Old series that has a decent following of mostly niche dedicated fans is left to sit without a new installment for many years.
New title is announced. It’s sells gang-busters and flips the community on its head.
Corporate Executives prioritize short term profits and begin planning a quick and easy cash grab. !
Second new installment comes out. It is a shell of the previous title with the soul sucked clean out.
Fans are dissapointed and outside of a small niche following the game series falls into obscurity.
Repeat.
!we are here right now
Look… Maybe BG4 will be good. But after watching this exact cycle play out over and over again for the past decade I’m not sure how you can expect anything else.
Baldurs Gate 4: From EA. $99 for the base game. Then you have the season pass with unique characters (squirrels you can kick), as well as character DLCs, then don’t forget all the skins. Oh! Did we mention that Act 2 and Act 3 are sold separately?
When will the business world realize that anything business majors are given control of turns to shit. Like I know that it’s not impossible for a AAA game to be good but I also know that most companies that can handle that kind of a budget are run by people who just think gamers love throwing money at anything labeled “video game”, proved by so many out of touch quotes.
Like the BlizzCon “don’t you have phones?” showed that Blizzard didn’t even realize that their main demographic and shitty f2p phone games didn’t have much overlap.
Or EA’s “sense of satisfaction” was transparent when they give a paid path to skip a ridiculously tuned grind.
Or Ubisoft’s “AAAA” said they hadn’t even noticed that “AAA” was starting to be considered synonymous with “shit”.
The funny part is that they aren’t even wrong about the potential to make a lot of money from video games, it’s just not by using business major tricks to extract the maximum short term gains or approaching making a video game by thinking about how to make the most money from it.
I remember when Disney fired Avalanche from Disney Infinity… Apparently some guy at Disney learned how cheap it was to make Mobile Games and how much money they made, erroneously assuming that this was where the gaming market was going and how development studios would soon be “Out of jobs” with how “Simple” it was getting…
He was a god damn moron
God, “Do you guys not have phones?” was just… embarrassing, the fact that they needed to be asked if this was an April Fools joke before the crowd understood what was happening is… yeesh
As an accountant and finance person I promise you “business major” and c-suite are not one in the same here…most of us are never allowed to rise that high due to nepotism and we’re just chugging along trying to make a living the same as the devs. I’d love to work for a company where the emphasis wasn’t on this short term ensuitication BS. It isn’t like entry and mid level accounting and finance folks are the ones pushing for this most of this nonsense. We just get dictated all the bs from the top and report/forecast the numbers.
I’m not saying business majors shouldn’t be involved at all, they just shouldn’t be making major game design decisions that the people who have a passion for making a great game disagree with.
It all comes down to the main motivation for doing the work. If the passion guiding the overall operation is about making a great x, then IMO it is much more likely to succeed than if the passion is about making money from making x.
When it’s a large company involved, that can be mitigated by finding people who are passionate about the x instead of just the money, but all the orders of “do it this less fun way because it will make us more money” can kill that passion over time or even just cancel out the positive effect that passion had on the game.
I’m reminded of the guy who busted his balls trying to get Fallout 1 to be a thing when Interplay had no faith in it, only to be “rewarded” by being overly worked and underpaid to rush out a sequel…
And the release parties for Tomb Raider that the devs literally weren’t invited to, just suits and press people acting like they were the ones who made the game.
Yeah, but it’s a straight terrible port from a mobile game with a solid gacha foundation and Baldur’s Gate skins tacked on. Also you need to subscribe and pay a weekly fee to get access to the premium lockboxes that may or may not (spoiler: they do not) give you the characters/skins/whatever that you actually came for. Everything is time-gated unless you pay more of the premium currency to be allowed to grind more for a chance that won’t proc anyway unless you go into debt to buy enough crates.
I’m in the opposite group. I don’t care for Larian’s games (though I wish them the best) and I was very let down when they made the latest Baldur’s Gate.
Not sure why you’re being down voted, it’s a reasonable opinion to have if you don’t like their games. I feel the same about the originals. I tried them and respect them a lot, but they’re just not for me.
Don’t think people should downvote you for this opinion, especially with you even being respectful about it.
I had a good time with BG3 (though I’m less high on it than most people), but at the end of the day it’s clearly a Larian-game. If you didn’t like the Divinity series you probably won’t enjoy BG3, and if you had hoped for a BG 1&2 feel, you would probably be a bit let down.
One thing I appreciate between BG3 and their Original Sin series is that the latter games felt like turn based Splatoon whereas the former has much less surface spam barrelmancy (though it is still present)
I know what you mean - and combat in D:OS2 would often devolve into pure silliness - but at the same time their proprietary systems also had more play and more interesting wrinkles to them than the 5E they were shackled to in BG3. I can’t decide which I think is better really.
I found the surface interactions to be really cool, and I think overall I like divinity 2’s combat more. That being said, all the jumping/pushing stuff from BG3 is amazing and I would love to see that added to s future divinity game.
Exactly. This headline read as “Interested investors want to throw money at someone because BG3 did so well and then demand they release a half finished product so they can meet their quarterly financial date.”
Everything will be fine when all the new RPGs in the works over the OGL drama come out. Ain’t critical role making an rpg or something? I hate critical role but I’m eager for them to get all the critical role fans playing a different system than D&D. More excited about the mcdm rpg personally
Well the ones you need to win over are the DMs and there’s not really any DM-side improvements as far as I’m aware, it’s basically just worth it if you like their setting.
I’ve seen plenty of situations where a DM wanted to run a different system but the players thought that sounded too hard and they only want to play what they know. In my experience, it’s usually the players you need to convince. The DM is the member of the friend group who is the most open to putting in effort to begin with. The players are the lazy ones and therefore the most resistant to change.
True, but you need someone to buy in first and there’s no real reason for the DM to buy-in outside of the setting. If the DM doesn’t buy in you don’t even get to the stage of pitching it to the players.
That said it is an easy pitch to the players since you can straight convert characters across.
Starfinder’d be cool, but Larian has been firmly in Fantasy for a good 10-15 years at least now, so I’d be more confident for Pathfinder than Starfinder
Yeah anyone apart from Larian making BG4 is basically fucked. Maybe if they wait 5-10 years and a studio with an established brand comes in, but that isn’t what’s going to happen.
Prior to BG3 I held BG1&2 somewhere in the top 5 games of all time. BG3 had an impossible bar to meet and they not only met it, but far surpassed it.
I’m genuinely sad at whatever BG4 releases as. It’s like someone who loved Diablo 1&2 looking at Diablo 3&4. Diablo 3 was a shell of Diablo 2 and I literally just had to check if Diablo 4 was a released game. Maybe it’s fun to someone, but I’ve completely checked out of the series.
So here’s to BG4, BG:TCG, & BG:Mobile, shells of the greatness that came before them.
It took less than 2 years to release BG2 after BG1. In the meantime Bioware licensed Infinity Engine to Black Isle who released Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale one year apart.
It took Larian 6 years to develop BG3 after Divinity 2. They moved on to their new game but that engine and assets could be similarily licensed to other studios to churn out some games using similar or simplified formula.
Definitely is. Try playing Divinity 2 and you will realize it’s the exact same engine just with a modified ruleset to match Baldurs gate more. I actually prefer Divinity, they just have more freedom as far as setting and the ruleset than a liscensed ip owned by another company
That’s certain but licensing engine could be additional revenue stream for Larian. They benefit from cRPG market becoming more mainstream too. And I’d kill for more games with couch coop implemented this well.
The problem is that Hasbro is desperately trying to make more money from WotC. But fairly recent actions indicate that they don’t have players’ best interests at heart. They fired all the contacts that Larian worked with. So nobody is left who has even a modicum of insight into how BG3 was done so well.
I fear several cheap cash grabs are in store for us. The first will probably be a quick and dirty DLC that will come out in a year or two.
WOTC can put the name “Baldurs Gate 4” on whatever they want. They could make a Farmville clone in 2 months and release it as “Baldurs Gate 4” if they want. They own the copyright.
Let me tell you as an employee at a studio where the parent company is widely viewed as shitty: it doesn’t matter. The rot starts at the head, and even good managers can get shitty. My workplace unionized and got recognition, and our overwhelmingly liked manager then went and violated status quo.
Did Hasbro or WotC send the Pinkertons after that guy who got a pre release card? It doesn’t matter, because a corporation that owns the IP still sent the Pinkertons after a random customer.
Was it WotC or Hasbro that sent Pinkerton’s to someone’s house to steal their Magic cards because a retailer accidentally sold them cards from the new set a couple days too early?
WotC is a division of Hasbro now & if you use MtG as a reference you can see the plan seems to be to drain the swamp. I think in their shareholders meetings they want MtG to double its earning in 4 years... So I'd imagine they're looking for angles on D&D & BG may be the flagship for this.
Yeah, cranking out another entry to capitalize on BG3’s success would be a terrible move. I’m so glad Hasbro/WotC are not known for making terrible moves. That would be so unlike them to trade in goodwill for short-term profits.
I think Owlcat makes fantastic dnd games. They made Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Rogue Trader. They could certainly do more than half as good as Larian. However, their big problem with pathfinder games is that they are stupid long and kinda bog down with so so so many items and talents in the late game.
Almost anyone who works with pathfinder/paizo could have instead worked with D&D/Wizards. Owlcat etc made their choice specifically to not work with Wizards.
I have full faith in Tactical Adventures. Solasta is the closest translation of tabletop D&D to CRPG ever made IMO. All they need is a better than indie budget and permissions to use the full license and content instead of just the SRD.
If you’re seeing that, good chance you’ve got some kind of network issue (or there’s a problem with the Photon setter you’re on and you should switch servers).
Generally I might see a desync every few hours. Rarely more often, but we can play for 6+hours sometimes with zero issues.
Couple things that could cause issues though:
make sure you’re both running at the same screen refresh (60hz is preferred).
if using the UB mod, make sure all settings are the same on both clients.
weirdly, turning off shadows can have a major impact on network sync. Try disabling shadows.
If you’re not maintaining 60 fps, turn down settings until you are, and if not possible lock both clients to 30 fps.
Lastly, as noted above if you’re having frequent desyncs, manually select your option server and choose a different region. E.g - I’m western USA, but I’d there’s issues I’ll switch to US East and that will generally resolve it.
Frankly, this is the only bummer with Solasta, the fact that networking is via Photon and no LAN option. Is set up my own Option server if I could but it doesn’t seem to be possible.
Nope, no network issues. It was because if the client characters went before the host in a round, particularly the first one, or first on a load, they'd desync.
Sorry, I edited my post above with some tips for desync issues. Have found in particular turning off shadows majorly reduced the frequency desyncs happen.
The gameplay is good but from what I played, outside of combat, it was a bit lackluster, and rations were a pain when I played. Though it’s hard not to compare it to BG3 in that regard. I did like Larian’s system to interact with the environment and liquids too that made some battles more dynamic. Maybe there’s more of that is Solasta than I saw too, I didn’t get far, should give it another go, it has solid combat which is at least half of a good DnD game.
You need to install the unfinished business mod to really make Solasta shine. It’s… unofficially endorsed by the devs (in the sense that the UB mod discord channel is hosted on the official Solasta discord). It adds races, subclasses, and more to bring the game fully in-line with tabletop options, including multi-classing.
Besides that, while the official campaign is decent enough, some custom campaigns are incredible, like full games in and of themselves, and some take more advantage of the game engine and dialogue options than the official campaign.
To me, Baldur’s Gate 3 is an interesting experiment, but in terms of gameplay it’s just not D&D. It’s a weird relationship sim with some (very) loose D&D mechanics. It has fun moments but the game is inconsistent, buggy, and generally becomes very un-fun, especially in multiplayer.
BG3 is very much a Larian game with D&D trappings, not a D&D game just made by Larian, if that makes sense.
I put something like 50-60 hours into BG3 and just couldn’t be bothered to finish it, stalled out once in act 2, and again on a second attempt in act 1. By contrast, I’ve got over 500 hours and counting in Solasta.
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Edit - oh, and with regard to rations, stack up early as you can (at least 20) and from there you’ll gather plenty in the field map if you have someone with high survival. Alternate option would be to have a Ranger or dries with goodberry, and later on other classes get the create food spell.
Or you could just disable the food mechanic altogether, it’s your game.
The economy is non-existent, actual balancing is literally impossible, you can’t make a character yours (reflavoring your eldritch blast doesn’t count), so many rules just don’t exist or are on some random designers Twitter account instead of the damn books. If you want to argue it’s a simple system; it isn’t, it’s stupidly convoluted for how little it actually offers.
Edit: look at Pathfinder (chosen because it’s the closest comparison); it actually gives DMs a rough guide to how much money a player should be expected to have at any level, a decent idea of what players should fight in an encounter (2e even tightened that math up even more), a myriad of ways to customize your character on a real mechanical level, and all the rules are easily found on the same online resource. 5e doesn’t do any of that.
It’s been way too long since I’ve played or dm’d 5e for me to get into all the little details of why it sucks lol, a short answer is all i can muster now.
I don’t know that the economy is an important part of D&D or that I see it as a fault that it isn’t. It has a list of approximately what kind of adversary should be a challenge for you at a given level, but that seems like a totally different discussion than how much money that character should have. A soldier would do better in a fight than Jeff Bezos, but Jeff’s got more money.
Economy is insanely important. How much gold should your players have at level 13? What magic items are they expected to have? What determines the availability of any random thing? If there is an imbalance between what is expected and what they have the game is either way too hard or way too easy. Economy is vital and is more than just money.
5e does not have balancing. The chart they give you in the book is so stupidly off i have to wonder if the designers ever played their own game. If you go by that the players will never be engaged, it’ll just be wasted time.
Those were two separate complaints, btw, no matter how well they feed into each other.
Hahaha oh your poor soul you don’t know what you risk conjuring up with a question like that.
I have to write this all out in a blog post so I can just link it one day.
The core mechanic of 1d20+stuff produces flat probability. Every outcome on the die is equally likely. That’s ridiculous. Go throw some darts at a dart board. Do you get an equal distribution around the board? Just as many hit the floor as the bullseye? No. So the underlying math is kind of trash.
The entire game is predicated on its rest cadence. You’re expected to have like 5-8 medium encounters and then take a long rest. This generates a ton of problems for pacing and balance. Chief among them, most people don’t want to play that way. Polls show people typically do like one fight per rest. Welp. Now all your long rest classes are over performing and your short rest classes suck.
Don’t even start with “not every encounter has to be a fight”. Don’t even fucking start. Most people can’t consistently come up with interesting non combat encounters in DND that tax resources the same way fights do. There are no real social conflict rules, for example, as mentioned below.
But even if you do somehow manage to do the suggested amount of encounters per rest, that severely limits the pacing of the story. There are so many hacks and variants to try to fix this. Gritty realism, sanctuary resting, heroic mode. They’re all bandaids on a poor foundation.
The magic system is trash. It’s just fucking bad. It had no real internal consistency. Every spell is bespoke. What’s the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level? Fuck if I know. Can you make your own spells? Not really. Can you be creative with spells? Ehh kind of but they tend to be very specific about what they do, with few inputs.
Also like the way magic works is boring. There’s no real flavor. You say you cast the spell and check off the box, and it happens. Maybe you need a material component. That’s about it. It’s shallow as heck. It’s also weird that rangers paladins wizards clerics arcane-tricksters all basically have magic that works the same way. You could do so much more.
The social system I would say it was trash if it existed. You meet a pack of bandits in the pass. You want to fight them. The rules have a lot to say here. Hit points, armor, saves, actions and reactions, equipment, etc. Ok wait, you want to scare them off with your words instead. Well get fucked, the book has some vague guidelines that quickly turn into “the dm decides”.
There are very few decisions to make about your character. Species and class. Maybe a feat or two depending on how long you play, but those compete with ASIs, and most games don’t even get to 8th level. Subclasses sometimes have a few things to pick, but sometimes you literally get zero choices.
The skill system is extremely basic and you can’t really specialize unless you’re a class with expertise, and even then your options are kind of limited.
Magic items also have no real internal consistency. Why is the flying broom a like uncommon item despite being extremely powerful? Who knows.
Low level combat tends to also be very “I move and attack once”. Some DMs might give you bonuses for taking advantage of the environment, but that’s not well defined. It could be. It’s not. Also making a single attack that has a like 40% chance of doing absolutely nothing sucks.
The main strengths of DND are brand recognition, and it’s shallow enough that you can’t really fuck up a character. Every human fighter is basically the same mechanically, which means your idiot 10 year old brother can play. But that also means you don’t really have much depth to explore.
Pretty much every other part of the game is bad, under baked, or not suited for general purpose RPG stuff.
If you want a dnd like experience Pathfinder is your bet, it’s got a lot more rules to it but if you read them you’ll understand why. You can read them for free on aonprd.com by the way. Pathfinder gives you far more creative freedom than 5e while still being relatively tight.
My person recommendation for newbies to the hobby is Chronicles of Darkness. It’s way cheaper than 5e too, if you stick to a single splat, think something like a race expanded out into a full game; vampires, werewolves, mages, changelings, humans who hunt monsters, mutants, things like that. The games are narrative focused but don’t neglect combat (like 5e neglects narrative).
it’s got a more free form point buy system, instead of leveling up and all your dice rolls just get better you get to put experience into whatever skill/ability you want to be better at or perk you want to have.
it’s mechanics are genuinely simple, almost everything in the game is handled with the same kind of roll; you and your dm picks a skill (let’s say crafting) and an ability (like 5e’s ability scores, let’s say intelligence) for whatever you want to do then you roll however many d10s as points you have in those scores.
it’s setting is easier to understand, it’s just modern day earth with a magical underground, that makes it way easier to know how much any given thing would cost or where you gotta go to do something. There are lots of weird things going on, but a new player doesn’t need all of those and has plenty of information to be grounded otherwise.
it gives you lots of things to work with (like bloodlines for vampires or groups to join as anything else) but also explicitly encourages you and your dm to create new things with the base stuff as guidelines.
A few other recommendations; world of darkness is my preferred game, so i gotta mention it. Gurps is the most open game I’ve ever played, you can do literally anything.
Pathfinder is the “we have both kinds of music: country and western” answer. I think pf 2nd edition is probably the best bet if you want to stay in the genre. I haven’t played it but I’ve heard good things.
One thing I didn’t touch on in my rant is genre. If you are trying to do something that isn’t a dungeon crawl, probably don’t use DND.
I personally really like Fate. It’s more in line with how I imagine RPGs should go. Very narrative, lots of creative freedom. If you want a really crunchy system with lots of rules, it’s not for you.
You know how sometimes people talking about DND will be like “ah yes my character will really come online when I hit 7th level as a monk paladin bard”? That’s kind of nonsense. In fate if you wanted to be a righteous rockstar with a mean left hook, you could just write down “Rocker on a mission from God” as your high concept. If everyone agrees that’s cool and they get it, you’re done. Character works in session 1.
DND also tends to make the players be very zoomed in on their characters. Some people like that. I prefer fate where it’s a little more zoomed out, and you’re expected to think about the scene and story. As a player you have input.
That said, blades in the dark is also pretty popular. I don’t like it for much less severe reasons than the problems I have with DND. It’s not a bad game, I don’t think, but there are some choices it made that I don’t enjoy.
1d20 + a modifier is how you eliminate flat probability, because you’re adding the modifier. DCs are set so that you nearly always succeed at a task that you’re good at.
What’s the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level spell? How many times you can feasibly use it. Or if you upcast, one die. This is probably the thing I like most about 5e compared to other systems.
Giving you a move every turn keeps combat more interesting than incentivizing you to stay still by treating it as any other action, IMO.
The modifier doesn’t make the probability less flat. You have an equal chance of getting every value on the die, so the worst and best outcome are equally likely. Compare to like 3d6. There’s only one way to roll a 3 [1,1,1], but a bunch of ways to roll an 8 ([4,3,1], [3,3,2], [6,1,1], etc)
Go look at anydice.com . The default should be 3d6 and you see a nice curve. Change it to 1d20 and it’s flat. 5% for everything. Change it to 1d20+5 and it’s still flat, just with bigger numbers.
Your odds of success change in that when you’re looking to roll a 15 you’re more likely to fail than when you’re looking for a 12, but at all times, for any check, you’re just as likely to get an extreme result as an average. That’s weird.
What’s the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level spell? How many times you can feasibly use it. Or if you upcast, one die. This is probably the thing I like most about 5e compared to other systems.
When you are creating a spell, how do you know what level it should be? How do you know what effects it should have? There’s some guidance in the DMG but it’s flimsy and not actually used by many of the canon spells. If you don’t care about being creative with magic then you might not care about this. To me it makes it feel very rigid and mechanical.
There are so many other ways you could do magic.
Giving you a move every turn keeps combat more interesting than incentivizing you to stay still by treating it as any other action, IMO.
What? My complaint wasn’t that you can move and attack. It’s that that’s typically all you do. You move 30’ and make a single attack. Go read “create an advantage” in the fate-srd for a glimpse of how things could be different. Some DMs will let you interact with the environment, but that’s highly DM dependent and uncodified.
At higher levels at least you tend to get more stuff you can do on your turn.
I think pf2e also changed it so you get 3 actions.
You have an equal chance of getting every value on the die, so the worst and best outcome are equally likely.
Yes, but only in a critical success and critical fail. If you’re supposed to always succeed because your character should be able to do the action successfully in their sleep, the DM isn’t even supposed to make you roll. The die may land on any value between 1 and 20, but if the DC is 10 and you have +7 to your roll, you’ve eliminated failures from 3-9 on the d20. I’m well aware of how the average chance of rolling a given number changes when rolling multiple dice, but I’m not sure why a 3d6 bell curve would be preferable to 1d20 when you’re only looking for a binary success or failure.
When you are creating a spell, how do you know what level it should be? How do you know what effects it should have? There’s some guidance in the DMG but it’s flimsy and not actually used by many of the canon spells. If you don’t care about being creative with magic then you might not care about this. To me it makes it feel very rigid and mechanical.
There are so many other ways you could do magic.
You could raise this about any card in Magic: The Gathering as well, and I think the answer is just “balance”. I don’t know that I’ve found myself in a position where we needed a spell to be created. For me at least, some amount of rigidity is very much appreciated on my end when the fiction involves literal magic, because it breaks the rigid laws of nature by definition.
What? My complaint wasn’t that you can move and attack. It’s that that’s typically all you do. … I think pf2e also changed it so you get 3 actions.
Someone described the PF2e 3 action mechanics to me, and there are parts of it that I like, but at the end of the day, it incentivizes different behaviors and isn’t necessarily better or worse. What would you like to do on your turn other than move and attack (which also ignores class-specific options you get for your bonus action, as well as other types of regular actions you might take for one reason or another)? What choices do you make differently when movement is treated equally to attacking as opposed to movement being use-it-or-lose-it? It affects how it feels, and it’s great that there are other systems to mix things up, but I like how 5e handles it.
Yes, but only in a critical success and critical fail. If you’re supposed to always succeed because your character should be able to do the action successfully in their sleep, the DM isn’t even supposed to make you roll. The die may land on any value between 1 and 20, but if the DC is 10 and you have +7 to your roll, you’ve eliminated failures from 3-9 on the d20. I’m well aware of how the average chance of rolling a given number changes when rolling multiple dice, but I’m not sure why a 3d6 bell curve would be preferable to 1d20 when you’re only looking for a binary success or failure.
I forgot to bring up in my rant that DND has no concept of “degree of success” outside of unique effects like the sprite’s poison. So that sucks, too.
I would prefer rolls were weighted towards the average instead of “any result is equally likely”. Imagine you have a wizard and a fighter. They are trying to figure out some arcane riddle. The wizard rolls at +5 (16 int, proficiency). The fighter at +0. They’re looking to hit DC 15, a tricky but not excessive target.
The fighter has a 25% to hit that. The wizard has like a 45% to just flub it. That feels weird to me. I want the wizard to have more reliable outcomes, and less zany “I rolled a 2 lol I can’t read today”.
A dice pool gives you more consistent results.
I also forgot to bring up DND has no concept of fail forward or succeed at a cost.
And I forgot to bring up how insane it is to still have “16 strength is a +3 bonus”.
You could raise this about card in Magic: The Gathering as well, and I think the answer is just “balance”. I don’t know that I’ve found myself in a position where we needed a spell to be created. For me at least, some amount of rigidity is very much appreciated on my end when the fiction involves literal magic, because it breaks the rigid laws of nature by definition.
You’ve never wanted to create your own spell. That’s surprising. There are many spells to pick from, so I guess that could be.
Even discarding the “make your own spell effects” for the moment, the fact that they all work basically the same is boring. Declare your action, check off the spell slot box.
Off the top of my head you could do like
every spell cast in the scene has some effect
increase failure rate
increase potency
some spells have preconditions
require specific actions
spell C requires B and A to be cast first
spell requires blood drawn from the victim first
context (phase of moon, for example)
spells must be made very specific for their targets and outcomes ahead of time. You don’t prepare fireball. You prepare “Blow up Carl”.
You could build whole classes, whole games, around that shit, and I just popped that out without any real thought. DND magic by comparison is extremely bland, safe, and mechanical. None of that is how you would typically describe magic.
Someone described the PF2e 3 action mechanics to me, and there are parts of it that I like, but at the end of the day, it incentivizes different behaviors and isn’t necessarily better or worse. What would you like to do on your turn other than move and attack (which also ignores class-specific options you get for your bonus action, as well as other types of regular actions you might take for one reason or another)? What choices do you make differently when movement is treated equally to attacking as opposed to movement being use-it-or-lose-it? It affects how it feels, and it’s great that there are other systems to mix things up, but I like how 5e handles it.
I don’t know what I said that has you stuck on literal movement. I must have said “move” when I meant “take your turn” at some point. Moving in space isn’t that important.
Anyway. First off, making a single attack is boring. Especially when you play with slow players. Especially when you miss and nothing happens. They should probably get rid of missing as a common possibility, come to think of it.
You get like a minute of activity and then wait 10 minutes for everyone else to go. There’s not really much tactical or narrative depth. You don’t really get to decide much. Especially if you’re not using flanking rules.
Something where you can make decisions and tradeoffs might be nice. Some sort of action point pool where you can decide how much goes into offense vs how much you keep for defense. Or something like fate’s “create an advantage” where you can do something to set up someone (maybe future you) for a slam dunk. Some sort of succeed at a cost mechanic, perhaps.
Or even just giving multiple attacks earlier would help. The odds shift towards “maybe something will happen” then.
I also forgot to rant about hit points. That’s a classic topic though you’ve probably read it before. But man, playing a game where health is constrained makes so much more sense to me. None of that “this bandit is fifth level so he can take 5 axe blows” weirdness.
Let me know if I missed replying to anything important. Doing this on my phone is hard.
I want the wizard to have more reliable outcomes, and less zany “I rolled a 2 lol I can’t read today”.
But in that example, it’s not that he can’t read today, it’s that in this case, he failed to decipher the riddle, and you or the DM role play exactly why that is.
A dice pool gives you more consistent results.
Which is why damage works that way in 5e. It was a conscious decision. I don’t see what benefit there is for a consistent bump in the middle of your dice results when you’re looking for success or failure, other than the fact that d6 dice are far more common to have on hand than d20.
And I forgot to bring up how insane it is to still have “16 strength is a +3 bonus”.
This is one of the few things in 5e I’d actually say I have a problem with. I understand that PF2e flattened this, which is good.
You could build whole classes, whole games, around that shit, and I just popped that out without any real thought. DND magic by comparison is extremely bland, safe, and mechanical. None of that is how you would typically describe magic.
But predictable mechanics mean that I can plan tactically, and I like the tactical battle map aspect of RPGs. That goes in to your ability to miss an attack as well. You can’t guarantee success, but you can influence your odds in a bunch of ways and take critical chances when they matter most.
You get like a minute of activity and then wait 10 minutes for everyone else to go.
This may vary by DM, but I’m still actively engaged in deducing HP, AC, and any other relevant values about the things we’re fighting while it’s not my turn, and our DM accommodates us doing that.
But in that example, it’s not that he can’t read today, it’s that in this case, he failed to decipher the riddle, and you or the DM role play exactly why that is.
That’s thin meat for roleplaying, and probably discouraging for the wizard who wants to be smart.
I don’t see what benefit there is for a consistent bump in the middle of your dice results when you’re looking for success or failure,
I like being consistently good at stuff. Every time I flub it on like a 5 I’m annoyed. Like, this is my character’s high concept why do I still have a huge chance of beefing it. With, again, little to no mechanics to succeed at a cost or fail forward.
I don’t feel the same way when a dice pool betrays me. If I roll [6, 2, 5, 4, 7] in Mage I can look at it and go “wow, I guess I fucked up”. Feels different when it’s just 1d20 comes out with a 3.
But predictable mechanics mean that I can plan tactically,
You can have understandable mechanics with the stuff I described. And about as predictable as regular DND, where people can pass or fail checks.
Some of what I described would open whole new tactical fronts. Like, if you have spell sequences, you’d want to consider how far to let an enemy go before you really need to deal with them. Or if you want to try to plan around your wizard using them.
Anything where the spell doesn’t fire instantly also opens new fronts.
I also forgot to complain how magic doesn’t get interrupted in 5e. You used to be able to interrupt casters by getting up in their face. I see why they removed it- players don’t like it, too hard, losing your spell sucks- but it removed an important depth.
All of this would kind of be dragged down by spells-per-rest, but that’s a separate topic .
You can’t guarantee success, but you can influence your odds in a bunch of ways
5e has vanishingly few ways of influencing the odds. No flanking. Expensive aid-another/teamwork. No situational bonuses. Few resources to dip into. I’m assuming a party that’s like levels 1-5 because that’s where most people play, and without a lot of magic items because that’s the default game assumption. Because the magic item rules are so thin, you can actually patch a lot of these problems with items. But that’s a patch.
This may vary by DM, but I’m still actively engaged in deducing HP, AC, and any other relevant values about the things we’re fighting while it’s not my turn, and our DM accommodates us doing that.
This is extremely metagamey, and not very interesting to me. Some DMs just tell you the numbers. And even so, that’s only so much you can do until you figure it out.
Compare Fate for example. You can defend someone else on their turn. Shit, I forgot, DND doesn’t even have this concept. But yeah, in Fate you’re engaged when other people are going because you might need to leap in to defend them, or spend a fate point to help them out. That’s engaging with the game a lot more than “I wonder what their AC is?”
I think at this point we might have to chalk this up to we want different things from games, and have different preferences. Some people like mayonnaise. That’s okay.
That’s thin meat for roleplaying, and probably discouraging for the wizard who wants to be smart.
You still get to be smart most of the time due to where you put your points and proficiencies, but you’re not all-knowing.
I like being consistently good at stuff.
But that makes you consistently middle of the road. The 1d20 still has that modifier to make you consistently good.
You used to be able to interrupt casters by getting up in their face. I see why they removed it- players don’t like it, too hard, losing your spell sucks- but it removed an important depth.
I don’t like it for similar reasons. It’s that thing where you said sometimes you miss, but I think it feels worse.
5e has vanishingly few ways of influencing the odds. No flanking. Expensive aid-another/teamwork. No situational bonuses. Few resources to dip into.
We play with +2 flanking rules. There are situational advantage rolls and such. Classes start with their resources quite early on.
You can defend someone else on their turn. Shit, I forgot, DND doesn’t even have this concept.
You can ready an action to trigger under certain conditions.
Some people like mayonnaise.
A ton of people like mayonnaise. I’m really not trying to pick a fight with you, and I appreciate this discussion, but you’ve been trying to say how bad mayonnaise is this whole time when I like mayonnaise, haha. At other times, I’ll be interested in other condiments too, but mayonnaise is good on a lot of food, and it’s easy to come by.
Plot twist: I like mayonnaise. To extend this metaphor, I’m just sick of it after eating nothing but mayo for a few years.
I appreciate you being patient. I’m not the most persuasive writer (especially on my phone), but I hope at least some of what I wrote gave you stuff to think about.
Ultimately, if you’re having fun with your group that’s what matters most. It sounds like you are. Would you have more or less fun with a different system? Maybe. I think it’s good to try different stuff, but the primary goal remains having fun with friends.
It’s just that when I’ve seen so many problems in other systems that this one solves, it’s astounding that someone can say the Larian DNA is the only thing making BG3 playable, haha.
Hold on, you’ve said a lot of stuff that just reads as wrong, uninformed, or overly generous, no offense, but there is one specific thing I’m zeroing in on here; you are just as likely to fail at something you are supposedly good at as you are to fail. The game is literally designed for that, the designers have gone on record as working to bake randomness in at the base level and prevent your character from being able to be genuinely good at something. The dice mechanics in 5e are terrible and indictive of why 5e is the worst game I’ve ever played (out of like maybe 10)
I’m currently in a Pathfinder campaign that kinda discourages specialization in skills due to going for harder combat, but there are things my character is genuinely good at. I’ve got a better than even chance of success in those things, hell for some of them i can remove randomness altogether and some tasks are literally impossible to fail. That feels good.
You are not just as likely to fail as you are to succeed at a DC 10 check in a skill you have proficiency in, and I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Why are you seriously doing anything that requires you to operate on the lowest level? What possible reason does a great mage have investigating a lowly flame cantrip? Why is a skilled thief trying to pick the lock on a child’s toy? The things set at dc 10 are things you out grow once you reach your first class level.
I’m not sure why there would be a lock on a child’s toy, but if there was, going by the table in the handbook, it would probably be closer to a 5 than a 10. A great mage would investigate something far beneath them if it helped their party advance their goals and they were the most likely to be able to do it. Just like someone who’s a great liar would have a far easier time convincing a naive person of the lie. It happens. They wouldn’t choose to not speak to that person just because they’re too easy to convince. And it’s why of course you’re more likely to succeed at something you’re good at, so I have no idea how you came to the conclusion you did about D&D’s skill checks.
Because those aren’t challenges you put towards an adventuring party. There is a level of scaling that you must implement to keep a game even vaguely interesting, if i put something so banal in front of any decent player they’d keep moving and look for the real hook.
So to be clear, if you get skill checks that your character is too good at, it’s because the DM sucks, but if you play this other system where you can have skill challenges that are impossible to fail, that’s because the system is better than D&D? I’m sorry, but you make no sense. I think we’re done here. I think I know why you found D&D to be the worst RPG system you’ve ever played.
it’s an aggressively mediocre system that’s had years of a huge community polishing it to a mirror shine.
You can praise it for the community content, or go off-book like you can with any other system, but that’s applicable to any system with the same community size.
Whatever you look for in it it’s lacking in comparison to another system. Tactical combat? PF2e. Rules light? Worlds without number.
It’s a decent middle ground of a system only because of community hard work. But that’s only for the GM side. Players still need to deal with the poor character creation, unless they get a lot of support from their GM.
Can you explain why? It’s fast, sure, but it’s simultaneously the most important character design choice you can make and also cripplingly absent of actual choices.
Rather than front-loading decisions in character creation, you get a bunch of more interesting choices to make at each level up, including an elegant multiclass system. In other systems, I feel like the only interesting things you get at level ups are just a few points here and there, and you already made all of your most important choices in the hours you spent creating your character. In 5e, just about every time I level up, I feel like I found a new gear to shift into. As a Fighter, for instance, there are tons of interesting choices to make at level 3 just within the Battle Master subclass, let alone other subclasses. The 5e rules sure aren’t perfect, and I definitely haven’t sampled every RPG system out there, but given that they all had old D&D rules to learn from and solve problems within, I think 5e solved a ton of them in really clever ways compared to others that I’ve tried. Character creation is just one of them.
Many classes do not get any choices at many levels. Sometimes the choices are thin.
Also calling 5e’s multi classing system elegant is extremely generous. It works, some of the time, but it’s extremely prone to making weaker characters with the occasional high power interaction.
Fate is an elegant system.
Also class-and-level is only one way to make a game. You could just not do that and open up whole new worlds.
Many classes do not get any choices at many levels. Sometimes the choices are thin.
True. But I’m also playing with Xanathar’s and Tasha’s, and with a choice of so many classes, you tend to gravitate towards the more interesting ones, so if one class is a dud, it doesn’t weigh too heavily on the game when there are more interesting choices available.
Also class-and-level is only one way to make a game. You could just not do that and open up whole new worlds.
You can, but it’s not an inherent downside to have classes like this either. The things they’re allowed to do and not allowed to do create some clear strengths and weaknesses.
In comparison to other games I’ve played I find this the opposite. Proficiency and ability scores basically never change after creation. And level ups allow for very very little decisions and distinction other than class.
To each their own on BG3, I used to play number of tabletop RPG games (many years ago now but a variety) and to me BG3 gives you enough options to feel like you can play as your character rather than just walk between combats, as well as avariety of ways to solve issues. Watching YouTube plays amazes me on the says other people solve the issue. I also used to play the old DnD PC games and it feels much better from my perspective, so that’s probably sways me.
I can see your view but to me BG3 is more intended as a single player game, especially with the companion interactions, so I can see why multiplayer would be lacking. Thankfully I haven’t had many bugs but have heard of them. For reference I have about 120 hours after trying beta a few goes and only a bit in act 2 so it’s a favorite of mine and am biased.
Thank you for the recommendation on the mod, I will definitely give that a try and see how the game plays. I keep meaning to reinstall anyways and new mods always give more incentive.
One huge advantage Larian had was years of experience making games in this genre, and I doubt many other studios have that sort of corporate knowledge. Obsidian may be the only sizable one that comes close. Maybe Beamdog too, as they are responsible for the Enhanced Editions of all the old Infinity Engine games, including some original content.
Please don’t let Beamdog near it. I like the UI and QoL improvements in the EEs and all, but by god they should not be writing for a mainline BG entry.
What’s up with Obsidian these days? Outer Worlds was a really fun empty box. I enjoyed it like a Fallout game, but after ~30 hours I was done. The hype for that game was setting it up to be “the better Fallout”, but alas, the whole thing just felt rushed and empty to me.
I love their old games and I’m tentatively excited about OW2, but I’d be lying if I said I haven’t lost some faith.
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