Intro
Baldur's Gate 3 is a sprawling, slightly kitschy, long-winded,accessible yet also quite challenging[1] role-playing game with fairly high production values that apparently pissed off other CRPG devs.
A sort of interactive pulp swords & sorcery novel. It's a flawed if IMO provisionally worthy yet lesser sequel to Baldur's Gate 2. Lesser but still rather good.
It is like heroin to CRPG types despite a slight tinge of woke, the dumb and optional romance system, and some flaws which are going to be rectified by mods fairly quickly or solved by the time you get to Baldur's Gate and can actually buy a fucking quiver, gem pouch or potion case. Romances are optional, the personal quests of party members are fairly interesting and quite decent afaict.
It allows up to 4 people to play what's essentially a D&D campaign without someone having to be GM. Perhaps some people would like to play it together in the evenings and it might strengthen this community? If playing thrice weekly for 4 hours, you could probably clear it under half a year even with a bit of save-scumming that's necessary for some of the tough fights.
Don't rush- perhaps Larian will give it paused realtime or FPS play or just speed up the computer turns which should be instant but sometimes (5% of the time) take 200-300 ms to decide per enemy mook.
As it's a significant cultural artifact and probably of interest to enough people on this forum, I believe it deserves its own thread.
For mods: ||It's not related to 'science, politics or philosophy', however, I feel it maybe deserves an exception due to its high profile. Factorio, a decade old game popular with Motte kind of people has 29 hits in search, BG3 has 25 mostly from the last 2 weeks. All argument and no play makes Jack a dull boy, no ? ||
Rules:
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Please post in the appropriate subthread. I'm going to start with 'reviews, technical issues, rant & gripe, gameplay advice, lore'. Feel free to make another top-level subthread if it doesn't fit into the other categories.
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For story and lore discussion not known to people familiar with general D&D, use spoiler tags, which are doubled pipes = '|' repeated twice without the quotes. Spoiler tag end is another set of doubled pipes.
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Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.
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Please report any comments spoiling the plot outside of the stuff that's in the intro cinematic.
[1]: I'm at around +2sd of ice people mental acuity and a disgusting minmaxing scrub who almost cleared** the infamous 'tactics' mod for BG2+ToB and I'm being challenged by the high difficulty fights in BG3. Even a run-of-the mill fight turns deadly if you're not paying attention, and certain fights are positively malicious.
And I'm just in chapter 2 atm. Yes, if you want you can re-roll PC and every party member for every dungeon but in essence that's just like save-scumming but worse. You don't have to do it, and I only re-rolled main char because I was unfamiliar with the ruleset and wanted to try a few different options. The dungeon puzzles, so far, seem mostly bloody obvious, I've encountered some mildly challenging treasure related ones, surely there's going to be a few good ones too.
**am not sure I ever cleared the final fight of the entire game with the tactics mod.
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Notes -
Griping
So far I just think there's too much dice rolling. I'm fine with combat having tons of dice rolls under the hood, but there are just too many occasions in dialogue where you have to roll for outcomes, sometimes for things that shouldn't be left to chance, or situations where someone with 18 in an ability simply should never fail the check unless they're dead drunk. It encourages savescumming which I'd rather not engage in.
I think if the game (a) removed the "nat 1/20 is an auto-fail/success on skill checks" and possibly gave you the option to "take 10" 3e style on a bog-standard check (or take 20 outside of conversation at the cost of a short rest), that'd go a long way to solving the problem.
Note this isn't actually a rule in 5e for skill checks, only for attack rolls automatically hitting/missing. It wasn't a rule in 3.x either. It's just people keep misapplying the attack-roll rule to other rolls and inadvertently houseruling it even though it's a stupid change, sometimes including D&D developers and now apparently including Lorian Studios developers.
In 3rd edition it only applied to attack rolls, but then in the Deities and Demigods supplement they added a special rule for gods:
Yes, if you attain godhood you don't automatically fail saving throws on 1, just like everyone else. Then in 3.5 they actually did add automatic success/failure to saving throws (which I would argue was a negative change) but still didn't have it for skill checks. (3.5 came out a year after Deities and Demigods so they could have been consciously trying to make it backwards compatible, but I'd guess they just forgot it didn't work like that and then in 3.5 rewrote the rules to match the way they played it.)
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