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

[Sharpedge]

Not to derail this thread again, but I would be somewhat interested in seeing you substantiate your opinion on the D:OS 2 armour system.

I actually participated in that topic and I think I already wrote what I though and many others expressed it better than me. I'll say that despite some problems with the balance, you can get very powerful skill and spells that target the opposite type of armor for minimal investment. Things like Necromancy is one of the most powerful physical damage, and it scales with INT. Skills like Chloroform require a single point on Trickery but is incredibly effective through the game. Earth spells target magic armour but apply physicall CC and so on and so fort. Is very easy to get a party that covers both types of damage and have always something to do each turn regardless of enemies resistances with very little sacrifices on their main builds.

Yet I don't disagree that more enemies necessitated physical resistances. But magic was still quite powerful when combined with the right skills and feats. An Elf with Elemental Affinity and Adrenaline is dangerous from the beginning, add later skills like Apotheosis or Skin Graft and you will be able to pull incredible damage and CC in a few turns.

Tuco's post in that thread best illustrated the problem in a succinct manner.

The problem with the armor system in DOS 2 is that it makes hardly any sense in principle and it creates way more problems that it solves.
Discouraging mixed sources of damage (which it factually does, it doesn't matter if you can work your way around it) is only the tip of the iceberg. There's also the fact that makes a certain amount of utility skills/spells utterly useless (not "unreliable" as much as literally 100% pointless to even attempt) until a certain threshold of damage has been passed, etc.

Basically it's a system of HP bloat (now in three different flavors!) that favors direct damage dealing above any other strategy. And conversely once that threshold of damage is surpassed the exact opposite becomes true, and some of these crowd controls become 100% reliable.

I mean, sure, you can learn to live with that. We all did.
But holy fucking Christ if it doesn't go straight in the bottom tier among all the countless attempts at "simulating damage mitigation" I've experienced across the years in different rulesets.

The thing is, because of how unbalanced the system is, the fact that it encourages stacking a single damage type (to be specific, physical is heavily favored), isn't really that noticeable. There are many powers which will outright 1 hit enemies (its surprising this game isn't Victor's wet dream considering how OP the necromancy spells are) and in order to bring any semblance of balance to the system, you either need to avoid whole swaths of abilities, or you need to mod the game a bunch.

From memory, there were only 2 or 3 enemies in the entire game which had physical resistance, the player clone during a dream sequence, the bat voidwoken and some of the creatures in the consulate. In contrast, most enemies in the game had resistances to 1 or more type of elemental damage and the resistance values were not low, sometimes going to values which would cause the powers to heal them. Yeah, it ultimately did not matter because damage values even post resistances to all damage types still far exceeded HP totals, but that doesn't mean the problem was not there, just that the system disguised it.

 

[Saravan]

Genuine question as I have never looked into Larian games before, including their re releases of old Iplay RPGs (I have the feeling I am better off with the originals)
But what is bad about the studio or their products?

To sum up the butthurt: boomers are mad I won't make the same Baldur's Gate game from 20 years ago.

Nope. The greatest problem of Larian is underestimating the player base.

Swen said that spell slots aren't intuitive. OwlCat gave two spellbooks on the vancian magical system for Wizards who follow the Lich path, the wiz leveling with XP and lich with milestone leveling. Each one with his own save DC, concentration, caster level, spell slots to memorize, etc. And unique feats for the mythic path which affects both spellbooks.

My two spellbooks on Wrat

weak stat system and a strange skill progression where you unlock almost all of the skills by the end of chapter 2. Then you have divisive things like the armor system, which some like and others hate, the writing and the cool down system for skills.

There is anyone who likes his armor system?

It truly is amazing that no matter what you reply to it always circles back to something about Pathfinder and some fucking cringe power-fetishism over being a lich. I swear who hurt you as a child to feel this way?

 

[Larianshill]

Back in the day I wrote a small essay on liches being power fantasy for nerds who got dunked in the toilet one too many times, but I'm not yet upset enough at Victor to go look for it.

 

[NJClaw]

BioWare was right to bar Dwarves from being mages.

In 5E, dwarves make interesting wizards thanks to their racial armor proficiency. You can go around in medium armor throwing fireballs.

The problem is they do not get an onborn bump to intelligence. This means in point buy and stat allocation systems you start the game with a +2 in a main stat, not a +3. A trendemous disadvantage, I don't think its worth the extra AC. Maybe with Hill Dwarf for the extra hp.

Wow, how did I miss such a racist post. Thankfully, Tasha came and now you can make a dwarf with +2 Intelligence and +2 Constitution. We can only hope Larian will open their eyes to the truth and update their outdated stats distribution system.

Bow to the master race of the mountain dwarf.

 

[Lacrymas]

Wow, how did I miss such a racist post. Thankfully, Tasha came and now you can make a dwarf with +2 Intelligence and +2 Constitution. We can only hope Larian will open their eyes to the truth and update their outdated stats distribution system.

Bow to the master race of the mountain dwarf.

Tasha made races literally unplayable.

 

[Thac0]

BioWare was right to bar Dwarves from being mages.

In 5E, dwarves make interesting wizards thanks to their racial armor proficiency. You can go around in medium armor throwing fireballs.

The problem is they do not get an onborn bump to intelligence. This means in point buy and stat allocation systems you start the game with a +2 in a main stat, not a +3. A trendemous disadvantage, I don't think its worth the extra AC. Maybe with Hill Dwarf for the extra hp.

Wow, how did I miss such a racist post. Thankfully, Tasha came and now you can make a dwarf with +2 Intelligence and +2 Constitution. We can only hope Larian will open their eyes to the truth and update their outdated stats distribution system.

Bow to the master race of the mountain dwarf.

I really like the minmax forums take on Tasha:
http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=19408.0

I am not as negative as them about it, but Lacrymas is right, Tasha custom lineage is a car crash.
If the game expects you to have +5 to hit at level 1, just give everyone +5 to hit at level 1. Bounded accuracy means races without a boost to a starting attribute of the class mainstat suck, but the current races are designed around their stat limitations in combination with their abilities.
6e needs races which only give abilities like darkvision/poison resist/orcish resilience/charm resistance etc, no longer attribute boosts, if they really want to keep going down this path.

 

[Larianshill]

I wonder how Mike Mearls feels now, cancelled by people he pandered to. Or this guy, for this matter.

It's a shame Mearls got struck by the divine bolt of cancellation, and not Crawford. Between the two, Crawford is far worse.

 

[Thac0]

It's a shame Mearls got struck by the divine bolt of cancellation, and not Crawford. Between the two, Crawford is far worse.

Mearls got cancelled? Crawford is worse than Mearls? I thought Crawford was the rules as written guy, and Mearls the Rules as Intended.
I need context.

Also write fast, since this is technically gaming drama it will be split from the thread to a forum you do not have access too soon.

 

[Lacrymas]

If the game expects you to have +5 to hit at level 1, just give everyone +5 to hit at level 1. Bounded accuracy means races without a boost to a starting attribute of the class mainstat suck, but the current races are designed around their stat limitations in combination with their abilities.
6e needs races which only give abilities like darkvision/poison resist/orcish resilience/charm resistance etc, no longer attribute boosts, if they really want to keep going down this path.

It depends on what you want to do. Do we want every race to be able to be equally good at everything?

 

[Yosharian]

Those takes are so horrible. Decoupling how good you are at e.g. attacking, from your primary ability score? No, just no. That's dumb.

 

[Larianshill]

Mearls got cancelled?

Mearls was involved in Zak Smith fiasco - if you don't know what Zak Smith fiasco is, who gives a shit, the important thing is, he got cancelled for it. He's not fired from WotC - to the best of my knowledge - but he's been moved out of the public eye. His twitter has been silent for 2 years. No public appearances. He's supposedly working with Larian, but when Larian had the druid showcase with the big stream, and had a personality from WotC appear for an interview, it wasn't Mearls - it was Crawford.

Crawford is worse than Mearls?

Far worse. Mearls had an imagination, and he did a lot of streams where he showcased making classes and subclasses, and how WotC approaches game design. Furthermore, even despite some absolutely idiotic woke shit leaving his mouth, he never made an impression of a true believer on me like Crawford does.

 

[Thonius]

Okay. So all the previous larian games were shit and I hated them, for some it took like an hour to hate it for others a bit more. Humor is shit etc but really, you will have to search REAL hard to find a good RPG in 22-23. Nothing with such complexity (shitty dnd5 aside) is on the horizon.
Pro Tip: At the end of the day if you hate larian just pirate their game, piracy is stealing, right (i don't really think it's stealing)? So if you pirate it it's like you stole from that retard swen! Take Care!

 

[Lacrymas]

Those takes are so horrible. Decoupling how good you are at e.g. attacking, from your primary ability score? No, just no. That's dumb.

Mmm, it might be a good idea to decouple something from your main attribute. Be it +hit or +damage. But still, I'm not sure what the end goal here is. WotC's end goal is to make every race/class combination as viable as each other, but this makes the already very, very samey characters even more alike. What do we want races to be in an ideal world is a good question to ask.

 

[Yosharian]

Those takes are so horrible. Decoupling how good you are at e.g. attacking, from your primary ability score? No, just no. That's dumb.

Mmm, it might be a good idea to decouple something from your main attribute. Be it +hit or +damage. But still, I'm not sure what the end goal here is. WotC's endgoal is to make every race/class combination as viable as each other, but this makes the already very, very samey characters even more alike. What do we want races to be in an ideal world is a good question to ask.

Fucking no. There is a reason Dwarven wizards are rare. Their genetics don't favour it and their cultures don't either. People want to make a Dwarven wizard, they should embrace that as part of the character. People need to stop trying to be special snowflakes and demanding that their chosen race has the exact ability scores they want. It's cancerous and it ruins worldbuilding.

I mean, unless you want dwarves in YOUR setting to have a particular culture that favours Intelligence, that's fine. Hell, change dwarves genetically if you want. But they won't be Forgotten Realms dwarves. Who are interesting at least partly because of their culture and genetics.

 

[Shrimp]

Those takes are so horrible. Decoupling how good you are at e.g. attacking, from your primary ability score? No, just no. That's dumb.

People need to stop trying to be special snowflakes and demanding that their chosen race has the exact ability scores they want. It's cancerous and it ruins worldbuilding.

Have you forgotten who the target audience for modern TTRPGs is? Why do you think self-insert tieflings are so common?

 

[Lacrymas]

Yeah, "genetically predisposed" is not a word combination or a concept in general I'd use. Not only because it's severely race realism-y, especially in conjunction with the non-physical stats, but also because it leads to monolithic race cultures in-game, and that's a big no-no for me (I'm aware of the special ...reproductive quality of the orcs in my setting and I acknowledge the irony, but I'm trying to differentiate them a bit). However, how ability scores work with bounded accuracy is a problem in 5E and must be addressed, but this is not the way to do it, so decoupling at least +damage would be an interesting experiment.

 

[Thac0]

Those takes are so horrible. Decoupling how good you are at e.g. attacking, from your primary ability score? No, just no. That's dumb.

Mmm, it might be a good idea to decouple something from your main attribute. Be it +hit or +damage. But still, I'm not sure what the end goal here is. WotC's endgoal is to make every race/class combination as viable as each other, but this makes the already very, very samey characters even more alike. What do we want races to be in an ideal world is a good question to ask.

Fucking no. There is a reason Dwarven wizards are rare. Their genetics don't favour it and their cultures don't either. People want to make a Dwarven wizard, they should embrace that as part of the character. People need to stop trying to be special snowflakes and demanding that their chosen race has the exact ability scores they want. It's cancerous and it ruins worldbuilding.

I mean, unless you want dwarves in YOUR setting to have a particular culture that favours Intelligence, that's fine. Hell, change dwarves genetically if you want. But they won't be Forgotten Realms dwarves. Who are interesting at least partly because of their culture and genetics.

DnD is moving into the direction of becoming a generalist rule system with a wide application basis for different settings. If you buy the recommend core package of PHB, DMG and MM there is barely any info about the Forgotten Realms, and loads of stuff about making your own settings.
For a generalist ruleset it makes a lot of sense to give it into the hands off the DM and the players to say at which which races are good. Maybe I want a setting where dwarves make excellent rune mages and elves have low magical abilities. You can still handwave the absence of certain classes in certain cultures through culture, or say that there are racial restrictions for classes, they just do not apply to the players.
So yeah I would like to see accuracy and DC decoupled from the main stat. It would make ASI's and attribute spreads a lot more interesting. Also then you could give each attribute some actual usefull functions, since it is no longer just a raise by default if you want your class to function.

That said I think this change is actually fairly likely, and I highly assume that 5e will be forked if they do so. Which is the best outcome really, more rulesets are always beneficial as they give the customer more choice.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

nooo ogres can't be stronger than gnomes they are EQUAL

 

[Larianshill]

I don't think there are any issues with how races originally worked in 5e. In fact, the only thing ancestries really did is make it all worse. Instead of being able to play whatever race you want, the optimal choice is to play a dwarf, or at least with the stats of a dwarf.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

5e is

Spoiler

trash

I hope this clears some things up

 

[Lacrymas]

DnD is moving into the direction of becoming a generalist rule system with a wide application basis for different settings. If you buy the recommend core package of PHB, DMG and MM there is barely any info about the Forgotten Realms, and loads of stuff about making your own settings.
For a generalist ruleset it makes a lot of sense to give it into the hands off the DM and the players to say at which which races are good. Maybe I want a setting where dwarves make excellent rune mages and elves have low magical abilities. You can still handwave the absence of certain classes in certain cultures through culture, or say that there are racial restrictions for classes, they just do not apply to the players.
So yeah I would like to see accuracy and DC decoupled from the main stat. It would make ASI's and attribute spreads a lot more interesting. Also then you could give each attribute some actual usefull functions, since it is no longer just a raise by default if you want your class to function.

That said I think this change is actually fairly likely, and I highly assume that 5e will be forked if they do so. Which is the best outcome really, more rulesets are always beneficial as they give the customer more choice.

This "raise only your main attribute" thing is a problem since at least AD&D, though. This is what Sawyer tried to remedy but wasn't particularly successful at.

 

[Thac0]

I don't think there are any issues with how races originally worked in 5e. In fact, the only thing ancestries really did is making it all worse. Instead of being able to play whatever race you want, the optimal choice is to play a dwarf, or at least with the stats of a dwarf.

Yeah now some races are genuinly inferior. Before races like the Firbolg and the Hobgoblin, which had fairly mediocre abilities but rare and valuable attributes, had a reason to exist. Now the Half-Orc, Dwarf, Halfling, Vhuman or whatever else there is with a banger ability taken together with the lineage attributes is the optimal choice.

 

[Larianshill]

I will defend 5e to the death. It certainly has flaws, serious flaws, but it's better than either 3.5, or 4e - and if everything Victor says about 2e is actually, literally true, than 2e too. It's important to never forget how terrible things used to be.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

This is what Sawyer tried to remedy but wasn't particularly successful at.

much more successful than D&D ever has been, only real issue I remember is CON being kinda worthless

 

[Yosharian]

Yeah, "genetically predisposed" is not a word combination or a concept in general I'd use. Not only because it's severely race realism-y, especially in conjunction with the non-physical stats, but also because it leads to monolithic race cultures in-game, and that's a big no-no for me (I'm aware of the special ...reproductive quality of the orcs in my setting and I acknowledge the irony, but I'm trying to differentiate them a bit). However, how ability scores work with bounded accuracy is a problem in 5E and must be addressed, but this is not the way to do it, so decoupling at least +damage would be an interesting experiment.

You're living in a dream world, which is fine because it's YOUR game. Just stop insisting that the rest of us live in your delusion.