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Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

Lacrymas

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There's also that check in New Vegas which makes the situation go worse for you if you pass it.
 

whydoibother

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There's also that check in New Vegas which makes the situation go worse for you if you pass it.
I wish there were more games that punish you for being a charismatic smartass. Passing a dialogue check, only for the other guy to go "well aint you a cocky little shit" or something, and drive the situation sour.
I know that technically that would be the outcome from FIALING the check, but in some situations, with it being adequately telegraphed of course (maybe some other NPC saying X doesn't like smooth talkers), succeeding in the check should result in the worst outcome. As it is right now, whenever I see an option to do a skill check against a skill I have high score for, I immediately do it, regardless of context. Its never bad to roll on a skill you have pumped up high in almost any game. Kind of like how in Mass Effect you pick paragon or renegade, and take all their prompts, even if they aren't what you'd necessarily want to do. Or in SWOTOR how you do all the light/dark side choices, regardless if its what you want, because you are light side and that's the light side choice. You are charisma-man, and this is the charisma-man dialogue, so click that.

What if there is some dialogue check against arcana or some other knowledge, and you proudly click and pass that, and the other guy immediately accuses you of being a witch and attacks? Stuff like that.
 

Child of Malkav

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There's also that check in New Vegas which makes the situation go worse for you if you pass it.
There was also Dean in Dead Money, which if you wanted to save him at the end you mustn't use any of the stat checks that come up during dialogue with him at any point during the DLC, basically playing dumb, because he had a fragile ego. Otherwise, when you get to the theatre and after some dialogue with him he becomes hostile automatically and tries to kill you.
 

Tacgnol

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There's also that check in New Vegas which makes the situation go worse for you if you pass it.

The DM threw a good one at us in our Strange Aeons AP in Pathfinder a while back.

We talked our way out of a combat in which we would have had the upper hand quite easily (tough combatant but without any support). The NPC then ambushed us later with strong reinforcements.

Bungling the checks the first time would have led to a much more straightforward combat encounter.
 

hell bovine

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A failure shouldn't necessarily lead to complete failure of the objective in all circumstances, maybe, for example,
Does it though? Take for example the tieflings vs. the goblin prisoner scene. You will need to kill the tieflings if you fail, but unless you let them run and alert the camp, this shouldn't be a problem. My party assassinated the tiefling leader with the camp remaining friendly, because as long as you kill out of sight, it doesn't turn the entire faction hostile. You can still get information from the goblin corpse via the speak with the dead spell. There are many ways into the goblin camp, so failing to save the goblin removes one.

Edit: Another example is the gith encounter. If you deceive them into leaving without combat, you will lose the map to the creche, since you get it from one of their corpses. So here being successful isn't the best option.
 
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Swen

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Swen Vincke, founder of Larian Studios, recently spoke to IGN about how Baldur's Gate 3 is going in Early Access, and what the developer has learned about its players. "They're all horny, I can tell you that," he said.

While we know that the RPG's most-romanced NPC is a human wizard who looks like a commercial for men's grooming products, apparently players have also been going out of their way to get with one of the villains, a dark elf named Minthara. "I can see how many people slept with Minthara", Vincke said, kind of creepily. "That's quite large, and to get there you have to be evil. There's certainly people that have had no moral scruples."

Baldur's Gate 3 contains a thorough variety of ways to be evil, even if it's not just for the sake of getting laid. Apparently the studio's writers had to be pushed into adding some of them. "The writers have a tendency of being good and not putting in the evil options," Vincke said. "We had to actually force them to go through everything and put in more contrasting options so that they could put the evil ones in there." But it is in the tradition of the series to have options for every alignment, even if being evil in the first two games did kind of suck. "For choice to be there, you need to have the ability to do good and evil and things in between," Vincke explained, "and edge cases, and stuff like that."



https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-developer-sums-up-its-players-theyre-all-horny
 

Lacrymas

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I don't think it's about horniness. I've said this before, but when I was still a teen I dabbled in romances in RPGs in order to explore my sexuality. Sexuality is not the right word, more like attractions, and how far I'm willing to go with particular people. Honestly, it helped me a lot, even though I knew they were kinda creepy even then. Not that I can speak for all people, but something tells me most do it due to these reasons and not due to horniness, which can be satisfied in other (more reasonable) ways.
 

Delterius

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Entre a serra e o mar.
broke - richard garriot talking about people genociding towns for exp

woke - swen vincke surprised people are evil for vagina

ascended - lacrymas analyzing the coming of age story of nerds
 
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Mebrilia the Viera Queen

Guest
Oh God that game i am so glad it flopped what a mockery!
 

Salvo

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I don't want to parrot what others have said, but the general idea in this thread is right.

It does feel bad to completely MISS out on something because of a bad roll. Failure states shouldn't be binary (either you "win" or "lose"), but rather fan out with multiple degrees of consequences ---> how many rolls did you fail in a row? what kind of approach did you use in dialogue?

That's something that Disco Elysium, for all its flaws, portrayed very well, and something that also happens constantly with a good DM in tabletop play. As of now with my personal experience in this EA, you either succeed at something or are barred off it completely, which is terrible game design.

EDIT: this only refers to SKILL CHECKS, combat is fine as is. (other than action economy with everyone getting bonus actions but that's a different matter. oh and the retarded larian surfaces)
 

Mebrilia the Viera Queen

Guest
YOu can always you know... Don't play games based on D&D? We have enough games around that pamper players. We have even pen and papers converted in FPS. I am glad for once we can have a proper D&D rpg.
 

Raghar

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It seems this topic is more and more hot now.

Oh MY....


Please Josh , miss once! :argh:
Quote him directly, he can easily edit that Twitter post. And he has flawed analysis in first post.
The problem is DnD skills were added ad hoc, and NOBODY bothered to make proper level independent skill system for DnD. Considering a lot of DnD characters are basically throw away characters, whith surivability of snowflake in hell, who would bother to make system requiring 3 hours of effort to make a character, just to lose that character by a random critical in fist fight?
 
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Cryomancer

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I have strong criticism over how Sawyer destroyed casters on nwn2, found the Pillars game very lackluster but he is right. Low level D&D tends to be frustrating due the high amount of misses. For eg, a epic level fighter would easily have a base attack bonus above 30 on nwn2 and multiple attacks per round, so he is mostly likely to hit even an ancient red dragon(AC = 39). And missing would't be a problem since he has a lot of attacks per round.

Larian, instead of giving hidden bonus or making the RNG more akin to a Bell curve, not a flat distribution, decided to lower AC and implement a high HP bloat in the second D&D edition with the highest HP bloat. 5e only loses to 4e on hp bloat. It only makes all spells fells worthless and the combat extremely slow.

Or could just made the game a higher level. Lets be real. We are adventuring into the underdark on chapter 1, on BG2 you only enter in underdark on chapter 5 and the game starts at higher level. The companions also looks too accomplished for a lv 1 char. If the game started at lv 5, fighters would have 2 attacks per round. And missing often a much smaller of a problem.
 

Elex

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So they discovered how D&D work since the start?
It’s the point of using a D20 being random.
Another point of D&D is being success/failure with little things in the middle.

People buy a D&D game and they discover is based on RNG and pure luck?
Wow. IT’S EXACTLY THE POINT OF THE GAME.

there is other TTRPG a lot less randon nobody force people to play with a d20 one.
 

Ninjerk

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Jul 10, 2013
Messages
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If you don't like using d20, you can opt for 2d10 to create more of a bell curve. Shocking.
p e r f e c t l i n e a r s c a l i n g
:balance:

(legends say the crowd took him into the bathroom and dunked his head in the toilet after the talk, fucking nerd)
 

Murk

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Jan 17, 2008
Messages
13,459
I've always been curious about just using some story related "boon" early on to help with the rolls. Like some latent buff that grants everyone +2 on skill checks or what have you to compensate for RNG. You could even make it an optional thing or have some minor downside to it to let people opt out. Basically the gameplay would let you modify difficulty a bit and it wouldn't just be a slider in the options menu.

In a game like BG 3, you could even set it as something like "the tadpole gives minor benefits" -- you currently get a psychic ability use per day, but could easily just spin it as a generic buff.

Though you already get that cleric cantrip that basically grants you a bonus on all stat rolls, so eh.
 

Murk

Arcane
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Jan 17, 2008
Messages
13,459
The problem that makes save scumming attractive is that is 5E. Even if you were level 17+ (+6) and had a maxed relevant attribute (+5), random chance has almost as much impact (10.5 +/- a value <=9.5) on your chance of success as your modifier (+11). At lower levels this is even worse as your modifer is likely closer to +6, which makes the issue even more pronounced. Of course people are going to save scum when random chance is unavoidably the primary determining factor of success.

Yep, this is something you see complaints about quite a lot with 5e.

It sounds as though Larian has made failure states too punishing/boring on rolls as well. A failure shouldn't necessarily lead to complete failure of the objective in all circumstances, maybe, for example, it leads to another harder check to swing things back in your favour.

Failure states could also occasionally lead to more interesting outcomes as well.

I would say the opposite, where-in failures on rolls often just change things.

For example -- if you fail to defuse the fight between Aradin and the Tiefling leader, Aradin might storm off (I think you find him near the ambush site). If you do defuse it, you can talk to him for more information and learn about the thing that drew Halsin's attention (nightsong was it?).

Similarly, if you fail your roll with the druid being converted to the shadow druids, you can fight it out with some druids supporting you and some not. If you succeed, all the druids will help out in the fight against the three shadow druids.

If you fail to realize the healer wants to poison you, you can convince her to give you the antidote. If you succeed, she gives you the poison but you just get it as an item (and it's quite a nice poison too).

I'd say they've REALLY gone deep into giving you multiple different outcomes -- some good, some bad -- but rarely win/fail.

You can also bypass rolls via gameplay. The first mindflayer after the ship crashes... you can just kill it without even going into dialog and that's a legitimate resolution (on par with killing him via dialog). The tadpole crawling away if you fail to crush it aspect, which happens a few times, etc.
 

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