I really wasn't sure about opening this thread for many reasons. Probably it doesn't really have much to do with BG3. It can sound a little pedantic. I can make many mistakes because, despite being game design a little passion of mine, I'm not that good. In the end I decided to do it anyways, because I keep seeing people referring to BG3 or 5e in general as a dumbing down, as a streamline, as ruining the world coherence, and I think that looking the things from a different perspective would help understand others positions.
Now, what are rules? Rules can mean many things, but the easiest way to see a game rules is to see them as the laws that makes the world work, not differently from our laws of physics. You have a rule for fall damage, you have a rule for how far you can push someone, you have a rule for what characterize a set of people, and if you put all these little rules side by side, you create a self-consistent world where every rule interact with eachother like a perfect swiss watch. This is amazing, this is cool, but this is not the only thing a rule can do, or be.
There are rules that don't exists for the world itself, but for the players alone. You can insert yourself in this world however you want, but if your only goal is to build a tavern and be a beerkeeper without ever engaging with the story the master is trying to offer you, maybe there is an issue. A rule comes to my mind, from Dungeon World: "Whenever you completely fail a check, you gain 1 experience point". Seems silly, but to me this is an amazing and elegant rule like fews. It's a short sentence that have nothing to do with the world, but leads the player into playing the game. Not only that, it leads into playing the game the way it has been designed to be played. The game is not telling you "You are an adventurer", but the rule is there to make you move, to try, to fail and grow. It makes you an adventurer. And what about min-maxers? Well, they will be cool, always succeeding, and will never gain extra experience losing progress and the whole party will end up on even ground in a way or another. Just for context, if I remember correctly, in Dungeon world you level up with 5 + your level experience points, so 1 is really noticeable.
But if we accept that a rule is not only a law of physics, but it can also be designed with the intention of changing the way we play the game, what else can we do? What if we want to create a rule that helps us telling a story rather than govering a world? Like a good John Woo movie. The characters are shooting like there is no tomorrow, literal showers of bullets flying from a single 15 clip mag, and suddendly, when it's the most important moment, the character have no ammos anymore. Sure, we can count ammos and if they are over in the most important moment it creates a interesting situation... or we can cheat. What if the ammos are virtually infinite and are over only when the story says so? What if our rule says that only when you fail completely a check you discover that your quiver is empty and, in the heat of the battle, you lost count of your arrows? Yeah, I know, the world is collapsing, it doesn't make sense anymore maybe, but the storytelling is growing. But the arrows has not been removed because "nowdays players can't even count arrows, they are so dumb", but because they are not needed for the storytelling. (Yeah, this is another rule of dungeon world)
We can go further, the master is not an arbiter anymore, is a storyteller. His job is not to move pawns but to create emotions and to make every check counts. Failing is not "you failed" anymore. Sure, a good master were always been able to do so without rules enforcing his role, as a good player doesn't need to be made into an adventurer, but not every master is a good master, not everyone really understands the powers they have in their hands and how to use them, or that they can change the very world on their whim. A ranger is studying the traces of a creature, the party knows they are after an hydra, but he fails, hard. The master can use the rule "Give a bad news" and inform them that they were ill informed, they weren't after an hydra because those traces are of a Fire Hydra! A fire hydra never even existed in the whole world, and surely it didn't exists before that check, but a rule lead the master to turn the most common check into a huge point that will change the players experience.
What does this all have to do with D&D and BG3?
I'm not really sure about this, but to me D&D hasn't and isn't dumbing down his rules, but it's just going into a different direction, taking away some rules that don't help the narration, to make the latter shine more. The world means less and the story means more. It's not about balance or coherence, but just the emotions you can create in said moments. And this is not bad, but just different. It's something you can have a preference towards or not. Maybe I'm just wrong and under Jeremy Crawford direction the game will be back to be a hard and grindy dungeon crawler where numbers are the only truth, and I'm sure it will be amazing anyways, just not something I will be personally interested into playing because I prefer systems that double down in the storytelling and puts the rest to the side.
I thinks that Larian is doing this, creating rules that lead the players into playing, removing rules that don't help nor the story nor the engagement, or working out things verticalized on the kind of story they want to tell. Maybe they miss-step somewhare, but not everything we don't like is "dumbing down" or bad. I hope I haven't said too much wrong things and please don't destroy me. <3
