Originally Posted by Zentu
This is a tough road to walk. How do you make a game easy enough for causal play and tough enough for the purists?

Then the whole balance issue which is a mess because of the desire to use as much DnD as you can. DnD is designed around the use of an active GM, someone that can tweak things on the fly and make snap decisions with an unforeseen player action could rerail everything. With a CRPG there is simply no way to do this short of putting limits on player actions.

While, as a DnD old school fan boy purist, there is much I would like to see changed, on the whole I think Larian did a good job of walking the line and making the game accessible to all levels of skill and interest.

Respectfully disagree...somewhat. I think Larian's encounter design and world design is probably the best I've seen in a CRPG to date. But 5e at base in tabletop was the first dnd edition where I could design a dungeon/encounter without knowing what my player would bring and not have to worry about players feeling OP or UP. Not sure if you were on the forums back then but you might have seen the 3.5 tier list and guides on balancing parties and having players try to pick classes within a certain tier range. I think it was JaronK who did that tier analysis iirc.

Anyways in my experience it's not the OP stuff that is the issue, but the UP stuff. I've been frustrated in my SP game to the point of restarting because my Tav was focused on control and healing and it was frustratingly weak. In 2 separate multiplayer games I've had players frustrated because they felt weak/useless compared to other party members or were frustrated with their spells not doing much.

To use a skyrim example. Stealth archery is overpowered, but nobody complains about it. They just don't use it. People DO complain about how bad destruction and magic is, because normal difficulty a pure caster can become painfully difficult and frustrating in mid to lategame if you don't enchant to lower spell costs...