Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Reaction system: ready an action / overwatch

Currently the reaction system is clunky with only attack of opportunities availables.

Dnd 5e had the concept of ready-ing an action to be able to use it as a reaction during the enemy turn.

You would tell your DM if X happens do this action at the cost of using your (bonus) action for the current turn.

It is hard to implement in a video game but one concept pretty much any tactical RPG has is for ranged dmg dealers (e.g. archer, wizard) an overwatch system (e.g. xcom)

Essentially you would position your archer / wizard use as an action "ready an action: shot an arrow or use that cantrip" and then the first enemy entering the line of sight of your character will trigger the attack as a reaction.

Simple & proven this classic tactical RPG staple (and dnd 5e compliant) will add dept to encounters (if half of the goblin camp enters in overwatch you would think twice before charging head on!) And it is bringing us middle of somewhere for a more diverse reaction system.

(Still would love more option beside overwatch: to ready an action for feathered fall and automatically trigger it if one of my companion get pushed)

+1 for a Ready Action system, and an Overwatch system is a decent enough implementation of it.

Clarification: You use your Action to Ready something, and then your Reaction if/when the trigger happens. RAW you can't ready a bonus action, though I imagine many games homebrew that you can.

If readying Feather Fall costs both your action and reaction, then it'll have been made much less powerful, to the point of almost uselessness. The whole point of Feather Fall is that it only takes your reaction and you don't have to attempt to cast it in advance. Having to spend an Action to precast it, just for the possibility you might need it in the next turn, is very punishing. It should simply be a toggle that activates whenever you or an ally gets pushed off a cliff (ideally with a prompt imo).

I hear you for defensive spell it would indeed make sense to have them costing a reaction only given you would use a spell slot etc..

My concern with prompt is that having multiple pop-ups might slow down the combat experience. (I believe it is an issue with solasta) it is also pententially an issue in MP.

Eh, it's not, for most people. It makes the combat more enjoyable in Solasta, which is why you'll hear the overwhelming majority of people who ACTUALLY played both games advocate for the same system coming in BG3.
And Solasta's implementation of the idea has room for improvement, too. So it's not like what they did is the most you could get from a prompted reaction system.

Not really? A turn-based tactical in multiplayer doesn't play particularly different. And it's an initiative-based queue system, meaning you'll still get one reaction at the time anyway.
Even imagining the fairly UNLIKELY scenario where two characters could be prompted to react to something during the same enemy action, where's the difficulty exactly? Each one of the player involved would get its own prompt. It's a self solving issue (and yeah, one could eventually be wasted if there's poor communication/collaboration between the two players, but that would be only their fault).

That aside, I have to admit that while there are issues to address with a decent reaction system, the current absence of Ready Action and Dodge is WAY more puzzling and hard to justify.
You can't even argue that "i't's not really needed for how BG3 works" when I felt its absence in several circumstances already.

1. Source?

2. This sounds an awful lot like, "fans of solasta like solasta!"

Well, duh.

I must say, I don't recall hearing much criticism of reactions in Solasta (not by people who played it). How ugly it is, how clunky grid based movement, how tripe and amatourish story is, how amatourish VO is, how easy it is - yes. Ruleset implementation, not really.

lol, I've heard plenty of complaints about the reactions in solasta.

Only if this reactions work like in Xcom, where they only work with natural attacks- in Bb3 in the form of cantrips. They trigger automatically and you can not interact with them in any capacity.

Most notably: overwatch: would become readied spell: you use a selected cantrip that is in your first slot [first pick at char creation]


- on the note of solasta reactions, they are really annoying and make combat disruptive by ruining my Emerson by constantly clicking yes / no. It should be automatic and without control on player part- because by logic, reactions are our impulses. You can’t control those, it’s done by our fight vs flight response.

I've heard plenty of voiced approvals for the reaction system in Solasta. Of the people who state they've actually played the game, I've seen fewer complaints than compliments, and most complaints focus on frequency of pop-ups for Sorcerer's Metamagic or Paladin's Smite, neither of which are actually reactions. People who complain about popups for Paladin's Smite overwhelming don't specify that they had a problem with the AoO prompt itself.

The source is our memories of posts, compiled from both this and Solasta's forum over the nearly 2 years that Solasta and BG3 have been out (in some form) for.

Sorry, but are you saying that we should only be able to ready a cantrip? And we don't actually get to choose which cantrip we're readying in real time? I strongly disagree. You should be able to ready any spell that has a casting time of 1 action. At the very least you should be able to choose which cantrip you're readying. Firebolt for damage? Ray of frost to reduce enemy speed?


This is getting a bit off topic, as the thread is supposedly focused on a Ready Action system, so I'll spoiler the following about reactions.

I've heard more complaints than approvals.

My source: same as yours, oddly enough.

I’m going to remind myself to make a poll here once I get home. A simple what would you prefer: ‘leave reaction system as is’ or ‘use a reaction system with prompts’. No additional fluff about programmable systems since that muddles the waters too much.

I wanted to make this exact poll on BG3 Reddit weeks ago, but apparently the mods there specifically disabled that functionality for that subreddit about 9 months ago. I still wonder why. I even messaged them about it to ask them to do it themselves for feedback gathering and never saw anything since.

I appreciate the effort. Unfortunately, I'm not convinced there's enough traffic here to get great results. Especially since--and this is just my opinion--I think posters of a certain mind-frame have been pushed away from these forums by some of the regulars here who are... I don't know how to say this nicely, I'm afraid, but basically... aggressive, demeaning, blowhard, bullyish, downright mean and unaccepting?

It would be nice to see a poll like that on reddit. I'm surprised they wouldn't let you do it.

1- Any place where both games are commonly discussed?

2- Yeah, I'm sure that people who didn't bother playing it don't have much to say about it.

I didn't.
For each person bitching that they don't like Solasta's reactions, there's twenty people saying they'd take the reaction system used in Solasta over the one used in BG3.

And if we are going to blame "biased samples", amusingly enough that's not happening "on the Solasta forum", either.
Here, on the Steam subforum for BG3, on the BG3 subreddit (just go and search for ANY of the dozens of threads started on the topic), on ResetEra, on RPG Codex, on NGI.

Wherever you look, for any whiner crying his eyes out that "pop-up are slooow and annoooooooying" there are dozens of variations of "Fuck the toggles".

You only have to be a registered user here to vote. There's plenty of people that hate lurk this place.

It would be better to do a vote on Reddit, but again, for whatever reasons the mods there specifically turned off that functionality in that specific subreddit about 9 months ago.

(Or was it 9 months ago? I tried figuring out exactly when it happened, but it looks like they quietly shut it off without announcing it. The last poll I could find was actually one I made from over a year ago, which had about 2.3k participants. https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldursGat...d_larian_prioritize_for_early_access_in/)

Exactly. Overwatch for a caster should be in form of a cantrip. To be honest I first saw it for my archer. I couldn't understand why they couldn't do an attack of opportunity if they hadn't use their action. So the idea came for there.

I don't want to turn the thread into another solasta vs. BG3. The system should be streamline and intuitive and as close to rules as possible. Neither games are satisfying these requirements.

A large amount of popup would be adverse to player experience and turn BG3 into a niche dnd game. It needs to be intuitive and easy to jump in. Too many pop-ups would ruin that. Imo it should be a simple click during your turn with no interruption during the enemies turn. Hence the overwatch idea. For more complex action to ready they should either be programmed in or not there for the flow and path of the game to be as fluid a possible.

I don't find reactions with a confirmation window like in Solasta that exciting, even if the point behind it is to skip attackers so that the second etc. attacker suffers the reaction. Nevertheless, I tend to prefer a system like Wartales, where the reaction is triggered by the first opponent. At least for the movement based reactions. These overwatch animations should only be shown during the reaction setup.

Good examples: Spear Wall & "Snipe" at 15:07 - 16:00 min.





Bad example: Just move out of the two handed fighter aoe range (Hit'N'Run style) 2:17 - 3:12 min. Such an implementation should be avoided.



It is noticeable that both Solasta and Wartales use cells for movement and tactical gameplay in general and this may have to be implemented differently for the BG 3 reaction system. I dont know. I dream of a good implementation like: https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Chain_Contingency (This is just for defense.)

I agree lotus Noctus. I ll push the logic even further: my view is that Larian would choose fluidity/ease of access over perfect implementation because a. Wider audience and b. One thing less to implement.

As such if we want to have more reaction and more dnd 5e implementation we need to find things that are not requiring a large effort from a non dnd player and that would not alter the combat flow. Overwatch tick these boxes. I just wish we could find something for defensive spell (e.g. shield or silence)

There's no reason why an Overwatch-like ability should be restricted to cantrips. If you have the ability to take a specific action to set up Overwatch, then you should be able to precast leveled spells too. Of course, in 5e, Ready-ing a Spell (even a cantrip) requires you to spend concentration on that spell until it is unleashed, making such an action less likely since you'd lose concentration on any other concentration spell you had up.

If Larian wanted to implement Ready Spell such that readying cantrips didn't require concentration, but leveled spells did because they are more magically complex, I wouldn't be opposed.