Sharp, I see that in the end we don't think in oposite directions.
I’ll throw those homebrews over the table:
Increased HP / Decreased AC
Advantage being given by high ground & backstab
Surfaces Effect
Two examples of higher HP than the monster manual could possibly allow? Well, the example was given.
I suspect the HP changes in your example may have been made independently of the AC changes. If you look at the example I gave in my post, those goblins all have MM HP, but they still have lowered AC, which technically means they were nerfed in comparison to the MM. A possible other reason then for the higher HP which may make more sense in the context, is larian wanted to have a fight that only had a few combatants, but those few combatants are more challenging to the player. They could have just picked some other enemy in the MM which fit the description and achieved the same result, but I guess for the sake of the story they went with goblins and this disagreement over monster HP is the result.
I'm adult enough to accept some cases where the HP is higher than the MM HP. My whole point was a thesis to debate spell efficiency.
One of the rules that I brought was this bloat + Decrease AC - TOGETHER. How it does favour spell efficiency? A martial fighter would have an easier like with his reliable damage output per turn against a caster who struggle to dish damage because we rules remained unchanged. See the point?
Please, pay attention where I do say that those 3 homebrews INTERTWINE. Even if you dont aknowlege the bloat (which is fine), you do aknowlege the rest of them. They exist. They are real and they are affecting spell eficiency. Is it good? Well, that depends on your play style.
I'm here to debate and by your arguments on the first reply I somehow got more in accordance to their scrambled hp? Not so bad as I thought at first, maybe? Do we agree that maybe the HP matters less than the decreased AC in that encounters regarding spell efficency?
Do we agree that Bless spell is less effective in the current meta compared to DnD5e?
Do we agree that the action economy is playing a minor role compared to DnD5e?
Do we agree that some ppl bought the game because they were looking for DnD5e?
Yeah, I understand you are upset about spell efficiency and in the case of Advantage and Surfaces, there upset is probably justified. I do think the HP bloat discussion though is upset which has been misplaced. If you look at that Goblin Camp above, sleep there would be more or less as useful as it is intended to be as per the rules. If those examples you have given over there had instead been say bugbears with 27 hp, would you still be complaining? My point being, for the purposes of the narrative here, they wanted to use a specific enemy type (Goblins), but for the kind of encounter they wanted to present, they needed a different stat block, so they adjusted it to suit the encounter. There are still encounters elsewhere, where sleep is hypothetically as useful as it would be per the rules, but that encounter is not intended to be 1.
This particular HP adjustment to fit the narrative, does not seem to be an issue to me. It is not like every single fight in the game is adjusted, or that they are adjusting them at random, it seems to be based on the type of encounter they are trying to present. The encounters do not feel bloated. A GM at a tabletop would do something similar if it fit within their narrative and the original baldur's gate games did the same thing when the situation demanded it, the developers said as much. The majority of enemies in Throne of Bhaal had their statistics modified for that matter, because stat tables for enemies were not built with epic level adventures in mind.
Can we for once look at ourselves as clients instead of beta testers hired by Larian? I'm not receiving any money to review the game and I hope you too...
I'm just being a disapointed client. But again, who am I?
I guess its a difference of expectations. I was expecting there to be rule changes, in fact, I am expecting that the majority of rule changes that would be made, would be made prior to players getting a hold of the game in the EA to test. Why is this? Well, it is because of expectations. The lead developer of Path of Exile gave a very good talk on this at one point, he said, when you design a game a certain way and players start to play it, it instills in them a certain expectation that this is what they are going to get out of the final product and there will be a large amount of resistance to change away from that.
In the speech he gave an example of this. In Path of Exile, when you enter a town, you automatically refill your flasks. This is not how he intended for flasks to work. In his original vision of the game, when you entered a town, you would have to go to an NPC to refill your flasks. In the beta for the game, they implemented this as a "quick solution" because they wanted to test the flask mechanics, but didn't have the NPC ready yet. They are now in a state however, that if they would ever implement flasks as they had originally intended it would cause massive uproar, even though if that had been how flasks had initially been implemented, there likely would have been no complaining at all as to players, that is how it had always worked.
This is, incidentally, why you are very resistant to changes to the 5e rules, because your expectation is that it follows those rules. Larian is trying to cater to more than 1 audience however and they only have 1 chance to make that first impression. This means that if they want to make changes (which it is clear that they do) it is in their best interest to make as many of the changes they want as possible before we get a hold of the game to play, because it means we won't have any previous expectations of what the game was like before those changes were made clouding our view.
Have you ever though about how would you like it to be? When you play a game do you feel that you are a customer instead of thinking that the company is making you a favor by releasing a game?
Yes, I have thought a lot about how I would want games to be, but over time I have come to accept that unless I personally make the game I want to play, I will never get to play it. Everyone has their own vision of a perfect game and from person to person, this game will differ, either slightly, or very drastically indeed. I could describe to you the game I want to play, it does not resemble any game that currently exists on the market. So instead, I try to appreciate other people's vision of the game they want to play, rather than force them to try and make mine.
