Larian Studios Forums Divinity General Discussion Mechanics are the most important part to get right.

One of the succeses of the refined D&D class system is that many distinct mechanics and spells are good, so players can choose what is fun and not google "best build" (although I guess you can rob yourself of fun if you really want to). A skill system that is too open can remove variability and diversity which makes campaigns feel repetitive and boring. So the class design needs to have some way of keeping characters distinct and allowing many different pathways to be effective.

Though one of its biggest issues is that there's quite a lot of not as good stuff. Then you add on limitations to such things to promote "Different pathways" that just further pushes people towards good stuff.

In fact, it's a sentiment that's been brought up a number of times on these forums. Especially in relation to party size. Whereby things like spell selection pushes them towards the few good spells and there's not enough freedom to pick up or use more niche spells that might be fun.

I.e. Why would a Sorcerer who only gets 3 level 3 spell slots pick things like Daylight, Gaseous Form or Hypnotic Pattern when things like Fireball, Counterspell, Lightning Bolt and Haste exist?

This also ends up being true for classes and subclasses. Many people dunk on Rogue outside of Thief multiclass just for Fast Hands. Why would anyone play a Monk that isn't Open Hand? Why ever play Ranger when Paladin and Fighter (And Sword Bard) exist?

This isn't unique to BG3 either. Thoughout all editions of D&D there's been a constant struggle with class balance, especially in regards to classes like Rogue and Ranger and the absolute stack that is Fighter and their excess of bonuses (Where at times Fighters even pushed out casters because why play a caster and have to suffer through dogwater early game when even your peak is eclipsed by the Fighter swinging his Greatsword 20 times a turn infinite times per day?) and of course scenarios when magic is just utterly bonkers and a single high level caster just wins every encounter alone.

Balance disparities between classes can be a major issue. Both leading to "Obvious Best Builds" but also leading to the easy way out... The dreaded "Homogenization" band-aid. Where classes lose their uniqueness (Thus players their build choice) so they all have the same base kit and thus function around the same power.

The most clear example of this would be the Dragon Age series. Dragon Age: Origins had diverse builds and party compositions that really mattered... Though the result was that Mages are OP. By far. Not only have way more options than Rogue or Warrior but vastly more power to boot. Fastforward to Dragon Age: Wokeguard and classes don't matter, the only difference is what gimmick your ranged attack uses (With a side of resource generation disparity) and party composition doesn't matter because everyone does the same thing regadless of class. Everything is homogenized into pure nothingburgers.


At the end of the day it's all about providing many options, but having sufficient limitations.

The more options you have, the more diversity you can have.

While the limitations keeps things in check so you can't eat your cake and have it too.

This is the difference between "Good systems" and "Bad systems". A bad system won't have enough options or limitations so builds all end up very samey, either due to lack of choice (Not enough options) or a lack of restriction (Not enough limitation).

It's here that the aspects of "Class" system present itself. A "Class" system inherently has limitations through you only accessing what a class is pre-prepared to obtain. The cost is the lack of options, which can be mitigated by making a LOT of classes and/or having multiclass functionality, but still persists.

It's also where the ability for a "Classless" system to fail is shown. With no inherent limitations, these instead need to be specifically designed and implemented to make it succeed, else it becomes "Master-of-all-trades". But of course the benefit of proper design is unparalleled options.

I think that is mostly a balancing issue, which is realistically not 100% solvable. Having classes that are exactly even in terms of how good they are is near impossible without them beeing the same. So some things will always be stronger than others and therefore will result into more optimal builds. However i do agree, that the discrepancy of the power levels between different builds should not go so far that you as a player feel stupid for not picking the other class, because it is outright better in every aspect. Everything should have its strengths and weaknessess.


I don't think any developer intends to make a game with different schools or classes just so every player resorts to the same 4 classes because the other 10 feel so weak, that it is really difficult to play through. But to be honest i have never experienced a game, where a class was so bad that you had a hard time finishing the game with it.

I also want to go against the notion of optimizing as a "disease". I for one love to optimize around certain mechanics/abilities/spells and see how good i can make it and yes i even google euqip abilities and so on beforehand. For me the fun lies in crafting the build and see how it plays out in game and once i did a playthrough with that build, i try another one and so on. Perhapts its more the notion that a player knows that they are playing a suboptimal build, that feels particularly bad.

The idea that Larian could manage a system in which there is more variance than in D&D5 is very funny to me.

Of course everyone can easily manage a game that allows millions or billions or whatever more legal builds. But the number of possible builds is not really interesting. Whats interesting is what real, actually competitive builds are there. I would call these real builds "powergamer builds" because they are truely powerful options that a powergamer would actually chose. While other types of players may have all kinds of whacky reasons to play stuff, even really weak builds.

BG3 had like 20+ valid powergamer builds. Thats clearly a record.

Most games have like 3-5 valid powergamger builds, with every other combo clearly underpowered by comparison.

So if Larian manages a game with 8 valid powergamer builds, I would already be impressed and happy.



But I am frankly more interested in a different aspect. Will the game be fun to play throughout ?

Many of these BG3 powerbuilds take ages to unlock. Many have lots of empty levels before you get all the abilities, or it takes a long time until you have all the gear needed.

Additionally we still see in D&D5 that spellcasters are much more fun, have much more options, than non-spellcasters. Not as strongly as with previous editions, but its still very much there.

My ideal here is to have a very interactive, dynamic system that gives you lots of options what to do, and makes choosing the right option a nontrivial problem, and where paying a warrior is just as interesting as playing a spellcaster.


P.s.: Really one can summarize the above in one sentence: Quality over quantity, please.

I don't think the majority of people like to pick classes because they are the strongest, unless they want to beat a challenging mode and get the trophy or whatever. I think the motiviation lies more in coming up or optimizing a concept than actually playing it. You see so many people on the bg3builds reddit, that bascially just theorycraft without actually having played the build.


The core of the new dvinity will propably still be an rpg. I think a lot of people me included sometimes make the mistake of seeing it as a roguelike where you basically can try out your desired build within a few hours. Would love a roguelike of bg3 or the new divnity but realistically it is still an rpg, which have a slow progression.




I never had an issue playing DnD with friends but playing the DnD system in a videogame kind of sucked in terms of balancing. Every spellcaster feels super weak in act 1, because they don't have a lot of resources in order to cast spells and actually feel impactful. Where as martials don't have a resource at all and feel strong right from the get go. I takes way to long till spellcaster start to feel good. I'm actually glad we have schools in divinity rather than one type of character has to rely on a resource and the other doesn't.

I also like the cooldown system a lot more in divinity than the DnD system in BG3. There you would do the same gameplay loop every turn. For Martials thats usually something like booming blade into extra attack or throw weapon into another throw weapon and that every single turn. That is boring as hell. With cooldowns at least you cant just spam the same action/ability every single round.