Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Core DnD Rules combat is garbage.

Disagree, that isn't an easy balance. Even doing just 1 point of unavoidable damage is too much because of Concentration, which is a *huge*, absolutely *MASSIVE* limitation to control spellcasters from getting out of control (like in prior D&D editions). Even just 1 point of unavoidable damage = Concentration Save (it's a save not a check damn it). That is part of why unavoidable damage in 5e is so rare and usually has a large costs associated with it (primarily from spell slots or other limited class resources). Unavoidable damage makes Concentration spells significantly less useful, which throws a ton of other things out of balance.

Here is another angle to think about it. How long did WoTC develop this rules? And how soon do you want BG3 to be released? It is mach easier to program existing logic than balance thousands of spells, creatures, and abilityes. And Larian with full licence don't have to wast there time on balance, yet the chose to.

They introduced house rules. Fine, what DM doesn't do that. It's the amount of them, and the extend to which they introduce broken interactions, that is being frowned upon.

They made guaranteed damage easily available through surfaces and barrels, so now they need to buff up enemies HP. They stole cunning action from rogues, so now advantage (therefore sneak attack) is easily available. Wait, now we need to rise HP even more. Lets lower the AC so fights dont last so long. Ouch, save spells are useless now. Need to do something with that. Dominos keep falling.

I think they are increased the HP because they lowered the AC earlier. Some changes seem unnecessary, but in this case it makes sense.
If the Wotc approved the changes, they obviously don't mind.

It wasn't the point of my post.
I tried to convey the idea the one wrong step can send you on a months journey to redesign every aspect of the game.
Taht time and resources are better spent on ironing out bugs, and making story and world believable.

No, no it doesn't make sense. The AC and HP values of enemies are carefully tailored to match that creatures expected CR value. The problem is that a few people at Larian probably never understood the mechanics of 5e or D&D, rolled badly on some attack rolls, and decided that it was no fun to "miss". So they lowered enemy AC, which fair enough. That's okay, in fact that would be a primary method of balancing gameplay Difficulty. But then they also increased enemy HP, which is stupid. Because that breaks a LOT more than just lowering AC breaks.

What Larian needs to realize is that there are plenty of methods of gaining Advantage/imposing Disadvantage during fights based on the 5e rules. Those methods have been balanced to have certain drawbacks or limitations, like the Faerie Fire spell or Barbarian Reckless or Rogue Cunning Action Hide. Each method has some sort of cost (spell slot, providing the enemy Advantage, Bonus Action and several requirements) and usually often involves some sort of Party synergy.

By introducing two no-cost methods of gaining Advantage, every single other method becomes useless. Why on earth would I ever cast Faerie Fire when I can just circle-strafe my Fighter? The amount of reliance on a good party drops off dramatically until every combat devolves to the exact same priority of:
1. Get height advantage
2. Get behind target
3. Use surfaces/shove

Fin. That's the optimal strategy for literally every fight in BG 3 right now. 1/3 of the game, no reliance on any thing else. What build you do, what your class is, any tactical efforts at party synergy, none of those matter because there are such stronger options introduced into an otherwise decently balanced rule system.

All stemming from the back that Larian didn't like to miss, but also wanted fights to last as long as DoS fights did.

Because of the abundance of love the forums here is giving it, I bought Solasta. My initial impressions are not great.

Ignoring graphics because small studio and unity engine.
Ignoring the UI (some have said they like it, I don't)
Ignoring the controls (I detest the camera manipulation even more than I had problems with BG3s! and the movement of characters is pretty boring with a sprawling empty city)
Ignoring the acting and script (some of the most cringe table top generic fantasy "we meet at an inn" listen to the trouble I had getting to work today! story telling)
Just focusing on combat.....

It is stale. Somehow it is very true to how I felt playing the Gold Box games for Dragonlance and Pools of Radiance, and at the time I loved it, but in this game it works, but is somehow lifeless?

I "AM" rushing through trying to experience the game to give a valid critique and comparison, so probably missing things that make it great, but pure combat evaluation is highly similar to BG3. There are far less actions you can take per a turn, attack, shove, cast a spell. It all feels very static.

Going to keep playing to give it more time as I don't want to buy it with an agenda to say "bg3 is great and that is trash", but my initial impression is confusion on why everyone loves it so much more.

Bro its just EA.

First, if they don't increase HP, the fight will be too easy.
Games should primarily be fun.
If players miss too often, it can be frustrating for them.
It problem with turn-based games which you can't easly
fix by adding extra enemies because fights will be to long.

This is very very very much true. I only wish they had a better license so it the world feels more D&D

I am playing solasta as we speak, and more satisfying combat is subjective. I am actually not impressed, yet I know a lot are. So this comes down to personal preference.

Having a few Bosses/sub-bosses per fight with a little bloated hp I think is fine. Perfectly fine. But not bloated stats. Look at some of the stats of even the easier goblins and stuff. They are stupid good. I personally don't mind a few misses until you start gaining levels. That's the power of magic missile and a few other spells IE sleep and other CC spells. Knocking someone prone for your buddy to get an advantage etc. Thats only an issue really through the first 3 levels. Which is why those levels fly by on both p&p and this game. I'd rather them get closer to the MM and have a key few "Named guys" during a fight then fight a goblin with 10000000000000 hp and 2 ac.

That's the primary reason why the old infinity engine games where RTWP.

Another thing that is not fun is when half of your spell list is useless because enemies HP is too high, or AC is so low that chances to hit it with a mace are higher.

The PnP game allows for stronger monsters simply by allocating levels to them - gone are the days where every goblin had the same HP range and did the same damage. An quick alternative is just to boost the stats, as Larian have done. Most encounters are matched to party capability by the GM, although there are occasions where an encounter might be deliberately out of the their league or particularly easy.

HP based on level is a D&D legacy that I don't like. It makes sense only if you insert a huge suspension of disbelief and agree that more heroic automatically means harder to kill because the hero is pumped full of life-giving narrativium. I would rather see major enemies made harder to kill through having better skills or resources than just becoming less vulnerable to having swords stuck through them.

"Missing is not fun" - that just feels very much like a problem of modern gaming to me. And damn, I am not even that old. Gamers are used to playing with skinnerboxes of constant gratification. So the new motto for games is: "Ohhohh, better never do something that could be misunderstood/is not working immediately, or someone will complain on the steam forums".

To this day, one of my favorite games of all time is Morrowind. I got it and tried it. Could not hit a stupid crab right in front of me and quit. Like the child that I was at the time. Then I read online, how it actually works, understood what I did wrong and became better. And holy shit. This game offers so much freedom in probably the greatest sandbox games of all time, that no game since could replicate. And why? Because Oblivion and Skyrim did so much better. It is the "I clicked on it, it must hit"-Crowd. If the skinnerbox is not giving out gratification, its not working right, and so many people got used to it. From an economical standpoint: I get it. But game design really got cowardly.

I think 5e action economy fad is not a very good system for games.

This was done to make TT players life easier, streamline, simplify and limit rolls, as well as try to balance things a bit better. But for video games, where computer handles the rolling without driving players crazy - having very limited amount of things you can do in your turn is a downgrade for sure from previous versions.

I am glad Larian understands it and tries to spice up amount of things you can do per turn, they should do this, especially given how quite a few encounters with 20+ actors work - I absolutely think that these are the cases where for sure out characters should be able to do more than plain 5e allows after waiting these 2 minutes or so for the single turn.

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And yes, missing is not fun.

It's ok to have Larian adjust this a bit to allow more actual effect for your actions. Missing was fine in earlier D&D RTwP games, where the ruleset allowed more actions per turn AND your whole round was 6 seconds flat. It's not fine when rounds take a good minute+ to complete and your actions are much more limited on top of it.

I think it's fine to adjust the game so that you are not expected to miss 50% of the time normally.

Besides, what we have now is Normal mode - it's a mode most of the players are expected to gun for, even those who have no idea about D&D. There is no need to be anal with this mode. I'm sure on tactician things will be quite different with higher ACs and so on.

The modern mantra is instant gratification. Doesn't matter if you are right or wrong as long as you meet some arbitrary parameters. People don't want actual complexity. They don't want to have to think. They want video games to be escapist in it's most diluted form where it's a time burner to distract from everything else.

...plus: They want to still feel "smart" and accomplished. That's also important.

True, but unfortunately RTWP is no longer popular, so we have to live with all of this problem.
I don't think there is a simple solution.

I think some people here are forgetting that games are entertainment, not everyone considers bashing their head against the RNG and systems galore an entertainment.

It is absolutely fine for BG3 to provide a "normal" mode, which is what we have now btw, that does not have excessive frustrations with inherent excessive D&D RNG. This is the mode intended for vast majority of players who are not necessarily familiar with the systems or inherently born with knowledge of how to make use of advantage/disadvantage and so on at any given situation. The guys/gals just want to play a game that is reasonably challenging for players unfamiliar with that and is not a meme level of RNG BS.

People who want more - will get it from difficulties dedicated to that. We will have Tactician mode, as per custom and things there might much more to the liking of people who want this kind of thing.