Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Party Size Discussion

/sigh
ok, lets try this again Alodar, and this time, try not to limit your view and add artificial limitations to create scenarios that support your mistakes.




Difficulty adjustments are based on more than just challenge rating (CR is a guideline only), take a look at other books than just the DMG that have dedicated in depth info on this. I can't remember which book it is off the top of my head because it has been while since i sat down with it and i don't have my books to hand at present. But there is a huge section of tables that describe how to adjust encounters for party size.... Tome of Foes maybe? I'm sure someone can confirm which book i'm thinking of. On top of this, in adjusting difficulty you as a DM should understand your players' limitations and weaknesses and use this knowledge and the special properties of a creature to provide an appropriate challenge for your players. There are plenty of examples where CR just makes no sense when you consider two different creatures of the same CR as the special properties of one make it innately more challenging than the other.



I never said combat was shorter, combat speed is improved, I didn't say anywhere that combat takes less time to complete. I was talking about the amount of input you as a player have relative to the amount of time you are not giving input. You brought up combat speed without understanding what it is now you're refuting that by arguing about something different entirely.




OK, assuming you are 100% correct here. You are saying that either i make an urchin or take Astarion in every playthrough if i want a proficient thief. How is this increasing variety from one playthrough to the next? How are you providing an argument that supports the idea that 4 man party offers more replay value? You aren't. You are arguing AGAINST a smaller party with the backgrounds argument because you are advocating for making your party more alike every time.


9 times out of 10 is not pulling a statistic out of my ass, it's a turn of phrase. If you don't know the difference you are too young to be playing BG3. The Cheese list you linked, also has no requirement for 6 man party. Most of those cheese tactics where used in solo playthroughs. If you're going to google something to throw at me like that at least read the cheese strats before making a claim that they had anything to do with party size. Most of those are oversights in mechanics such as the potion stacking which is still possible in solo runs. I mentioned these already in this thread and I don't see how this helps your argument or is in any way relevant outside of my point about "inventive solutions". Linking this does nothing to refute my arguments and nothing to support yours.



This is so so stupid. No one is arguing to be able to take all companions in one playthrough. You are completely ignoring the argument here.
It has already been said that there are plans for more than 5 companions.
It has already been said that you need a bigger companion pool for a larger party to work.
"so many accusation and so wrong"
"if you do the math which you seem to think you're an expert"
I made no accusations and you don't need to be an expert mathematician to understand basic math.
The math that is actually being argued for here is as follows:

At each stage of play the player is offered a set amount of choices, let's call this number of choices x. To simplify the representation we will assume that every choice has only 2 possible outcomes, this is obviously not an accurate representation as each choice may have many more potential outcomes.
Therefore, in this example at any stage of play the total number of possible outcomes is 2 to the power of x.
For each incrementation of x the total number of possibly outcomes experiences exponential growth.
Again this is the same principle that all probability ie. a vast amount of statistics which is an entire of study within mathematics is based upon.

In asking if a 4 man party is better for replay value, or 5 or 6 is better, we are actually asking is a large x value better or a smaller x value. Is more choice better or less choice better for replay value. The answer is obviously more choices which is what you get with a larger party.


False, unless you add additional limitations that are not what people are talking about in this thread, ie, if you limit the number of available companions/mercs/hirelings/pets so that you as a player take the same ones every play through. Again, no one is saying they want to take all the companions, they are saying they want to change group composition so that you are NOT taking the same or very similar selection of companions/mercs/whatever on every playthrough. How are you not getting that? It has been made pretty clear.



Actually, yes what I said not only disputes those points, it completely disproves those points.
Again to summarise:
Your understanding of combat speed when you say that is wrong, you're arguing for shorter combat time, which is of much greater importance in pen and paper than a cRPG and if you want less combat, maybe a cRPG isn't the right medium for you as by their very nature you spend more of your game time in combat in a cRPG than in a tabletop game.
You're argument for replay value is based on additional limitations that you are adding to the discussion, not one person in this thread has argued for maintaining those limitations. I myself fall in line with the belief that less fleshed out mercs are the the answer to fill extra party slots on top of whatever fully fleshed out companions may be in the works already. This is much easier to implement than full companions, they don't have to react and be as interactive they just have to have some interactions and input at important moments, much like the companions of BG1.
As for the strategy bit, yeah i'm not going over that again, if you don't understand strategic difficulty, turns of phrase and the underpinning principle of probability and how that same principle applies here you are either way too young for this game or you're just a lost cause.

You are entitled to your opinion, but don't try to argue that white is black. You may prefer it, but that's not the same as you're opinion being fact or in any way based in logic.
As for you're comment on modding, we are well aware that mods will be a part of things, that this is one thing that can be modded, but why on earth would someone take a game that is already too easy (in part because of the 4 man party) and cut its difficulty in half (at least) by adding two extra characters without adjusting every single aspect of the game to make it more suitable
"If you want to make a mod that overhauls the entire game, every single combat encounter in the game, you are free to do so after full release" is not constructive in the slightest. Larian are balancing encounters and fixing issues now, now is the time to do it. Not rely on someone having the time, motivation and skill to rewrite a huge portion of the game to fix this issue for them later for free. It would be better to just balance it around 5 or 6 party members now than for modders to do it later as not only is doing it later far far more work, but would have to be done by a team that is a fraction of the size.

People want a bigger party. Personally I would say a 5 man party would be the best approach as it could be done with far less work, allow a little variation and means that the mercs mechanic wouldn't be as big a portion of the party which keeps the full companions much more centre stage.