Originally Posted by Alodar
I disagree completely.


Six players would slow down combat.
Not only would you be adding 2 more bodies on the players side you would need to add additional monsters to make combats challenging.
Six players could mean as many as 6 more turns for combats and that's just too much.


Nonsense, this is the entire reason encounter difficulty exists in 5e. This is the opinion of DM that doesn't know how to tailor encounters to a party.

Originally Posted by Alodar
You really need to explore the backgrounds in 5E. A dedicated thief is no longer necessary. With the Urchin background you gain proficiency in both stealth and Sleight of hand which allows any Dex character to sneak and pick locks/remove traps.


True to an extent, however proficiency and expertise are different things, and is not allowing for party diversity instead your just making a sub par rogue crossed with a sub par something else. Background don't fix this.

Originally Posted by Alodar
There are lots of options, and the smaller the party the more re-playable the game and the more strategy you have to employ.


So less party flexibility and player agency means more replay value? That's not how that works. Go read my lengthy post above where I talk about the notion of "more strategy and inventive solutions" with smaller party, 9 times out of 10 this means go find your own favourite way to cheese. Your argument for replay value works in a system without classes, not one with rigid class progression, smaller party means less flexibility, in turn this means each playthrough has a much more cookie cutter party composition which results in much less replay value. Your dialogue and decisions might differ from one playthrough to the next, but that is only one aspect of replay value, the more places you provide the opportunity for variety the more your overall variety grows exponentially. Akin to RNG layering, each layer provides exponential growth in possible outcomes. To make your claim of replay value is to show a staggering lack of understanding of how mathematics applies to the implementation, of course you make other mathematically anomalous claims in your post but i'll get to that.

Originally Posted by Alodar
There has been no combat in Early Access that I've thought that I needed two more characters to be more effective


This has nothing to do with why people want more party members. Its about player agency and replay value, about having variety in your playthroughs.

Originally Posted by Alodar
Six players would slow down combat, decrease re-playablity, and lessen the strategy required to succeed.
That's a hard no from me.


Extra characters doesn't slow down combat, you as a player are still giving the same rate of input, on a typical turn your input vs ai input will remain at similar ratios, or at even higher ratios because as i said above, if an encounter is properly balanced, you don't need far more enemies, you need more appropriate enemies. So in most encounters you would be increasing the amount of time you are acting compared to the amount of time enemies are acting as such each turn might involve more units going, so each turn is longer, but your are providing relatively more input, as such combat feels faster, not slower, this isn't PnP where each character is controlled by a different player thinking about what they want their character to do and how they can optimally get through their priority list of moves, you are one person thinking about the total effective approach of your entire party. This is basic mathematics and any attempt to refute it only demonstrates a lack of understanding on how a multiplayer pen and paper game translates to a singleplayer computer game. The speed of combat is not equivalent to the length of an individual turn it is about how much input you are providing compared to how long you spend not giving input.

Faster feeling combat means more appealing combat in general, which helps re-playability you are right in saying that, you are absolutely wrong in your understanding of how combat speed translates to a game setting.

As for lessening strategy, this is a nonsense claim built on the idea that more party members mean easier encounter because the game is balanced for 4. Again, this is not what people are asking for, they are asking for it to be balanced around 5 or 6 characters, typically this means more challenging enemies which means an increase in strategic difficulty, not just allowing more characters without adjusting encounters. As an example, a well designed boss encounter vs a mob of cannon fodder, the boss will require more thought every single time. Better enemies and encounter area design is far more effective at providing challenge than simply adding more enemies.

Originally Posted by Alodar

(If it's something you folks truly want you can Mod it in after full release.)



This would be a huge mod project, attempting this without a proper dev team would be a really, really long haul. If you want to play with fewer characters, you don't even need to mod it after, you can just do it and if its too difficult, you can mod a change of xp rate much, much more easily. Once again this isn't some random suggestion out of left field, this has been stated as an expected aspect of any spiritual successor, never mind sequel, to the BG series since ToB rounded out the original story. Long, long before the announcement from Larian that BG3 was coming, and it was brought up, many many times throughout development, it was mentioned in initial replies and reactions to the announcement of BG3. It was well known and understood that a 4 man party was only going to lead to complaints and for very legitimate reasons. Now if you would like to debate further I would suggest doing so with an actual understanding of what your claiming. This was a purposeful design decision by Larian, made in the full knowledge that it would not be well received, they're attempting to balance the game around 4 characters, it would be much easier and better to adjust those balance sliders while they are adjusting them anyway, not to mention when you consider party variety from one playthrough to the next, it would be easier to balance for 5 than 4 given the massive power discrepancy between the the standard 4 man party and the many approaches to the non standard. As it stands, the only way Larian makes the non cookie-cutter party comps viable is by making the game too easy for a standard balanced 4 man party, and given the mechanics of low level D&D 5E, that difference will be very noticeable at times.

The difficulty argument works for free-form character building like DOS2 had, not for a rigid class system.

Last edited by Malkie; 08/10/20 02:41 AM. Reason: Clarification