Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Attributes in character creation

*heavy sigh*

Sometimes people get things wrong. That’s fine. It’s human. Correcting them with grace and civility is the mark of compassion. Publicly beating somebody over the head with their errors or ignorance is a display of self-indulgence. Intelligence without tact or humility ain’t worth much.

Anyway, I hope that Larian does indeed include both forms of stat generation. Personally I’ll mostly use point-buy, as I think it leads to more interesting character build decisions, but I’ll likely roll one Demi-god character at some point for the novelty of it. Probably something that requires a completely discordant and convoluted attribute allocation, like a sorcerer / monk.

Rolling for stats to demigod degrees is just another variant of a story mode. We already have story mode type adjustments.

If some people want a barbarian with 5 int and 18 strenght to start with? Well, why not. Rolling for characters with more pronounced weaknesses and strenghts is fine by me.

What I'm upset about? No option to leave some of our player characters in camp. This actually affects everyone and is currently incredibly annoying.

Eh, Solasta is clearly a niche product aimed at D&D aficionados, so I think it’s fine. If you want balanced you go point buy, if you want to build OP character and than complain that the game is too easy, you go for rolls.

After dithering for ages and playing around with the different options, I ended up going with standard array for my only Solasta party (so far). It somehow felt right for that game, though I don’t think I could give a good explanation why. Something to do with wanting to treat my party members equally, as I was playing the party as a whole rather than an individual character, I think. It’s not an option I’d pick for a BG3 main character, but I maybe would if we get to create custom companions/mercenaries. And if I play enough to tire of the pre-built companions.

It's done. I would invite you to not to fan the flames further. I got irritated about being accused of wanting to dictate what people do in single player games - which I had repeatedly said I don't care about. Like, literally said it 3-4 times. It's ridiculous. I usually filter stuff like that out but it seemed a particularly egregious example. It's fine, it's my bad, I have blocked Seraphin - which is what I should have done originally.

But the sentimentality thing is serious business. People who can't recognize it are opening themselves up to being victimized.

That does segue into a more important aspect of this topic - that is how often Nostalgia is used as a reason for arguing for design changes for BG3. There was a whole brigade of people saying this wasn't a real Baldur's gate game because it didn't confirm to some trivial design aspects of the original game.

The infamous "Nashkel Mines guy" and others..and the infinite rolling thing is one of those old systems or aspects which people are nostalgic about but doesn't have a lot of merit to it - other than maybe giving some people the thrill of gambling without the risk of loss.

Maybe we need to more intelligently and honestly examine what those systems mean.

I’m all for re-examining design decisions. A lot of people want the map to be less crowded, but in BG1 that meant a lot of not terribly engaging walking over empty space, so I’m okay with Larian’s handling of the map. The four character party limit also works better in 5E I think, as individual characters have more to do in their action economy than 2E.

I think some harmless call backs are fine though. BG3 certainly doesn’t need a set of undergarments made of metal, but I think it would be fitting if it did.

That said, while I do get irrationally nostalgic about the endless rerolling on the Infinity Engine games, I do hope and think Larian can do something a bit better. Most people are rerolling to get really good attributes, so rolling 4 and dropping 1 as you suggest might be a better way to go to just diminish the time spent clicking.

Good lord... what have I done!?

*Makes a mental note* - Never ask about point attritubes again!

The legendary disk horse has blessed ye!

You weren't a serious BG player unless you'd spent at least more than an hour re-rolling your stats! The exquisite and hollowing horror of clicking past a better score than you had saved... it was stuff of nightmares. It worked, because all rolls were bad, no matter what you got you needed more, BG char creation was the drug!

BG stat rolling plus BG3 soundtrack would mean happiness for hours before even flopping out the pod.

To be fair, this was a side affect of 2nd editions non-linear stat progression. The difference between a 15 and an 18 was as large (larger) than the difference between 10 and 18 in 5e, and for the most part you got nothing for a stat lower than 15. Rolling just once meant that you were going to play a 15 minute peasant walking simulator, followed by a quick peasant death simulator.

In any case, I absolutely do intend to roll for stats in BG3 when its possible. And if they limit that I'll install a mod that removes the limit. 5e balance means you don't really NEED the extra stats from rolling to play the game, but it also means that the extra stats don't make you that much more powerful in the long run (just an easier level 1-3).

Do you know how many times I blew past at 90+ roll from 100's of clicks on my rerolls?! :P

It's largely identical to playing with weighted dice for increased damage output and hit chance, which it seems like you can. Unlike the dice, you can't turn the demigod stats off, though

The reason I want stat rolling is because I also want to use feats. I have a hard time mentally playing a character class that has maxed out a main stat at 15. I get that you can ASI but feats are what I consider sets a character apart from others. With the current system almost all your fighters, etc. will feel the same. All dump stats will be pretty much cookie cutter. This makes multi classing less attractive and let’s not even think about how this effects the Eldritch knight int spell use. Magic Missile for everyone lol.

Look at the debate about Wyll’s stats spread. As it is, an ASI boost for him is pretty much useless so the consensus seems to be to give him moderately armored. The good thing here is that he also gets to boost his Dex. I also suspect Larian set his stats like this for when his contract is removed. He shouldn’t gain warlock levels anymore and will need to multiclass. His stats give you a few good options.

Now if there was a system that allowed ASI boost and a feat every so many levels, I would be more than happy with the way stats are currently allocated. Or like the Wyll example above, choose a feats and get a single stat boost in a related stat (ie Magic Initiate: Bard AND +1 to CHR) would be an awesome option.

I plan on making a Barbarian with Magic Initiate: Bard and learning drums from Alfria(sp?) to make my “Skald” player; however, I am honestly torn between the above or take a single level of bard and take an ASI feat). I will have to dump int and wis to get CHR at a reasonable 14(has to be 13+). As it is, a single level of bard is winning out.

I am looking forward to playing a foul mouth beserker(Skald) with his lovely mullet and drum! 🥁 😅

I do understand this is the way 5e works and IIRC this is going to be changed in the upcoming edition.

Have Larian stated whether or not you'll be able to roll the origin characters stats?

I like the idea of rolling 4 dice and dropping the low one, they could also hold you to that roll to discourage manic stat scumming. Or Possibly you could choose the number of dice you want to roll up your character with, and whether you want to drop the low roll. Basically letting you choose from a number of common ways stats have been determined throughout the game. Has any cRPG done that before?

I'm all for both options, rolling and point buy. More options are always better. I probably will use both options, depending on what kind of character I like to make.
I don't get the argument of 'I have no self control, so rolling shouldn't been in.' ( pataphrasing). - this is a) a personal problem, that shouldn't affect the majority of players and b) it's frankly not an argument, because you can do in your singleplayer game, what you like.

And just for my curiosity ...
How would you people feel about infinite point buy ... or just seting your scores however you like with no restrictions at all (except prehaps min is 3 and max is 18 ... or 20)?

I mean there will certainly be mod for that if Larian refuse to include it ...
But i just dont see why would they ... after all its basically the same as rerolling over and over (and there is no way they can restrict us from doing that ) ... it only saves time ...

Mods allow you to set your stats to whatever you want now .

Thats not really even close to what i asked, but okey. :-/

Having more options is better than none. Personally I like rolling stats not for the nostalgia of it, but it makes it feel like a table top haha. As for rolling stats making the game too easy, it really depends on if you play with premade characters or a full custom party. Overall, I think they should probably lock the stats of the origin characters, unless you play them. If I recall correctly, in DOS II you could adjust all appearance and stat things the first time they joined you. Hope they keep this the way as is now, shadowheart etc have set attributes and so on. full custom party is nice and all But I do hope we get to save characters as well, akin to Solasta at some point. Back to topic, hope they add all 3 attribute systems.

I’m fine with this, as long as it’s a separate specific option for stat setting, clearly marked off from other options such as (normal) point buy, standard array and dice roll, any of which I’d prefer to use for my character creation. I personally wouldn’t want to have to use/calculate these offline, but because an option like this would let others use whatever method they prefer to calculate stats outside the game and then enter them, I think it makes a lot of sense to add along with a few standard attribute generation methods.