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

No one said you can't enjoy bad things. They are still bad though.



So what is the excuse for the bad writing, immersion braking artificial mechanics shoved in your face, the constant skip from 3rd to 1st person for pre rendered cinematics, the lack of impact of decisions etc.
None of these things affect the 'difficulty'.


Tactician mode was a joke in previous releases and will be a joke in this one. You are ignoring all the problems except this one as you feel you have a basis for this argument and while I'm not about to throw neuroscience articles at you what you said doesn't address anything other than mechanics which larian has never ever been good at.

If Larian want's put in the work, that is...

But so is Monopoly, The Game of Life, Clue and so on. You do need a ruleset in any way. 5e provides one of the easiest rule sets out there. And it is also relatively robust and balanced. The problem starts when someone thinks "I did not hit, even tho I clicked on that person, that is SO unfair!!1". No one playing monopoly would *really* call a bad dice throw that sends you to jail "unfair" or would have problems understanding what happens. The main thing - imo - is that Larian really really is betting a lot on this game and they try to minimize any risks. And because they don't trust people to understand one of die easiest rulesets for a game out there, they made changes. And now they toppled the first domino and all the others need to fall too:

People need to hit more often -> AC down
Monsters die too quick -> HP up
PCs still use normal HP rules, so we need HP through Food
PCs are getting HP back too easy so we need to threaten them more often -> surfaces
Because killing small and many enemies in one hit is not possible all PCs get free disengage

Instead they could trust the rules already tested, but do a better job to explaining them in some way. To hide the real mechanics in a collapsed log while just showing statistics that mislead people is just a bad way of doing that. When someone sees that they need to hit a 13 with a D20 and their +3 mod they is is better than seeing a "50%". The first one you instantly understand: "oh, dang I rolled a 8 and a 2, thats just bad luck with dice", the other one is "fuck this game, it said 50%, and I missed 2 attacks!?! This is not 50%!!"

The writing in BG3 is good to me, unless the whole lore dump hero thump thing:
"I am lord tallywag from galandria, second son to the great bimplewig, slayer of targoth and founder or the town of bragom. Hail good sire, shall we off on a grand adventure from this tavern? My it twill be a good morrow upon whence we gather our specifically six other allies, including a doe eyed female cleric who is very nice to me and never says bad things at all about our relations. Come, I am the hero and everyone is less important than me with little interference to how awesome I am!"

I really don't get why BG3 writing is considered bad by you guys. Immersion breaking artificial mechanics may be bad scripting where you took an action but no one changes in accordance to that. Sure those things should be fleshed out, but the characters themselves are great to me (again this is my subjectivity against yours, so we most likely will not agree because there are not objective points to discuss other than our feelings. Pretty pointless huh?).

We are already seeing that issue with people using the current bg3 mechanics now. Because they don't understand percentages and there is confirmation bias rampant. Unless it is 100% you have a chance to miss. Even if your chance is 99% you can conceivably miss 10 times in a row. Chances are low but it can happen. More rolls do not increase your chances, each time is the same (gamblers fallacy).

If they can't understand the current mechanics, then going to 5e would be even harder for them (which they are basically the same with the inclusion of advantage/disadvantage on elevation). Even then, I don't think a lot of the people complaining that they can't hit anything understand advantage in the first place.

I'm with you on the writing.

Nothing worse to my eyes than pseudo-Medieval speak used incorrectly to try to set a Medieval tone. It is 'RenFayre' or 'guides in period costume' territory where using 'thee' and 'thou' and hyperbolic Shakespeare-isms is supposed to be Medieval-speak. <shudder>

@CMF
Because character are homogenous. Because there are few options and the writing completely ignores basic principles of writing such as characterization. Because they make unrealistic choices and present themselves in unrealistic ways and these things go against their backstory or background. There are many, many reasons but I'll be happy to outline them in great detail once another chunk of content has been released.

Short version? It's full of contrivances, conveniences, is sidestepping/misrepresenting established lore, and feels all in all too skittish, sensationalistic, and juvenile.

...but that's not what this thread is about.

@gaidax. Lack of impact of decisions? You can make some pretty bad decisions. And some pretty bad things can happen. There are limitations on what a computer game can do when it's setup like this. The time it would take for a chose your own adventure type of game would be 5-10 years if you make everything have a reaction.

For example.. how many times did you mess up but yet reloaded your game instantly?? You yourself are not living with the outcome of what happened.

No, you're wrong. The system used in dnd(limited actions) has been used in many games and it feels perfectly in party focused games(Darkest dungeon, Xcoms etc). AP system on the contrary is better for games with one hero (Fallout,Underrail etc) and btw because of this, the majority preferred to play by LW in the DOS2.

We can complain about the changes introduced by Larian, however, they dont change the rules just for the sake of the changes.
They just try to adjust the rules so that people don't get discouraged in the very beginning.

@Rhobar121
That is a very PG way of saying they assume their audience to be simpletons that are afraid of a bit of learning / challenge.

Discouraged by what exactly? Atm the miss chances are still really not much better than Tabletop courtesy of height advantage/disadvantage (which I am more fine with btw) and how often you start in a shit position. So your average Joe is just as much discouraged as before. If he can figure out that scouting and starting in a good position is the way to go, he also can work out how a random number from 1-20 plus another number works.

They fear that a person just flips the table on a game of monopoly just because he was unlucky and got to jail in round 1. And yes, those people do exist, but the question is: would monopoly be a better game, if you design it in a manner that this cannot happen? I'd doubt that.

You said that

The only people that ive seen react like this with regards to the rules are the people who dont actually READ the rules and dont even know what options are open to them. They just want to mimic the voice actors from Critical Role and think dnd is only about stage acting or something.

I dm for groups and play in a few. Combat can be quick and sweet if everyone at the table knows the bloody rules and its muddy and slow in groups that dont. Some groups have people who prefer the roleplaying part and thats fine. But combat is and always will be a part of dnd. I swear if I hear 'the rules are just guidelines' as an excuse why a DM wont follow basic rules and to restrict players or 'this is homework the game' I swear il bloody toss my desk out of the window.

True enough, this thread is about combat rules.

That said, strict adherence to 5e combat rules is fine. My playthrough of solasta was probably more marred with the user interface being bad at providing information to the player. the UI in bg3 is fairly intuitive and gives lots of feedback as far as percentages, advantages, dmg done, formulas used to determine hit/miss and dmg rolls, line of sight, spell effects, etc.

There are exceptions to those where some tooltips are wrong or skills are broken, but those are expected to be fixed as this is EA.

The biggest differences with bg3 combat is:
- Surfaces
- Shove/Push Actions
- Elevation Advantages
- Jump/Disengage to gain Advantage from a flank

Going back to solasta
- Surfaces obviously didn't exist there
- Shove/Push actions were present, killed a few monsters that way that crowded my wizard and thunderwaved 3 of them off to their death on falling. Bonus thing that I actually did like from solasta was that my cleric got knocked off a ledge and the game paused and asked if I wanted to use a spell to cast feather fall and prevent dmg. Interesting mechanic, but it basically play combat FOR you.
- Elevation Advantages again did not exist
- Disengage was available, but it took an action so you could not use that and then attack again. BUUUT, you could still just run behind them and attack for a flank. BG3 permits you to move while engaged with mulitple targets to jump behind them and not having to risk an attack of opportunity in order to get a flank on your primary target.

From my point of view, BG3 just needs a couple of rule set changes for balance and its core is actually pretty solid.




I think this statement is pretty fair. Table top combat needed to be deliberate and paced due to so many moving pieces and limitation of automated organization that computer gaming can provide. Also in computer gaming turn based can feel tedious to some. Already with bg3 there is a crowd of people who don't like how slow it is and want rtwp back, they also feel like they waste their turn if they don't expend all the resources and action/bonus actions/movement.

Core 5e is very slow in practice with very little done per a move. Larian spiced it up a bit and changed some things to bonus actions and allowed you to do a little bit more per a turn, still fairly slow in comparison, but I'm used to this style of gameplay from back in the 80s/90s. Rtwp is ok too, but can be chaotic if totally player driven actions or too passive if overly automated and letting AI control a majority of the movement while reserving specific spell casts or actions to the player IF they want to pause the game and dig through the skills to cast something.

I feel I like turn based more, even if it is slow.

This is the reason why e.g. Dota 2 does use pseudo-random distribution. People just can't naturally deal with statistics and probability. It's somehow too aliens for our brains. When we see 30% we expect it's about to happen on every third occasion. That's what pseudo-random distribution does achive while still keeping some degree of randomness.

you forgot "healing food" issue

After nearly three years of alternate weekend games, our current group (stood down at present) has picked the rules up well enough that combats go quickly and smoothly. We do, however, have a girl who still forgets what die to roll and how much damage she is meant to be inflicting with a longbow. The round inevitably stalls when it reaches her, and she rarely has anything planned for her turn. It is frustrating. Luckily we are a fairly mature and well-balanced group so nobody has yet stood up and told her that she is an anchor around the group's neck. She's a lovely person, but my gods it is frustrating to play RPGs with her.

The food healing issue isn't as game breaking in my opinion. Food takes a bonus action, much like a potion. Even then the food does not scale with your level and is maybe 1-10 hp in recovery. At higher levels this will be insufficient in combat. The mass availability of it trivializes short rest/long rest though. Possibly put a debuff on food so you can only eat so much in a day before needing to rest? Or make it mandatory to have food in order to short rest and provide more short rests allowed in a day.