Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate III by Larian Studios - Early Access announcement on June 13th

Technically, you are correct. In practice though - bitch, please. "Rebalanced encounters" usually means slapping few more mobs here and/or there (sometimes on the second turn) and I'm not sure about AI improvements, it's still trying rather to entertain, not to create challenge. Focusing summons, collecting AoO, casting fancy shit instead of finishing some of your party members off...

 

The hardest games to get through are the games that don't appeal to us.

 

Exactly that.
5E completely blows at offering player choices in character builds in actual rules. Weapons? Automatically given by class. Skills? You select what skills you are "good" at and those will have higher rolls. Stats? Have always been a pseudo-choice in DnD.
Feats? There are not even 60 of them in total, spread over multiple books: https://www.aidedd.org/dnd-filters/feats.php
And all they really do is reinforce an already existing strength of a character, not adding anything really interesting.
It really is as I said, you make two choices, one at level 1, another at level 3, and the rest of the time character advancement is pretty much autopilot - though spellcasters do get to make some kind of choice more often...*

The only way to spice things up and realize non-standard character concepts is multiclassing, and that really does allow for some flexibility.
However, I never liked multiclassing, as it always ends up with a character that is simply less good at what they do primarily than a single-classed character.
And fighter2/wizard4/rogue8 reads like some chemical formula, not something that represents a character to roleplay...
I guess that's a downside of a system so heavily focused on classes instead of being freeform, but even then 3.5E managed to do it better.

Combat itself is actually pretty good in 5E - overly simple with its advantage/disadvantage system, sure, but it has a good flow and is pretty fast.
That's why I'm actually looking forward to this, I can see an adaptation working fairly well with good encounter design. And in a combat-focused PC game, I don't really care much about the "roleplay" factor to begin with. I mostly just want to see builds in action.

* This is quite the tangent, but I'm convinced by now that this incredible ease of creating characters has lead to the phenomenon of online PnP (via roll20, etc.) having crazy problems of finding stable groups. People just drop out after a session or two like crazy. Ghosting groups is more normal than actually sticking to a group.
And with character creation taking mere minutes, it's not a wonder. Not like you are losing any investment of time when you just drop out of a group, no dedication required.
This is really something I witnessed only while playing 5E. Other, more complicated and involved systems, do not have this problem and generally have way more reliable players.

 

you don’t know how stuff work you just google and read stuff you have no idea how it work and why.

No this is :

“we release a new class every 1-2 years or a book with new subclasses after multiple beta version, beta testing and feedbacks from the community instead of rushing new products with zero testing just for printing a new book”

 

You know what happen when a DM kill a player character?

nothing, the player just take another character from the pile and play it.

 

There, there.
I'm sure someone will read your blog.
Eventually.

 

You are just butthurt that you lack this authoritative retrospective!

 

cRPG adaptation of PnP rules is going to be a tricky proposal no matter what. And parts where PnP systems indulge in highly complicated rules are not necessarily the parts where cRPGs need highly specific ones.
At least there is hope that with simpler ruleset there will be less to unfuck for cRPG adaptation.

You might be projecting.

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You won't out-sperg me dweeb-boy so don't even try.

 

It's one of those things 90% of the Codex just doesn't grok.

 

Muh,most times i just play as 18 in everything,after all i like to roleplay my self. Sad that in the modern D&D games you have set amount of points and have to cheat for the 18 in everything. In the older ones i could just spend half an hour rerolling shit till i get it.

 

Yes, your penchant for cheating is well documented, fanta.

 

Post your times for rolling 18/00 fighter/druid.

 

DM can always crush you. DMs are tools for crushing you for stupid non-mechanical decisions, actually, mechanical ones can be handled by mechanics just fine.

But if you prefer playing with a dumbfuck DM, that's fine - birds of a feather and all that.

 

The way I view it, adventuring is a profession with a very low Darwin threshold. The stupid die. The normies die. You have to be exceptional in either mind or body to survive the adventuring life. That is why you are adventurers. That is why you solve things that others can't. They are either incapable or dead (same thing, usually).

If you want to be a dramaqueen and play a crippled, blind commoner with a tragic backstory, Darwin gets you. Without pity or remorse. Nature is a bitch, and you just offered yourself up as a sacrifice. Congrats! Now, roll up a new character and wait until we have a chance to introduce him.

 

You can change "5E" with "AD&D" and everything would still stand true. The only difference is that in AD&D you can pick weapon pips, but calling that "character building" or "customization" is a bit of a stretch.

The occasional bit of insight from someone that has barely any experience on the matter is always interesting, but seldom useful. You talk about "DMs", but how many DMs have you actually met? Because I've been constantly playing D&D for almost 20 years and half the DMs I have met don't have any problem with killing characters if players are okay with it (at least a third of them don't even care about players' opinion on the matter).

 

If you want to play a crippled, blind commoner, the campaign won't revolve around killing, duh.

 

One time a player of mine played a blind crippled commoner (3.5 has the commoner class, which gives you nothing from level 1 to 20) and took every prestige class, feat and archetype that could improve his survivability.

The commoner is so weak that he satisfies the Survivor prestige class' requirements with a single level (while you usually need at least 5 levels in any other class). The Survivor gets no offensive abilities at all, but in 5 levels he gains access to high level defensive features (stuff like the Damage Reduction of a 19th level Barbarian and Improved Evasion, that a Rogue can take only at level 13). The character was useless, but he was able to stumble through the first part of the adventure without dying.

 

Then, the system you want is World of Darkness, not DnD.

 

I have "DM'd" a campaign where all characters were poor commoners and the campaign goal was paying the feudal lords' demands for the month. I have a friend who is obsessed with mundane shit in his fantasy.

 

Cheating is irrelevant,winning is important in life .

Rogue for life.

 

Not gonna lie, that does sound somewhat interesting for a session or two.

 

In BG1/2 you also had next to no character building choices after you picked your class and stats.
I like the simple approach if you have a larger party. Skill points are pretty much pointless in party
based games. I haven't seen a game where you couldn't cover all skills as a party anyway. So far
it sounds like a 5'th edition based game will be much closer to the originals than the third edition
games were.

 

You'd be surprised what desperate people in poverty are willing to do and get themselves into.

 

Baldur's Gate is the best adaptation of D&D rules outside of ToEE.

Way better than Goldbox, which is D&D-lite in comparison.

I challenge anyone on the 'Dex to go against my retrospective; I will light you up on my blog.

 

Nobody cares about your blog.

I love BG as much as anyone, but the Gold Box games are objectively more faithful because they are Turn-Based.

I’m no TB purist, but it’s retarded to claim that BG is a more faithful adaptation of D&D than the GoldBox games. I’ll do you one better, Dark Sun. Also turn-based, and a faithful adaptation of D&D.