Even a D&D campaign at this level is hard to DM, I cant imagine the complexity in trying to really gameify this when especially at the end your players are gods.
Cast wish, may as well just let players write their own code for what they want.
Sure bigger stronger enemies are available but parties become so powerful i can’t see it being easy.
I would say just leave those aspects out of the game, or put strict limitations on their usage. You could isolate higher magic abilities to specific items (e.g. deck of many things).
It is complex, however I think if you look to games like Neverwinter as a template for moving forward (absent microtransactions).
I’d actually rather love some sort of different campaign or some adventure packs, similar to how D&D does it with their expansion books.
Either that or a great mod tool that would allow for something like that. Doesn’t even need support for added races, classes or traits. Just a map editor with a mob editor slapped on top would be a gamechanger
My Drow Warlock has been a ton of fun. A lot of the NPCs react differently to you for being a Drow. I’ve been able to deceive or intimidate my way through a lot of dialog. Also Eldritch blast just feels very satisfying to cast in game.
Haha I would just think about what sounds the most fun to you and play that. You can have 3 other npcs in your party that you control so you can have them fill in the gaps that your character may struggle in
Especially if you’re playing a class not covered by the default companions. My paladin has been awesome, smashing goblins with a Warhammer, and still able to talk her way through just about anything. Playing a wizard, rogue, or cleric feels like it would make it tough to justify bringing someone along.
I tried a rogue that I built into heavy crossbows and line-holding while also having Ass Orion, there are definitely times I feel that it was redundant/wasteful (such as skill checks) but it pays off during stealth fights.
Having 2 characters that can move, enter stealth, and sneak attack in the same turn is extremely powerful.
[SPOILERS BELOW] Beat the cenobite doctor and the toll house lady back to back using this at lvl6, neither bosses got any attacks off on my guys. Idk if this is supposed to be impressive or anything, but In both cases I used both rouges to exploit the bosses AI, although admittedly the toll house fight was clearly designed for stealth.
My bard and Astarion work as a team to do the robbing. When you perform, crowds gather around you, so it’s very useful for redirecting prying eyes so Astarion can pick pockets.
Bard is always the first thing I play in D&D crpgs that let me. It’s a great class that lets you do a little bit of everything. Plus it’s great to do a face-melting lute solo as the last thing you do before ending your turn, since Performance is a free action.
I'm skeptical of any article like this on its face. The whole beauty of a well done RPG, especially a CRPG, is that you get choices on how to build your character and how you handle encounters and can be successful with many of them.
If bard is the most fun for you, awesome. If it's "objectively better", the game is flawed.
Arguably, that’s the whole point. I never played the original Fallout thinking I could play every option. I’ve seen people complaining about “you have to use savescumming or you miss half the dialogue.” No, that’s called “replayability” so when you go back and try as a different type of character, there will be paths you’ll be locked out of, but there will also be paths that were previously closed now open.
that's something I've noticed about bg3 (only 1-2h in) vs the old ones and even ps:torment.
in most of those you can continue the dialog and usually circle back to the other choices.
in bg3 its seems much more like, you say one option you're stuck with it - which seems much better.
i'll be interested to see on the replay - but i guess itll be up to me to play it differently.
Bg3 makes you feel like your choices matter. I havnt progressed very far (10 hours in and mostly exploring) and there have been points in dialog or exploring the open world when I pass a “point of no return”. This is where I can tell there will be a consequence (good or bad) to my choices, but perhaps it’s not immediately seen. I havnt had most of these choices pay off yet, but it builds anticipation and makes me want to see how this will play out and wonder if it will come up further down the line when I least expect.
That’s actually my biggest criticism of D&D. Bards are better choices than rogues or fighters or wizards. Same goes with clerics or druids. sprinkle on a bit of paladin, a couple feats, and some magic gauntlets, and they can invalidate whole swathes of staple fantasy archetypes entirely.
if by better you mean, more fun, i think that's slightly up to you.
you can have just as much fun with a more constrained character who keeps losing dice rolls - it might be harder work though.
no, i mean more empowered to interact with the game world. They have more agency in more arenas of play. You can play a goober of any class and have fun, i agree, but a goober who picks a “better” class will be able to create more comedies of errors beyond “Player fails to hit thing with a big stick”.
That's the issue with how combat oriented D&D is. While there is a wide assortment of abilities between classes and their roles in combat, a lot of non-combat situations are reduced to just roling high on a skill check, not many choices and approaches to be made. There might be the odd utility spell, but even that isn't a choice for martial classes. Because of that, Bards dominate non-combat encounters, with Jack of all Trades and Expertise.
It’s not a problem for a videogame, but D&D5e (actually most D&D editions) is not a balanced game at all. In fact the only RPG that I’ve played and would call balanced is Pathfinder 2e.
So I was not expecting Baldur’s Gate to be balanced at all given it’s based on D&D5e.
Bards are objectively the best if you want the full breadth of options to move the story around. If you want to kick ass in combat or sling more spells, other classes are better at those aspects of the game, but Bards are going to give you a lot more to play with in terms of the RP.
Not spoiling anything either, but you can always try bard and change your class later, as there is a mechanic in the game for that.
I had been planning to play as a bard (I’m normally a rogue in RPGs, but we’ve got one in the party), then watched part of a Let’s Play where someone did, and the sight of the bard pulling out a violin in the middle of a battle was so ridiculous I immediately dismissed the idea because I knew I went be able to take my character seriously 🤣
I just finished downloading it and am playing as a ranger, and I’m not quite far into it enough to see how I like it, but I picked it because another Let’s Play I watched (I watched the first hour of several to see what it was like before I decided to get it) played as a ranger and it seemed interesting.
Maybe next playthrough I’ll give bard a go, just because I know they’re a good class.
Right? Ranger is probably at the bottom of my list just cause in 5e (as has been noted everywhere else), it seems to lack its own identity. If you’re familiar with those rules, do you feel like BG3 does anything to make the Ranger more worthwhile than the tabletop version?
This is my first entry into anything D&D / 5e honestly and the lack of identity kind of drew me to the ranger, I wanted to go for a melee front fighter but the barbarian and warrior trees seemed a bit too focused
Beast master ranger with the heavy armour proficiency ended up being the “do anything” class when I swapped between a couple
Thing with bard is you do not get a bard companion at least in the beginning (I have only played so far into it). You get a cleric, thief, fighter, and wizard pretty early. Granted you can respec anyone to whatever you want but bardic inspiration combined with guidance from the cleric is pretty nice for the various non combat rolls and then it gives you two sources of healing word and bardic inspiration is pretty nice in combat as well. The biggest annoyance factor is the bard can't inspire themselves.
Two roll buffs and healing word is tempting. Good to know you get a thief early, although there’s also the question of whether to do one of the origin characters or not…
Honestly, better to pirate the game because ZA/UM fucked over the original devs and now they don’t get any money from the game’s sales - and it ruined any potential for a sequel.
I don't normally do this, and I'll go do some searching of my own, but any chance for a tldw on the video? What's the background? 2.5 hours is a bit much and the intro was sort of wandering and more or less.just repeated that yes, the game was stolen from them.
I can understand why fantasy settings are pretty stale, not just in games but in a variety of other media as well. Fantasy can be complex, and using old, familiar tropes (elves are haughty and love nature, dwarves are stubborn and love gold, humans are the world’s jack-of-all-trades) lowers the barrier to entry, which is really important when you want something to be easily marketable to as large an audience as possible. People know what to expect from familiar fantasy tropes, which means they can focus on plot and gameplay rather than going “so what’s that character supposed to be?”
But it’s boring. I love it when a fantasy setting isn’t afraid to trust the intelligence and curiosity of its audience and do something weird.
Anime if anything seems to be doing worse at this. Nearly every fantasy or fantasy adjacent anime goes for a knock-off D&D MMO style and it feels so tired. They don't want their audience to need to make the smallest effort to understand the world and the role of the characters in it.
That’s so disappointing. I haven’t really kept up with anime in recent years, but what I loved about the anime I watched when I was much, much younger was how different it was compared to the western media I was familiar with.
I think the difference is that a lot more English speakers watch anime as it’s airing in Japan now. Anime used to have to be at least somewhat interesting for someone in the west to even be aware of it, but now we get to see all the shit they’re putting out that never would have made it over here before.
Dr. Stone, Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen – you don’t have to look very hard to find anime that doesn’t look anything like western fantasy
pcgamer.com
Aktywne