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.
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.
