Baldur's Gate RTwP vs TB in Baldur's Gate 3 - Discuss!

[Atchodas]

but round-based RtwP is literally TB in disguise.

this is very much incline

 

[Atchodas]

Never seen such deep defense of RtwP, "Liking TB turns you on literally a cuck." Keep the butthurt flowing guise, pretty entertaining.

who is butthurt now

 

[Saerain]

I thought TB died last year.

 

[PrK]

Yeah when you play BGT with a full SCS installation all you can think is what a nice hack & slash experience this is all my casualfag friends will love it..

 

[Elex]

the point of 5e is being simple and immediate.
turn are faster.

5e is made for be turn based without being boring and slow.

 

[Squid]

RTwP is my favorite. Old people like TB because it's slow and they can't keep up with real time combat with pause. These people are known as boomers.

I can play fast paced games just fine but I prefer turn based combat. RTwP just feels bad compared to TB.

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

When a nest of rats have nothing left to eat, they will consume each other. Such is this thread.

 

[BING XI LAO]

Judging by the typical critique of RTwP most TB boomers don't know what autopause is.

 

[Kaivokz]

I like how discussions of RTwP vs TB always bring the agents of decline out of their hiding places and the emotional response they have against TB in favor of RTwP.

What emotional response? I and others gave clear examples of things TB cannot do or does poorly. The appeals to emotion are from people like you who compare RTwP to the literal incarnation of decline.

Chess is an interesting abstraction of combat, but it is incredibly simple in its principles. This, you might say, is part of the beauty of chess. It is also why chess was one of the first games to have a computer totally dominate any human player, no matter how talented.

Turn-based games with individual units fragment the flow of time, thus diluting the tactical challenge into smaller parcels which are easy to process and understand. Chess rewards foresight, planning, and knowledge of pieces and common strategies. However, the old image we have of a commander playing “chess” with his troops on some war board is a drastic oversimplification, and even then, the further you get down the chain of command, the more real tactical combat is dissimilar to chess. When you are talking about an individual squad or party, the sort of tactical thinking used by each member is, of course, not what we are talking about (that’s more like a co-op action game), but the tactical decisions of whoever is leading them—whether on the field or from a remote location—do not resemble chess, partly for the reason that the tactical decisions of RTwP and the early phase-based combat of D&D do not resemble modern TB and 5th edition.

If you want to say chess is more fun, fine. But to say TB is more tactical because it is “pure and easy” makes about as much sense as saying you are being more tactical when you sit around playing chess than a special forces team is when carrying out an operation.

 

[Lacrymas]

What emotional response?

You do know that butthurt old failing people like you that constantly screech that X game doesn't cater to their TB fetish are turning people away from the whole TB thing. By this point i am so annoyed by losers like you pushing their garbage that i do hope the whole TB genre dies in flames and we never see another TB game,only to see you cry in the corner,broken and miserable!

Judging by the typical critique of RTwP most TB boomers don't know what autopause is.

Also, most examples given of "depth", I hate. Who the hell came up with attacks of opportunity? What is the point of it, other than being some annoying mechanic nobody cares about, that brings absolutely nothing of value? TB combat murders players with its overhead in party based games.
[...] Would take RTwP over that crap anytime. ANYTIME!

The last one reads like a strong preference for RTwP with quite a few spicy and emotionally charged words in there. This is not only now, I've noticed it quite a lot. The button crusades don't help either.

Anyway, there is nothing "more challenging" in RTwP since you can pause every millisecond and react to whatever is happening. RTwP is reactionary, TB requires foresight and good control of the battlefield if it's that sort of game. The fragmentation of time is literally a non-issue and has never been an issue, I'd even argue that RTwP is the thing which fragments time because it's asynchronous, there are still turns but they are chaotically dispersed for each individual unit on the battlefield, effectively making them act outside of each other's time. Turn-based gives every unit the same amount of time which can be imagined to be taking place simultaneously, just abstracted for our benefit. When there are 3 units vs 1, the 1 unit can't react to all of them at once (which is one the criticism of turn-based combat, that units wait for each other to do their turn, which is not true) because the actions of the 3 happen at the same time if it wasn't abstracted. Nobody on the battlefield is "waiting" for anything.

 

[ItsChon]

People greatly exaggerate the problems with RTwP. As a general rule, I prefer turn-based games over RTwP games any day of the week, but RTwP, as done by the IE games, is not a bad system, and I'd say the vast majority of the complaints people have it with it is that they're fucking trash at the RTwP system.

And, all that aside, someone said it best earlier in this thread. Baldur's Gate as a series is personified by the RTwP mechanic infused with a D&D ruleset. To do anything else would be to move away from a fundamental part of the series.

RTwP is reactionary, TB requires foresight and good control of the battlefield if it's that sort of game.

This is a gross mischaracterization of RTwP. Yes, there are reactionary elements as the game does play out in real-time, but to pretend that RTwP doesn't also require good foresight and control of the battlefield is disingenuous.

 

[Lacrymas]

The lack of AoOs in the IE games (they aren't that much of an issue either way) and the existence of boots of speed makes battlefield control and foresight ...less than required and present, let me tell you.

 

[ItsChon]

The lack of AoOs in the IE games (they aren't that much of an issue either way) and the existence of boots of speed makes battlefield control and foresight ...less than required and present, let me tell you.

Regardless of AoO's and the boots of speed, try telling me that battlefield control and foresight aren't required in some of the more difficult fights in the IWD and BG series, especially with less than optimized parties.

 

[BING XI LAO]

RTwP is the thing which fragments time because it's asynchronous, there are still turns but they are chaotically dispersed for each individual unit on the battlefield, effectively making them act outside of each other's time. Turn-based gives every unit the same amount of time which can be imagined to be taking place simultaneously, just abstracted for our benefit.

Woah
RTwP is the real turn based and TB is the real RTwP!
*brain begins expanding drastically*

 

[Tigranes]

People greatly exaggerate the problems with RTwP. As a general rule, I prefer turn-based games over RTwP games any day of the week, but RTwP, as done by the IE games, is not a bad system

This. For an actually broken system, see nuFallout VATS; for a truly clunky implementation that militates against tactical play, see KOTORs.

As I've argued a million times on the Codex, RTwPs are best played as a variant of turn-based tactical systems, where you control the entire party and actively make use of pause to do so. Silly quirks like "skateboarding" notwithstanding, it can work fairly well and has a place in the wider RPG ecosystem.

Surprisingly, I've found over the years that quite a few Codexers try to play RTwP games more like action games, controlling one person, pausing rarely, and leaving the rest up to AI. I would imagine the result is a boring clusterfuck that is hardly worth one's time. But it's not necessary to play that way.

 

[Lacrymas]

Regardless of AoO's and the boots of speed, try telling me that battlefield control and foresight aren't required in some of the more difficult fights in the IWD and BG series, especially with less than optimized parties.

You can almost always reposition or run out of sight of a mage casting every spell which isn't instant (and you can sometimes juke that too if you can count 6 seconds after the previous spell), especially with Haste and boots of speed, so the only thing that is required is noticing someone is casting something. In TB, you have to take the brunt of everyone's turn and live with the consequences of previous turns, especially in terms of positioning. There is no "kiting" in TB either, in the IE games you could take a mage with boots of speed and zap around kiting mobs, stopping each 6 seconds to cast a spell and then continue with the kiting. I've used that to surprisingly good effect against SCS Sarevok in BG1. You effectively ignore the turns of the mobs which are kited.

Battlefield control and foresight requirement in RTwP heavily depend on the surroundings, not so much the encounter design.

 

[BING XI LAO]

RTwP is reactionary, TB requires foresight and good control of the battlefield if it's that sort of game.

Much as I am on the RTwP side, I do think this is true. In RTwP you can react the moment something goes wrong unless the game has a lot of stuns, roots, invisibility etc built into it. Which they should do, but generally don't. I 100% agree about running around endlessly in BG being a bad joke.
Whereas with TB, you must commit to things. When you press end turn you are saying 'I am okay with standing here as I am, while everything else takes a round of actions.' TB games also probably have a far higher higher damage-to-HP ratio (otherwise they would be insufferably slow) than RTwP games, and those two things combine to feel pretty hardcore. I like Underrail a lot.

But at the same time that can also be extremely annoying in ways that do not add to tactical depth. I was playing Geneforge 1 recently, I had 7 critters under my command and a battle started in a thin corridor. I am not exaggerating - their order in the corridor was the OPPOSITE of their turn order, so they ALL blocked each other in for fucking forever while ranged enemies plinked away at them. I wanted to give up, so I did for a few weeks. RTwP would never have that problem and it also wouldn't need to add some janky, arbitrary, band-aid position-switching mechanic (which I have abused in another TB game to move people behind cover when it's not their turn).

Edit - bit of maths on that geneforge situation - moving those 7 critters out of that chokepoint would've required 21 end turn commands and 7 move commands. In RTwp it would've required 1 (one) move command.

IMO the inherent casualness and reactive style of RTwP can be fixed through things like attacks of opportunity, stuns, slows, etc (used by enemies that is), by the big 'save' spells having long cast time, by enemies attacking out of invisibility, and so on. Whereas the problems of TB require speeding up animations to the point they look dumb or don't really exist (cheatengine speedhack is NECESSARY for Underrail unless you are a level 20 autist), and a load of arbitrary mechanics that add to burden of knowledge without adding to tactical depth like the Wait command and position switching to fix things which are never an issue in RTwP.

 

[Kaivokz]

What emotional response?

You do know that butthurt old failing people like you that constantly screech that X game doesn't cater to their TB fetish are turning people away from the whole TB thing. By this point i am so annoyed by losers like you pushing their garbage that i do hope the whole TB genre dies in flames and we never see another TB game,only to see you cry in the corner,broken and miserable!

Judging by the typical critique of RTwP most TB boomers don't know what autopause is.

Also, most examples given of "depth", I hate. Who the hell came up with attacks of opportunity? What is the point of it, other than being some annoying mechanic nobody cares about, that brings absolutely nothing of value? TB combat murders players with its overhead in party based games.
[...] Would take RTwP over that crap anytime. ANYTIME!

The last one reads like a strong preference for RTwP with quite a few spicy and emotionally charged words in there. This is not only now, I've noticed it quite a lot. The button crusades don't help either.

Fair enough, I guess I glossed over those, haha.

Anyway, there is nothing "more challenging" in RTwP since you can pause every millisecond and react to whatever is happening. RTwP is reactionary, TB requires foresight and good control of the battlefield if it's that sort of game. The fragmentation of time is literally a non-issue and has never been an issue, I'd even argue that RTwP is the thing which fragments time because it's asynchronous, there are still turns but they are chaotically dispersed for each individual unit on the battlefield, effectively making them act outside of each other's time. Turn-based gives every unit the same amount of time which can be imagined to be taking place simultaneously, just abstracted for our benefit. When there are 3 units vs 1, the 1 unit can't react to all of them at once (which is one the criticism of turn-based combat, that units wait for each other to do their turn, which is not true) because the actions of the 3 happen at the same time if it wasn't abstracted. Nobody on the battlefield is "waiting" for anything.

I think not being able to see how this doesn’t make sense is a symptom of experiencing this particular abstraction so frequently.

A fact of initiative TB systems is that units do wait. Units take individual turns and this abstraction changes the entire flow of decision making. Imagine a 5v5 brawl on initiative. One person takes their entire turn first. Now every player on the opposing team can make decisions about what they are going to do as if they effectively could see into the future and predict that person’s opening move with 100% accuracy. If the next three turns in initiative are the opposing team, they can gang up on that one person while the other 5 of his friends wait for their abstracted “simultaneous” turn.

The tactical experience is inherently different and RTwP is not just a worse TB. If you enjoy the tactical experience of TB more, you could argue why, but I don’t buy the argument that RTwP is somehow casual because it doesn’t follow the abstractions or chess.

 

[Lacrymas]

They can't see into the future because they can't prevent or somehow prepare themselves for the actions of the turn which has transpired. They see them happening in real time and react accordingly (with their own turn). But this is not an issue at all, no game in existence requires this kind of precise timing and calculations. Either way, the point is that all turns in a round take place at the same time for the actual participants in the battle.

 

[Valky]

Did the RTWP defenders come fresh in from the Watch?

 

[ItsChon]

All these people here larping like the BG series and IWD aren't top 10 RPGs can get the fuck out of my face and go back to playing hot garbage like Morrowind, FO:NV, Dark Souls, and TOW.

 

[Fairfax]

Are there any games that use a phase based system? It sounds pretty clunky but would have to see it in action.

The main concept (declaration phase->resolution phase) has examples like the Wizardry series, Dragon Quest up to IX, Frozen Synapse, Combat Mission, Laser Squad Nemesis, and The Last Remnant. However, AFAIK no digital game has implemented PB combat with individual initiative in resolution and tactical/free movement with a map. I suppose the closest thing is in The Last Remnant, but its combat has some unique mechanics and limited movement. You'd have to look into tabletop to see the type that was being discussed, like AD&D and oWoD.

the point of 5e is being simple and immediate.
turn are faster.

5e is made for be turn based without being boring and slow.

While it's faster than 3E and 4E, 5E is still relatively slow.

 

[Strange Fellow]

All these people here larping like the BG series and IWD aren't top 10 RPGs can get the fuck out of my face and go back to playing hot garbage like Morrowind, FO:NV, Dark Souls, and TOW.

Resident Zoomer

 

[Valky]

I'm not sure ItsChode is even old enough to have had enough time in his early life to play all of those games to completion yet.

 

[Strange Fellow]

However, AFAIK no digital game has implemented PB combat with individual initiative in resolution and tactical/free movement with a map.

Provided I'm understanding you correctly, Albion is one such game (though it's not good). Also Wasteland, technically speaking.