Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Gameplay poll: traditional or simplified combat?

Poor kitty ...
You have no idea what have you just brought on youreself ... do you?

What? The fact that it doesn't need to be 100% RAW? Can't deny that it still plays and feels like 5e and it gets closer to RAW with each patch. The main thing the game needs is a rework of the reaction system to be closer to Solasta and to get rid of the bad homebrew.

Lol. Ragnarok is right. You have no idea what you have done. Pandora's box is now open.

What is NOT 5e about BG3:

1. Rogues - No Expertise. No tool proficiencies. Fast Hands has been nerfed because potions are Bonus actions, so who needs Fast Hands? Sneak Attack is broken. Stealth is broken. Anyone can pick locks as well as a rogue and sneak as well as a rogue. And that's not even all.
2. Intellect Devourers don't DEVOUR INTELLECT or body thief and don't have resistance.
3. Phase spiders spit poison globs and teleport hundreds of feet through the air, hardly ever attacking at melee like they should.
4. Shove has no prone option and pushes people 20+ feet on average.
5. Spellcasters can cast Action spells and Bonus spells in the same turn, so once Fireball's a thing, they can Misty Step to safety and Fireball the crap out of enemies all in the same turn.

I have SO much more, but I'll stop there for now. I'm out of time.

Ok. Here's a few more non-5e things:

6. Imps don't have resistance in the prologue or use sting or turn invisible or change shape.
7. You can pick up enemies and throw them at other enemies more than 10 feet away and deal more damage to both than if you used a weapon.
8. Invoke Duplicity only grants advantage to a cleric if the cleric is within like a 10 foot radius of it. Looks nothing like the cleric and it isn't a minion that can be moved via Bonus action.
9. Scrolls can be cast by ANYONE.
10. No checks to see if you can cast a spell via a scroll if it is a higher level spell.
11. No Medicine checks to stabilize characters.
12. You restore 1 HP to a character by using the Help button if they are dying.

Without any substantive changes to the EA for the past few months, the extent BG3 is/isn't/needs to be faithful to the paper rules of the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons is the currently how the old hands are passing the time around here.

13. No Hit Dice for short rests but you are limited to only 2.
14. Arcane Recovery outside of resting.
15. Familiars act like animal companions, and you can't channel spells through them.
16. You summon animal companions like familiars rather than befriend them and get them to journey with you.
17. Animal companions and familiars despawn when you sleep.
18. Animal companions can die, and you can immediately summon a new one without any time passing.
19. Harpies attack with rocks rather than multiattack with claws and clubs.
20. Minotaurs Hulk Stomp you, as do other monsters that shouldn't be able to jump so far and knock you prone with jumps.
21. Jumping extends your movement distance instead of being included in your movement distance.
22. Rangers.
23. Mage Hand and Arcane Trickster Mage Hand. NOTHING like 5e.
24. Armor doesn't actually apply Disadvantage on stealth.
25. Druids wear any kind of armor, not just non-metal armor.
26. Helmets, gauntlets and boots.
27. Spell books don't exist.
28. Spell focuses don't exist.
29. Spell components don't exist.
30. You can't write spells to your spell book.

This is one of my favorite changes!

Combat is already cheesified, so a traditional approach is not really in the cards. Whereas I tend to gravitate towards traditional, what matters most is what works best for gameplay. And I firmly believe how reactions are finally dealt with will be crucial. This will become obvious to more people once we get to toy around with eg. a Lore Bard who have Cutting Words and Counterspell to react to just about any enemy's action(s). Implemented like Solasta with an ugly pop-up freezing combat like I see many advocate, would kill the flow of combat and harm immersion for most who's not part of the purist 5e mechanics crowd. Implemented like a slow-motion real-time reaction would slow combat somewhat, but be immersive and offer player agency. The current implementation (pre-set automatic reaction) would be *horribly inadequate* to the point of removing the reaction mechanic all together would be preferable. This again would unleash an avalanche of homebrew - something Larian in my opinion has shown themselves pretty inept at with poor balancing, poor internal logic/lore/immersion and poor creativity.

I honestly don't want a 100% RAW 5e experience. Spellcasting would suck. Imagine having to make sure you have all the proper spell components every time you wanted to cast certain spells.

Want to cast Fireball? Nope. Can't. You don't have a tiny ball of bat guano and sulfur. Too bad.

Ugh. No thanks. I found it hard enough to deal with the spell focuses in Solasta which require an equipment slot of some kind. I'd always strive to buy a focus that wasn't in my item utility slot, and sometimes I would sell the focus first and forget to buy a new one. Then my spellcaster couldn't use magic and I'd be like, "Ah crap. Forgot the spell focus."

Yeah. No thanks. Simple is better in a lot of regards. BG3 is a fun game partially because they didn't go 100% RAW.

Again. Looking for more RAW. Not 100%. Something that will balance the game more and make certain things more meaningful.

voted traditional.. otherwise don't call it dungeons & dragons. call it dos recipe in faerun.

I call it "Divinity: Sword Coast 1"

Yes, I most definitely can... It does not feel or play like 5e. It does so only with the vaguest and most lenient of descriptions... to the point that many other unrelated fantasy rpgs would also fit the criterion.

What I'm more curious to hear about, actually, is how you arrived at the '85% 5e' figure.

Legitimately, I'd like to know how you got to that number - what you weighted in as accurate and faithful and what you looked at as not so, to deliver this percentage?

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For the record: I'm with Icelyn on her statement. The bonus action restriction is an arbitrary, unfounded and ultimately pointless restriction in 5e, and a flaw in its ruleset that was place in due to legitimate concerns from older editions which, due to 5e's design, were not actually legitimate concerns in 5e. It's unnecessary and does not belong (and, in fact, it actually runs against 5e's original design philosophy and creation style). It does not create imbalance or unfairness, and it does not create gain that is not sufficiently balanced by cost. There are three instances where this is not the case - and those three specific instances require specific rules which would take command over the general rules for spellcasting (one is quicken spell, and the others are two specific ba/action spell combinations). The Ba limitation punishes all spellcasters needlessly, and it needs to go. It's good that it's gone, here. I don't play at a single table that uses the rule, and it has only increased the enjoyment and decreased frustration for everyone to dispense with it.

Here's how I see all of this shaking out. Close to when BG3 is released, WotC will make a big announcement about their upcomming release of D&D edition 5.x/6, currently scheduled for a 2024 release, and simply hand-wave away any and all deviations from 5e in BG3 by saying BG3 is actually more a D&D 5.x/6 edition game than a 5e game. Just you wait and see.

This is an interesting question. How do you rank "how 5e" something is? Unfortunately, I don't think it has an answer - or more accurately everyone's answer will be different.

I don't think you can just go through every single rule, counting up the % of ones that are implemented correctly in BG3. Besides being incredibly tedious, some rules are obviously more important than others (e.g., the D20, actions during combat, the 6 main stats, spell slots) and should be given more weight.

Also, do you only count rules that are unique to D&D 5e? Other systems are d20+modifier based, and Pathfinder in particular has a lot of common rules...

I have made positive statements about indivudual small changes like this. But they are not being made as part of an intelligent, balanced redesign of D&D. For every one of these things we might be happy with in our own campaigns, there are ten other mistakes in BG3 that are frustrating and disappointing. This is not even a "homebrew," as that implies there is purpose behind the changes. The haphazard way this game has been put together is clearly not based on any principled vision for how to improve 5E.

It's easy to get some people to cheer for dumbing down the game and making it "easier," but these things just ruin the long-term value of the game. Why don't we give all classes d20 hit die? Why don't we let every class learn all the spells from every spellbook? The rules in 5E, for the most part, are there for a reason, and exist as part of a larger balanced whole. If you are going to make changes, you must preserve the depth and value in the existing systems.

Oh I certainly agree with that - the cynic in me will say that it's almost a certainty that this particular point is one that came about as 'lack of implementation', rather than 'deliberate decision to change'...

I voted for "simplified". Some homebrew features make combat just better. For example +2 from heights. It is not in the 5e DnD rules, which is nonsense because height usually gives advantage in real combat situations, so the DnD rules are dump. I want some homebrew rules to be changed (f.e. better reactions, "Shove" should stay as bonus action but it's effect should be toned down even more, ...) but as the poll is "0 or 1", I had to decide.

BTW I don't think Larian's combat is per se "simplified". It partly offers more tactical availabilities than the simple DnD rules, so the poll should be changed to: Do you want "More simple DnD combat" or" "More tactically divers homebrew combat".

I love how people use one thing that Larian implemented well and no one has issue with (after a lengthy backlash to the initial implementation which was broken as hell) to defend their messy system. It is still arguably a simplified version of DnD rule of Cover. I think it works well, but that's one good thing, among a sea of bad things.

I do agree that the poll carries quite a lot of judgement in the way it described both choices. So do yours

And no, BG3 isn't more tactical - it's too unbalanced and too chaotic for that. "Tactical" suggests some basic level of depth and balance that BG3 simply lacks. Hopefully it will get there in a year's time.

I don't think that is cynical at all. It is obvious that many changes are due to lack of implementation, or even lack of knowledge of the core rules. I think Larian is betting that the audience doesn't know the rules either, and will assume it's all being done according to a plan, when it clearly isn't.