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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30234 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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since RtWP is a vastly superior mechanic for CRPGs than turn-based gameplay (because it allows one to fast-forward through trash encounters and to play at one's own pace).

Why have encounters that involve no real decision-making? At that point just cut those ones and have interesting encounters give better rewards. I get maybe having one or two an act just to embrace a power fantasy, but a system being better for grinding isn't much of an endorsement when you can just design the game without grinding.

Now, can be a completely separate issue that the encounters are poorly designed, but then it makes more sense to me to spend more time tuning the encounters rather than slapping in a fast forward button.

A big part of this is because of the direct translation of many 5e mechanics into a game, which is ridiculous since they were designed for abstraction to make tabletop play viable. The combat system has too many actions...

I feel the overall complaint is correct, but much of the issue of too many actions are a result of it NOT being a direct translation of 5e. Bonus action shoving, dipping as a thing at all, bonus action throwing things and all the short-rest weapon abilities etc were added on by Larian to basically give martials more stuff to do.

D&D itemization is fine for tabletop campaigns where you can carry a handful of items, your inventory is a box on a lined piece of paper and there are three combat encounters in a 4 hour session, but it works less well in a game where there are mountains of loot and players are used to more interesting itemization than +2 swords or things that provide a single-point increase in one stat.

The inventory management is absolutely trash, especially given separate inventories between characters and the extra steps to swap characters in and out to access their inventories.

That said, I'd say Larian did an OK job tackling half of this complaint (the loot in BG3 is generally a lot more interesting than base 5e), but made the other half far worse- the absolute deluge of magic items you run into is not standard 5e, it much more resembles Pathfinder. Looking at the table from the DMG for starting at higher levels makes it clear how absolutely loaded down with loot you are in BG3, before considering that without attunement slots you're also not only collecting but using a lot more.

This also makes the above issue with too many abilities worse, as many of the more interesting magic items are more interesting because they bestow yet more abilities.

This ought not to be taken as a defense of 5e, more showing that it can be hard to parse out issues with 5e, issues with Larian games in general (obsession with barrels, bottles and surfaces) and issues with BG3 as a result of Larian trying to fix issues with 5e.

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