this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
37 points (66.4% liked)
Baldur's Gate 3
6275 readers
5 users here now
All things BG3!
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
Spoilers
If your post contains any possible spoilers, please:
- Use the text [SPOILER] at the beginning of your title, do not include any spoilers in the title.
- Use the appropriate spoiler markup to conceal that content in the body of your post.
Thank you!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
5e is a bad table top game, but that's part of what's made it so successful - it's not treated as a game unto itself anymore, but just some loose guidelines to help generate setpieces, and people like that.
But also BG3 seems to recognize this and actually fills in the broken or missing game elements, just like everyone's DM does whenever they come across these gaps. It takes an opinionated approach to implementing the rules, and does so with the confidence of years of building CRPGs.
It's an impressive feat.
The only thing that I would say is missing from BG3 is a more comprehensive encyclopedia of game and class mechanics a la the Owlcat Pathfinder games. Being able to see all the things a class would get ahead of time would be hella dope and help with character planning.
I feel like the game really, really, really needs an “I’ve Never Played D&D” mode - one that actually explains what the terms and such means. It took me forever to figure out what things like “1d6” in weapons meant, and I’m still not completely sure what a “cantrip” exactly is.
Cantrips are just spells that don’t use spell slots. No further explanation needed
And this info is nowhere.
It's in the game, I've never played 5e and I knew that since I've started playing.
Additionally, it can help to see them as "level 0" spells.
Here is the full description of them in the Player HandBook:
It's true that mechanics in BG3 could be better explained to people who don't know dnd. Then again, in RPG videogames, mechanics are usually implementation details that no player gets in details. :) At leat this time, there is an opportunity to understand them (the basic rules are free to obtain on dndbeyond.com, btw)
I agree, I made some leveling choices not fully understanding cantrips either.
Basically, what they are is a spell that doesn't use your spell slots. So for example, wylls eltrich blast is a cantrip. You can cast it once per turn and it doesn't cost any resources, just like a regular melee attack or ranged attack, it just uses your attack move that turn.
I think the problem with 5e is that it's super crunchy with combat but super fluffy with everything else. It is really combat centric. It encourages a lot of ad hoc roleplay but super rigid combat. "The problem" is a strong term. This is mostly my opinion. It's a popular system so everyone is going to have things about it they dislike.
I've tried to get my friends to try other systems but it has been tough getting buy-in. It's good enough. We basically play with one combat per long rest but there's a sort of an unspoken agreement to not go crazy with dumping a bunch of strong spells. Plus I think we actually don't even have any full casters in the group which is what would benefit most from that style so it works out nicely.
No it's not. Everybody loved 5e before the OGL fiasco early this year, but the hardcore old-schoolers who found it too simplified. The recent bad sentiment is about poor business moves by WotC regarding their license, and has nothing to do with the 5e system, which has been to date the most successful edition of dnd.
It really depends on what you mean by "good" and "bad" for a table top game. Clearly many people are having fun with it, so it's hard to say that it's a complete trash fire except as hyperbole.
However! I would argue that many of the people playing DND would have more fun with a different system. All those people who do one fight per day? Should play a game that supports that. All the people who do mostly social encounters with the occasional fight? That's not what dnd is good at, and would have more fun with a system that was built for that.
Unfortunately DND is mega popular and sucks most of the air out of the hobby. This has a important effects.
One, I suspect there's a huge survivorship bias in the hobby. DND is the first game most people play because it's super popular. Thus, most of the people who stick around the hobby are people who didn't hate DND enough to leave. There are probably lots of people who would like rpgs in general that don't play anything because their first experience was DND, and they hated it. Most of them won't come back to the hobby.
Second, because DND is such a janky system that's difficult to learn (don't you tell me a 15 is a +2 is an easy system), most of the people who do stick around are hesitant to try something else. Why would they want to learn another system and memorize another set of stat mappings? Some people probably don't even know there are rpgs without six stats, or character attributes like that at all.
Anyway. I digress. 5e is very good at being 5e, but it is not a general purpose RPG. It also has something I dislike in pretty much every one of its systems. As a shorthand I often say it's a bad game.
Being popular and being a good game are completely different things. Being fun and being a good game are different things. Being useful and being a good game are different things.
I'm not making a value judgement on whether 5e is likeable. I like 5e. It's just that it's not a complete and coherent experience.
Argument ad populum doesn't change that.
Right. Gladly, you're here to explain those masses of idiots who are having fun why they should not. You're just being pedantic. And for the record, no, it doesn't make you sound smart.
Right? And “a fun game doesn’t mean a good game” is just bizarrely wrong headed. Yes, definitionally a fun game is a good game. You have to be incredibly high sniffing your own farts to confidently and obstinately state otherwise.