know what the next ennemy is going to do and what's gonna happen in a system or another...
Yes, you'll have more control over time with pops-up but it doesn't prevent you at all to make mistakes. It doesn't matter in the end. You don't HAVE to make THE BEST reactions choices to enjoy and to beat Solasta.

Except your implementation doesn't account for:
Also, you wouldn't want to have the same preferences every combat, let alone every turn. There might be only 1 enemy caster in which case you'd want to counterspell any spell above level 1. Or there might be multiple enemy casters, so you only want to counterspell spells of level 3+. Or there might be an ogre who would deal a lot of damage, so you'd want to save your reaction to Shield a hit coming your way, so maybe you'd turn off Counterspell. Even if the enemies don't change, the # of slots you have changes and thus so would your strategy. So even if the game saves your preferences, you'd still constantly be making changes.

Edit: It's not about making the "best" decisions. It's about having Full Control over your characters, also considering time required to give a certain level of control.

I guess it is because ALL your exemples (in which you always know what's coming next) attempt to prove that you could make a better choices with pos-up
You'd probably have to change a few things at every combats, obviously (mostly targets). But don't forget that most of the examples given in the previous pages are all about the wizards and eventually the sorcerer...

Stuff like this is why my suggestion a few pages back allows you to automate away prompts for situations in which you wouldn't want to use the reaction anyway, while still prompting you in more nuanced situations in which you would want to consider using the reaction. And it also allows for full automation for people who don't really want to put much thought into things, and the option to quickly switch into or remove full automation without having to mess with your custom settings every single time.

https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=821917#Post821917

It's literally just Solasta system, but customizable. The game would already have to check for conditions to trigger the reactions to begin with (and Solasta itself won't actually ask you for reactions in situations where said reaction won't make any difference at all, like how it won't prompt you for Shield if an enemy already rolled too low for an attack to hit to begin with, or if an enemy rolls too high for Shield to work - incidentally, even BG3 doesn't check for contextual conditions, already immediately blowing Bardic/Combat Inspiration die whether they would have mattered or not). All my suggestion would do is to give the option to let people disable prompts for specific conditions or automate everything if they wish.

The correct approach to reactions shouldn't be to automate the system as much as possible, it should focus on retaining strategic choice first and then automate away redundant situations afterwards.

It's true that you don't *know* what's coming next, but you can certainly guess. And since you'll already have information about at least one enemy did (because they're currently prompting a reaction pop-up from you), you can make a more informed choice than you could on your turn. Obviously you can still make a mistake or fail a gamble; you could not use your reaction because you think the next enemy will cast fireball, but then they cast a cantrip. But this decision process is more on the player and less on the whims of Larian AI, again because you have more information at the time of decision.

Well, here's a different one for you.

Let's say you've given someone Combat Inspiration: AC increase. They're being threatened by a Minotaur who has a weapon that can potentially do 2d6 damage + 1d6 fire damage if the attack lands, and a goblin with a dagger that does a measly 1d4 damage. But the goblin goes first in initiative. A simple toggle system isn't feasibly going to differentiate between the two attacks. In order to automate this in a way that the Combat Inspiration die would be saved for the Minotaur's attack instead, you'd have to design a system that would differentiate between possible incoming damage, and set a condition to not automatically use the Combat Inspiration if an incoming attack will inflict less damage than whatever number you have set.

In any case, a simple pop up system is far easier to program if you want to retain precise player control over how the reaction is used, and something to automate said pop-up should come into existence afterwards.

But we cannot forget that the crux of the matter is that we're all trying to come up with solutions for a problem that is only subjective to begin with. And how much effort does a programmer really want to put into something like this? The Solasta devs evidently cared a lot to implement reactions correctly, but haven't figured out customizable conditional automation (as far as we're aware, I have enough trust in them to believe that they might be working on something like that after they release the remaining classes in a few months from now). But who even knows if it's even a priority or even possible in regards to BG3 at this point?

I had something else in mind that would better stick to what I'm thinking about for a few days : "to have more control over your reactions, you're able to select your targets".

Rather than "giving the character" a on/off toggle on your hotbar, it gives him an activable icon he can also toggle on/off (right click to toggle, left click to activate).
When he left click the new available reaction skills on his hotbar, it opens the variation window in which he can select "manual target" or "auto target".
=> You give your die just as now but rather than only being able to turn your toggles ON/OFF, you can manually select the targets that will trigger them.

The one thing that bothers me slightly about your solution, even if it is somewhat elegant, is that the ability to set specific targets for activation basically pushes it into the realm of metagame knowledge. I mean, my proposed solution would kind of do that too, but there's a slight difference between generalized conditions that would trigger equally for any enemy able to meet said conditions, and outright targeted reactions.

But at the end of the day, it's only a minor complaint, so eh. Still better than whatever the hell we have right now.

So. No one likes my Reaction Button suggestion?

Hmm... Oh well.

I don't like particularly systems that require timing in a turn-based system, in general, but I could see something of that type work as an exception with SOME SPECIFIC skills, like Cutting words, which has the problem of being basically impossible to use with the ordinary pop-up system, since practically any action could trigger one.
Basically it's a different type of "reaction" that I would call an "interrupt", as it can be called practically at any time. Like an "instant" in Magic the Gathering.

I wouldn't want this system for AoO, Counterspell, Hellish Rebuke, and all the more common, more typical situational reactions.

Question for DnD players : can you use combat maneuvers with your AOO when the PHB say "When you hit a creature with a weapon attack,...." ?
E.G I can AOO an ennemy, can I also spend a superiority die for it to become a "disarming attacks" ?

According to this they can ...
(The idea with polearm seems especialy funny )

Why could they not ? It says "When you hit a creature with a weapon attack", not "when you use the Attack action". So it does not have to be during your turn. It could apply to an Opportunity Attack.

In the same spirit, the Rogue's Sneak Attack say "once per turn", not "once during your turn". So it does not have to be during your turn. It could apply to an Opportunity Attack.

So, in link with the topic of the thread, if you hit an enemy with a Opportunity Attack, you would want the game to ask you "do you want to use a Maneuver/your Sneak Attack" ?
(Actually, in the case of Sneak Attack the answer would always be yes, since you can do only one Opportunity Attack per round and you get one Sneak Attack per turn, there is no point saving your Sneak Attack for the next Opportunity Attack).

I think it would be very cool to be able to choose some "variations" for our AOO depending our classes/subclasses (sneak attack, smite, maybe a maneuver or two...) but I wouldn't mind at all if everything written in the PHB is not a choice.
That said, I wouldn't go so far as to say that I would want the game to "ask me" anything. Still thinking about it

Thx for your answer, and thx @rag' !

The more I think about it, the more I think it should be NOT a pop-up but the game pausing and pulling up a UI panel with all your available Reactions only. So, if an enemy triggers AOO, the game pauses and the UI only shows Melee attack as an option of what you can do. If you're a rogue who hasn't used Sneak Attack, the Sneak Attack button appears as well, giving you the option to use it.

But maybe you wouldn't want to Sneak Attack because the enemy only has 5 HP. That's why it pops up as an option and it's not automatic.

It would work the same for Battlemaster. AOO triggers. Game pauses. Melee attack and all Battlemaster maneuvers pop up on the UI.

For paladin, same thing except Smite options.

So no message popups. Just game pauses and UI presents your options.