Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback "Concentration"

Can someone please explain "concentration" reasoning to me? Besides "game balance" BS. The whole concept of it is just dumb. Let's look at the definition of the word: "the action or power of focusing one's attention or mental effort."

So HOw am I actually "focusing" on my spell if I can still move around, attack, or even cast other spells? I can literally turn my back to the spell I am supposed to be "concentrating" on?? LOL. HOW is any of this actually concentrating? Yes I know it's partially done for "game balance". Fine. I understand that. But there's other ways of doing that. There's got to be. This whole "concentration" is dumb. And yes I also know it's a D&D thing not a Lrian thing. Fine, but that hasn't stopped Larian from changing things with this game before so why should it make any difference?

IMO they need to just do away with the whole concentration thing to begin with. either that or make a lot of spells basically never used by actually making you concentrate and not do anything else like you're supposed to by definition.

As you said, Concentration is not Larian's invention, but already in the D&D 5e rules. Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense, because otherwise, spellcasters might be a little bit overpowered: without concentration, a wizard would be able to cast extremely powerful spell combos and the opponent would not stand the slightest chance (and the fight would be quite boring, and quite short)

I found this on Roll20.net regarding Concentration:

It's bad and unbalance for a video game In Table top it's good and it makes senese because it speeds up combat and makes arbitrary balance, that's not balance at all but it works well enough and is something that can remove buffing in a quick and easy way for people to understand and do balancing around.


In the end it just translates to video gaming in a bad way and leaves you with a bunch of spells that never or in best case are rarely used and a bunch of others that are OP as fuck and always get abused.

In a video game format you have lots of better ways to stop and fix all those problems concentration is trying to fix as you are not limited by human conditions.

But what can you do if you make changes 5e "purists" will get upset and say it's not 5e anymore so you have to deal with that crowd and they don't really care if it would make for a better video game. This kinds of things always happen with table top ports where devs port rules just because they are rules.

If you need to be looking at something and not moving and arresting all other action of all sorts in order to concentrate on something, then I suspect you do not get much done in your day to day life. Are you familiar with the concept of multi-tasking?

Concentration is an aspect of magical maintenance; you are mentally maintaining the weave of a spell after casting it; many spells, if not maintained in this manner will simply dissipate the moment the spell is not being actively held in place by the caster - the weave in the area smooths itself out naturally, if you will. Imagine that you're holding two small swatches of fabric folded against each other; as long as they're tightly pinched together, something useful happens. You put them in place and pressed them together, and pinched them tight with your fingers - if you just set them down and let them go, however, they will slip apart and straighten out, and the effect will end. Instead, you have to hold pressure on them to keep them together. You can do this easily enough. You can also walk around your house, put the laundry on, have a snack, and cast a few other spells with your other hand while you're doing this, none of which interrupts your ability to hold that pinch in the weave together. Large shocks, sudden pain and other interrupting effects may make you lose your grip on that pinch of cloth momentarily, and once they slip apart you can't clutch them back again, but apart from major direct interruptions, you're in no danger of losing them.

Concentration is perfectly sensible mechanic that tracks in universe as well as systematically - granted some spells should not be concentration when they are, and other should be when they aren't; the system isn't perfect, but in general the concentration mechanic exists for a valid reason and does its job. In Larian's game, however, they've bombarded players with situations that force many, many more concentration checks than should normally come into play, and also created unavoidable condition infliction that automatically breaks your concentration - as opposed to a normal game of D&D where you might make one, maybe two concentration checks between one turn and the next, IF you're actively being harried. In BG3 you'll often have to make several successive concentration checks in a row, or just get handed an auto-fail that had no chance of not breaking your concentration automatically... The game is tailored strongly to make people hate the concentration mechanic and think that it's bad, because it's extremely difficult and often impossible to maintain your concentration for any useful amount of turns at all.

That's not a problem if you know how to do it. Never had problem with concentration as a way to break buffs, keeping up concentration is easy.

The problem is how it makes lots of concentration spells bad apart from edge cases because you just can't use them without concentration slot if you will and it's just not worth it.
(some classes are especially plagued by concentration spells)

Second problem is in a video game format you do not have active DM that can change things on the fly, to make those edge cases for you. In a video game you always gonna use what works most of the time.

It's like having that special hammer for that off one chance that you will need it but you never do. So you end up draging that hammer with you through entire game all along looking at it, hoping to use it! But that time just never comes.

As i said it works in table top in a video game we just have better ways of doing the same thing.

What is a better way? Without Concentration, you could enable some very busted combos from casters. Many people already argue casters are already overpowered even WITH Concentration, so to imagine a system without this is strange to me.

It makes perfect sense for a spell like, for example, Hold Person to actively require mental focus and effort to sustain.

It would be great if Larian's version of Prone didn't mean auto-loss of Concentration and enemies didn't hurl 3d8 bombs every other turn.

You just don't need to have uniform rule for all spells in video game you can balance them on case by case bases because everything is handled behind the wall by cpu automatically and it deosn't bother players in anyway shape or form like you would in table top with gazillion charts and checks... anyway it's fine for what it is, some spell will just see little or no use because of it, no biggy. Still planty left that good and are broken op even with Concentration.:)

It did notice the concentration being lost very quickly and sometimes without understanding why but I didn't pay more attention to it (until now).
After a little bit of research on this forum (in addition to what's been said here), I've seen some mentions of things that break concentration but shouldn't : prone, abnormal amount of surface effects and magical arrows (even when missing with Nat 1 and they are given to all sorts of NPCs which is apparently uncommon?).

Is there a proper thread that has made the suggestion that I could find?
I've seen this one : https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=773389
But I wonder if Larian listens to threads with titles like "Concentration Loss Jackassery" 😶
(I hope, because they are some good points there, but I'm not sure they would?)

I like concentration, mostly as it limits buff stacking that I felt have been a bane of D&D for a long time - by limiting some spells to one per cast we avoid that.

As Niara said, BG3 is particularly unfriendly to concentration spells, to the point that I rarely opt to use the defensive ones, or accept that they will likely disappear before the end of the turn, as NPC will target the caster on mass with unavoidable granades and surfaces.

Solasta had quite an OP homebrewed feat that would prevent concentration rolls from if caster took less then 10 damage. I feel BG3 would benefit of something like that, considering how common low unavoidable damage is.

As an incidental aside, the concentration loss on Prone is part of a bigger issue with the condition, that impacts a number of other things as well. It happens because 'Prone', the condition, inflicts 'unconscious' the condition as part of its in-built effect, and 'unconscious' carries 'incapacitated', which automatically ends concentration, no save. This is terrible for concentration, but it's bad for a number of other things too - folks may have noticed that slipping or falling prone at any point during their turn causes them to lose their entire turn immediately, regardless of what they were doing or what actions they had yet to take; this is why. Prone being coupled with unconscious like this also means that hits on prone characters auto-crit when they shouldn't.

This has been the case since the beginning of Ea, more or less, and no amount of reporting of the issues has yet resulted in a change or a fix.

Well, that's upsetting 😕 I hope it's just because this is EA, so they postponed that for the polishing phase 🤞?

I agree with everyone who has said that concentration is fine in principle, but poorly implemented in BG3 in practice. I really hope addressing the unnecessary number of factors that prematurely break concentration will be addressed as part of tuning and tweaking over the next eight months.

It’s true that even with an excellently realised concentration mechanic, the fact that each character can only maintain one concentration spell at a time is going to mean that there are certain spells that are unlikely to ever be selected by gamers whose priority is to optimise combat effectiveness every playthrough. But I don’t really see that as a problem. There are still plenty of cool spells for those players to use, and personally I quite like picking some of the more situational, weird or just weak spells that might fit the RP for my current character and trying to make them work.

Removing or tweaking concentration from 5e would have a profound impact on how everything works. As we see it right now with Larian's 'small' changes.

Some people might not like it, but its an integral part of the game balance of this edition and it prevents all those utterly annoying buffing/debuffing cycles that made the game incredibly complex in previous editions (or see the current Pathfinder games). But it goes beyond just casting several spells. The whole AC mechanic is based around certain max values - if you can now easily stack buffs you break the whole balance for attacks vs AC. Not to mention that many class features are balanced around these core principles.

Larian's biggest problem with the game design of BG3 is that they far too often only see the small thing that disturbs them not paying attention to what their tweaks do for the game as a whole. Their homebrew already severely shifted the balance of the game - removing concentration would make it a completely new D&D system/edition.

I believe that, as of patch 9, damaging surfaces and clouds trigger a saving throw. Succeeding on the throw halves the damage; I suggest having no damage at all on a succesful save. That would alleviate some of the pressure on concentration spells.

People are just used to it and see it as part of the rules so it becomes fine... Not to mention anyone can homebrew whatever they want in their table top game so it's whatever i seen people make rings, change spells and all sorts of stuff hehe.

There is a difference between what you can homebrew and what you should.

Here a simple example:
Crossbow Expert:
If you ignore the rule for needing a free hand to be able to shoot multiple times you actually give the player the option to wield a crossbow and a shield, so not only do you already have one of the most potent dealer combat styles that actually can deal damage up to 120 feet, but also it gets an +2 AC compared to two-weapon styles/great weapon, this combined with an dexterity build (at level 4 with a variant human you can have dex 16 with studded leather and shield for 2 attacks with sharpshooter and crossbow expert while having an ac of 17). Its a small tweak that many do because they think its unconsequential and cool to fullfil player fantasy (for example the youtube channel Dungon Dudes, who also more than ironically complain that crossbow expert is already overpowered and dominates the meta).


Feel free to do your homebrew, but I'm for sure utterly against removing concentration in 5e without a complete rules overhaul.

Ouch! I had a variation of it in my recent playthrough that annoyed me so much I reported it over to Larian:

My Sorcerer and Pal had joined turn and a troll was right after them. Sorcerer casted ice cantrip on troll and blood under him turned to ice. Pal and troll both slipped. Even though I didn’t even touch my Pal his turn was skipped, as he was part of the joined turn, while troll got up, crit the pal and killed him. Good times.

Being able to have some spells going at the same time would be great. Like Barkskin and Flame blade. I see no reason they made it so you can't. You get one or the other. It kinda makes them (and a lot of other spells that require concentration) a bit pointless. I can cast one of them and then say "oh well, screw the rest of my spells. They require concentration so I'm basically done". Great idea. Yes I DO understand "game balance". You're limited to casting ONE spell per round (unless you're a sorcerer) AND you only get so many spells per day. So right there you are limited to begin with. Why hamstring casters even more? I'm not asking to turn spell casters into gods. I just find it very annoying for so many spells to be "concentration" based so you can't cast them. You choose ONE concentration spell and then that's it. You're done. Even the simple cantrip Guidance is concentration based. Lol. Why? Again, being able to cast Barkskin AND Flame Blade seems like a normal thing to do but you can't do it. Just one example. Mage Armor isn't concentration so why is Barkskin? I'm not trying to bash Larian on this one because I know it's a D&D thing and not them, but like I said before, Larian has made it's own rules adjustments to this game before so why not something with concentration as well?

welcome to 5e where it's better to run around naked and use scroll like mage armor or have others cast it on you than to have armor and cast Barkskin on it. yep that makes sense, but hey it's fantasy right so it's all amde up anyway.:)

All you need is dex +2 so pretty much anything that's not dumping dex will have no use for it apart from maybe on pets and wild shapes but no way that is worth concentration slot.
The wrost thing is that you lose concentration on any spell you have up even if the new spell that uses concentration didn't do anything at all.

Seconded.

Stacking buff is not fun. At some point in the game where you have 10+ possible combination of buffs it becoming a burden. Example already exist, almost everyone who plays both Pathfinder game does not like it, somebody even make a mod to automate the process.

For me, it make Constitution matter. At this point, if not for maintaining concentration, Con is more or less, a dump stat. Why should I put point in Con if I just can focus on Dex or Wis or Str?