Larian Banner: Baldur's Gate Patch 9
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Right now I feel Larian is making a newbie DM mistake and people are seeing it in encounter design difficulty. It will have serious class balance issues, later, if unchanged as well.

(Forgive my spelling errors, I am using my phone)

The Five Minute Workday is when a party has one encounter a day, can blow all their resources on it, then fully rests after. There are (at least) three major issues with this.

1:) Classes aren't balanced around a single encounter or two a day.

Some of your classes are long distance runners like warlocks, fighters, monks. They get all (or most) of their resources back on a short rest. Longer times between long rests favor them since their strength is their endurance. They don't shine as bright in a single fight a day because their powers aren't as dramatic as what someone blowing all their resources in one big fight can accomplish.

Other classes are sprinters. These tend to be full casters. They get little to nothing (hi sorcerers) from a short rest. In exchange their abilities are dramatic and have a larger impact. They need to be more careful expanding things like spell slots since they have limited ability to recover spent resources. In return their powers are individually more influencial in ending most fights than a distance runners.

These issues get more pronounced as you gain levels. Very much so.

2) One big fight a day can be draining and a slog

Hear me out on this one: there is a strong temptation on the DM's part to make every fight epic and memorable. You don't want combat to be a boring slog of clearing trash. Ironoically making every fight memorable and epic easily leads to most fights not being epic nor memorable. If everything is epic nothing is, basically. Worse this approach also encourages the five minute workday, since you need all those resources for that big encounter. Returning to 1) you can end up in a situation where the campaign was epic to play from the wizard's stand point and kinda fun to watch from rogue that just mostly stood there as the wizard end the fight with a wall of force and fireball while they got two sneak attacks in.

3) a five minute work day leads to fights that are easy to die in at low levels and difficult to die to at higher levels. If you enjoy a challange this is great levels 1-7 and becomes easy mode 8+ and your enjoyment diminishes. If you like a more casual game it makes levels 1-5 a drag and 6/7+ the game you want.

I'm speaking broadly here, class wise. Please no nitpicking.

Last edited by Kbot; 11/10/20 02:23 PM.
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Yeah, I kind of wish the map were about twice as big, because as it is now there's literallynno physical room for small encounters between the big set-pieces. And I like the big, interesting battles — they just shouldn't be every one.

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If act 1 was pnp campaign most dm would have allow like 3 long rests total.

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Experienced players can manage multiple fights with even with a full party of sprinters. But generally only with balanced encounters.

I agree that the encounters in thr game so far pretty much all fall in the 'big rpic fights' that drain resources and there isent much room for smaller engagements.

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I have had no issues with doing multiple fights back to back without resting, I do not feel like the game as it is forces you to rest after every encounter. It would be more interesting imo however if there was a penalty for doing that in the form of a timer or something.

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Originally Posted by Sharp
I have had no issues with doing multiple fights back to back without resting, I do not feel like the game as it is forces you to rest after every encounter. It would be more interesting imo however if there was a penalty for doing that in the form of a timer or something.


There are some consequences to resting - if you take long rests while certain quests are active, time will progress and people can die or an area can change.

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Originally Posted by Ramien

There are some consequences to resting - if you take long rests while certain quests are active, time will progress and people can die or an area can change.


When and where? I would LOVE for this to be true

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When considering balance with regards to implementing 5E rules, I think Larian needs to keep the following in mind when designing encounters:

In 5E the default resting is: Long rest can only benefit characters once every 24 hours per the SRD for 5E, and a short rest has no such limitations, but is by default about an hour long (although spells and many houserules shorten this).

For encounter balancing, the default assumption is about 2 short rests to each long rest (although I have been in tabletop games where significantly more short rests are taken, sometimes after each encounter).

This should be considered when balancing encounters. But as it stands now, in BG3 short rest and long rest are functionally reversed, with the short rest being much more limiting than simply returning to camp for a long one at any time. I am finding I basically am not using short rest at all in the current build, just long resting after each encounter because there is no reason not to, and short rest is too limited in its availability and use.

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Wow, why would anyone even want to play like that? I mean I agree that long rests is better suited to be more restricted than currently but who even needs to play like that? The game feels very lenient as it is anyway. In my current playthrough I reached lv3 before everyone was out of spell slots short rest and started to need a long rest to not start burning through potions faster than I got them.

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Originally Posted by Skallewag
Wow, why would anyone even want to play like that? I mean I agree that long rests is better suited to be more restricted than currently but who even needs to play like that? The game feels very lenient as it is anyway. In my current playthrough I reached lv3 before everyone was out of spell slots short rest and started to need a long rest to not start burning through potions faster than I got them.



That is actually another problem with resource management - having so many consumables that character resources don't even matter.

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in regards to your 1st observation. It needs to be corrected. Encounters are not balanced correctly in the sense you need to rest after each one

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I don’t know man, now that I’m at 4th level I see I can take on several tough fights in a row with not that much issue. You’re tougher than you feel and good positioning can be all you need.

I feel like taking a rest after each battle is not necessary, but it just feels “safer”. It is, but having some tenacity is also an option.


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