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

In bg3 upcasting will be in, a lot of stuff that older edition required a feat in 5e already work upcasting make the spell more powerfull (like finesse now is on the weapon itself, if a weapon have finesse it can be used with dex or str)

 

You are right. But powerful spells can only exist in a place where they are very limited. Having 1~4 casts of finger of death and it OhKilling enemies is one thing. Having a cast and then after few seconds in cooldown, another cast means that the spell needs to be nerfed.

WoTC already tried to make casters and martial more equals. With D&D 4e. But they tried by the worst way possible, by making casters weaker and more boring to play. Instead of martial more interesting. A high level Barbarian playing like Guts with Berserk armor would be so amazing. But i have no idea about how to translate it mechanic wise to P&P. Give deadly things like allowing barbarians to decapitate enemies, on a critical hit could be also amazing. Allowing supernatural warcries that forces the enemy to save or flee in fear would also fit the barbarian and be amazing.

You got the idea. I an 100% in favor of making martial classes more interesting to play. But 100% against making casters more boring.

I maxed my CHA. hu3hu3hu3. Just kidding, i also spended a lot of time discussing firearms on fallout new vegas. And one reason that i don't consider outer worlds extremely inferior to new vegas is not only because the story is just "corporations bad" instead a conflict among Mr House, Legion and NCR, each one with his own ideals but also because outer worlds weapons looks like toys. While new vegas has a lot of cool guns and cool ammo. You can have classy weapons like a 45-70 lever action brush gun, a fully auto 12 gauge shotgun with dragon breath rounds making it into a flamethrower, can use explosive ammo on anti materiel rifles...

 

The system you are creating actually consists of mechanics and fiction it accompanies. If your mechanics produces results that don't make sense in fiction you have effectively broken your game up into two completely disjoint segments and successfully prevented one from meaningfully affecting the other. That's where all sorts of shit videogame design (like "oh, you might have killed that character but I really need them for muh story so they will just appear for no reason, it's not that you will notice among all the other nonsense happening" or "what do you mean you wanted to approach that room carefully? cutscene ambush mode on") come from.
Good games try to integrate their mechanics and lore.
Bad games try to separate them.
Ugly games completely misunderstand the whole concept and serially murder and resurrect their goddess of magic.

We've been over BG being pretty shit already. Other than pissing off fagopoly I see no reason to reiterate.

What's your rationale for piling completely redundant and shit mechanics over good one?

Ham sandwich is an improvement over shit sandwich.
Shit and ham sandwich is not an improvement over just ham sandwich.

And I have now abridged yours to only the relevant part.

It's actually a fair point that Vancian system is only marginally less shitty and nonsensical than cooldowns (because in a way it is cooldowns, except the cooldowns in it last until rest and are on individual slots rather than spells themselves).

That's probably why, AFAIK the games started to move away from deeply nonsensical memorization interpretation to "preparation" where the spell is actually mostly cast during rest and "suspended", while actual casting merely finalizes it. That makes more sense, but at this point it pretty much becomes a crafting system (especially with components) in which wizards crafts their "ammo" during the rest.

Why? It sounds like something a perfectly sane and stable person would do.

What if two spells are very similar? What if they are different? What if you'd rather overexercise your spell muscle and risk it cramping on you than die? What if you want to use one muscle to exercise the cramped one to help it recover? You know why your analogy doesn't work?

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Because it's a shit analogy.

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Because cooldowns are a shit system for which good analogies don't exist, apart from a handful of highly specific cases.

Of course physical skills that we know don't work that way are a problem, but the main problem with cooldowns is that they are completely passive. They just happen in background.
Compare and contrast casting times when wizard is completely dedicated to that single spell he's casting. Meanwhile cooldowns (you could just as well replace them with warmups to fully parallel casting times and better contrast the two) are just ticking down whether the wizard is casting something else, just standing there, swinging stick, has been just knocked unconscious by ogre's club or is quietly wanking in the corner. They don't particularly pertain to neither the wizard nor anything else and that makes them artificial. If you put cooldown on some actual entity like gadgeteer's raygun or weather system in the surrounding area, or summoned being that needs to expend some of its own effort to break the barrier between realities, it then starts to make sense, but otherwise it just doesn't.

Again, wizard is doing the casting (time). A machinegun might be cooling down. But who or what cools down wizard's (fire) balls? Because we have established that the wizard is not doing it himself.

 

If you added casting times even the first casting would no longer be OP without necessarily nerfing the spell itself or making it unreliable via save-or-die.

 

Someone mentioned “why on sigil spell work the same?”

because the lady of pain and vecna.

google “Die Vecna Die!”

 

Ontopoly is a sadomasochist. He likes being butthurt, he likes to suffer and see Larian transform his precious franchise into whatever they want it to be. He enjoys the pain, he needs it because this butthurt is the only type of emotion he can get in his miserable existence. In his depraved mind it's better to feel something than nothing even if it's only pain...

 

Yep. But look to warlocks on 3.5e(not nwn2 which nerfed then to oblivion) and kineticists on pathfinder 1e/pathfinder kingmaker. A lot of DM's ban both classes because being able to permanently transform the enemy into a 1 HD toad(word of changing) with no limitation on spell slots is ludicrous OP. On 5e is different, DM's seems to be encouraging warlock play over wizard play...

"but 5e warlocks has at will invocations too" Yes, but they are not nowhere near powerful as the dead walk, unlimited undead creation, nor world of change, a unlimited save of else invocation, unlimited teleportation, unlimited tentacles, unlimited fly... Now, if you wanna do powerful stuff, you need to spend a spell slot like any other caster.

PS : Eldritch Glaive melee warlocks was amazing on 3.5e too. Not just traditional casters.

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With short rest abilities being per encounter, all spell slots of warlock that was per short rest will be per encounter on BG3 considering the lv cap. Imagine a fiend warlock casting fireball as a tier 5 spell every encounter...

 

I think that you could come up with any excuse of why it works like that as long as its written well. I'm not writer, evidently, so anything I come up will be shit, but I guess you could say that spells exist in a plane of its own, as "origin concepts" or something, that are infinite and able to create powerful reality breaking effects, and mage link their mind/soul to this plane, so when they use a spell they are summoning this concepts and manifesting them on our plane. Because it stress their link to the other plane, and the energy that can go through it is limited, they require a momentary rest. The stronger the spell, the more energy you require, explaining why bigger spells require more time. It is a natural occurrence, just like breathing, but needs to be trained and developed through years of meditation, study and such.

In a way is similar like how mana usually works, as magic energies that the mage has to absorb and recover in different manners, but instead of recovering magic energy, you restore your link to the plane of magic. I know is not really a good explanation, but what I wanted to say, is that I think you could come up with a good in-lore reason as to why it works in such a way.

The real issue lies with developers just neglecting to integrate their world with the mechanics of the game. I would say it is probably an issue of developing the gameplay system first, and then ignoring details like these when writing the lore of the game. Is there actually any game with cooldowns that tries to justify why their spells work in such a manner?

 

The spell relies on runes in the grimoire which disappear after usage.

 

It's not redundant. Casting time alone isn't sufficient limitator on its own. You need something else in combination with it. It does not have to be a cooldown mechanic, but something that does not allow you to throw spells out without due consideration.

I am thinking about slowly regenerating mana pool. You start with full mana and you can cast whatever you want, but each spell depletes your mana reserves (small spells deplete less mana, big spells deplete more). Each turn you get to roll a dice and add your INT to check out how much mana gets returned this turn. In addition, your mana pool dictates what is the strongest spell you can possibly cast. That's the rough idea.

 

Another problem with cooldowns, is that they provide incentive to use your spells/abilities with the longest cooldowns first. It's the most efficient output of power, since the sooner you use a spell, the sooner you can use it again. In a resource based system, the incentive is to use spells proportionate to the challenge.

 

You can have other resources to manage in addition to cooldowns, so that's not an unsolvable problem. You just have to make those resources matter.

 

It is redundant because cooldowns don't give you anything casting times don't already provide. If you need further limitation use some sort of resource or specific circumstances needed for casting.

That's pretty much your standard mana pool with regen (say, TES>3).

 

As far as caster supremacy, 5e is a very big improvement over 3.5e, but it still creeps in at higher levels. As far as making martials fun, they generally have a lot more than "attack or one specialized maneuver" (except maybe for a Champion-archetype Fighter) but of course that will depend on what options Larian decide to implement and how they decide to implement them.

 

If you already have a resource mechanic, then a cooldown becomes unnecessary. Placing too many restrictions on ability use is bothersome and can become very arbitrary. If a bunch of "tax mechanics" are deemed necessary to restrain a class or spell, then the fundamental design of said class or spell(s) should be reconsidered.

 

Thanks for the answer. I hope then that Larian takes this issue into consideration when adapting classes.

 

Even if you have other resources, cooldowns can still serve a purpose. Dragon Age: Origins without cooldowns would be a completely crazy shitshow, because they are fundamental to prevent you from going nova.

Also, D&D uses cooldowns sometimes, just not that frequently and almost exclusively for monsters abilities.

 

I've literally criticized being able to horde the supplies in late game in this very thread, although I don't expect you to have seen every message in all 600 pages. The rests wouldn't be unnecessary because it would mean recovering your spells and managing your resources, which is the whole point of both long and short rest mechanics. I would have preferred Pathfinder kingmaker to do something like Poe. Limit camp fires you can carry at once based on difficulty and if a dungeon is long enough that it needs more, they can hide them in the dungeon like they did in the Cyclops chapter. Would have been even better in kingmaker than Poe because you would be punished for walking back to town to get more by the whole time limit mechanics.

Saraven is literally defending the short rest decision right above you and saying short rests are useless anyways. I'm not making up anything. Maybe you're not that far into the shill machine yet but some of you cultists are.

 

The lv cap will gonna be 10. That means that the strongest evocation spell will be Cone of Cold(8d8), so will be no stop time, no Wish or similar spells(unless via scrolls)

If you take out cooldowns from any game designed around it, the game suddenly become a mess. This is why you can't just mod to remove CDs on game with it. The exception is the games that takes a system without cooldowns and had the (dumb) idea of putting cooldowns. Example? Sword Coast Legends and Low Magic Age.

Anyway, vancian magic system translates easily to computers. Is not like Mage the ascension or even certain vampire disciplines from vampire the masquarede and not only thaumaturgy. Even the more melee and shapeshift disciplines are hard to translate. Mask of 1000 faces for eg...

 

Like who? Expose them!

But seriously speaking - I am curious if you can name more than a single person (rusty).

 

Does it also explain why spells work the same everywhere else: Dragonlance, Darksun (minus the lifedrain part), Ravenloft etc?

 

Shadowfell still under influence of Mystra. Dragon lance IDK. Dark Sun, if tier 11 spells exists on Dark Sun setting, only the sorcerer kings knows it. And considering their age, i believe that they use a certain high tier magic to extend his life at expense of slaves. Arcane practitioners on dark sun are extremely rare, as preservers or defilers, but the Sorcerers Kings are the closest things to Gods.

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But only i would love to see less "Faerun low level adveture" and more unique things?

• Spelljammer
• A campaign on city of embers
• A aquatic campaign with arrogant chaotic Marids
• A Netheril campaign

Video games rarely explore this unique settings. The feyworld is very common on pathfinder but and i really wish to see abyss common on the next pathfinder and hope to see a little of Arvenus on Baldur's Gate 3.

 

Maybe D&D should have cooldowns considering how broken casters are in pretty much every version

 

I personally find that differentiating short rest as per encounter and long rest as camping within the framework of a turn-based game strikes a fair balance between maintaining a satisfying momentum in the combat system (game flow) and adhering to the rule-set that they have chosen to apply, in this case D&D 5e. I also appreciate an awareness from the developer in that one is first and foremost playing a video game and not an autistic simulation of P&P rules. If that makes me a shill then I will shill on buddy boy. I have never said that Larian is perfect or that this game will be. I bet you can't find any post in all of these +600 pages that someone share a sentiment akin to a "cultist" or "fanboy" but you are so wrapped up in your butthurt that you are incapable of seeing that.

 

I've checked and there actually are 10th level spells for Darksun, so that's checks out. As for Ravenloft, Shadowfell as in 4th edition and later didn't exist back in the ADnD and Ravenloft couldn't be connected to it back in those times.