The writer got mad when a goblin shoved Astarion off a cliff. It reminded me of when I had Karlach shove a goblin in lava, then a goblin ran up and shoved HER in the lava. I didn’t get mad; I took it as a learning moment: enemies can shove me back, so move away from the lava.
Counter opinion : this is a bad article written on a great videogame and a great tabletop game.
So, the main point of the author is that they don’t like DnD. Well, maybe don’t play a DnD game? 😂 #firstWorldProblems
The main point of the author was to say something controversial for clicks.
Tbf, it screamed click bait before I went ahead and knowingly clicked the bait, but they could have at least come up with something. 90% of it boils down to “it’s hard and I can’t cheese my way out of it by wheedling a computer program like I wheedle my DM.”
For being a *tedious, unfun system in which to play a video game," my ass has barely done anything else in four days and I have only stopped today because I find myself in a moral quandary about murdering known enemies that have already let me pass.
Since when was murder an issue for me. I’m coming to realize my approach to gaming is not my approach to tabletop for some reason and I’m not atm sure what to do about it.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat encounters are particularly tedious. I have taken to saving right before I enter any combat encounter so that I can start over the second things start to go sour. But no matter how much I prep, how much I plan, or how many times I load my save, something can randomly go wrong.
Once, when I was finally making headway into a goblin camp, a goblin sprang up from the bushes and kicked Astarion into a chasm to his death. My jaw dropped open in shock — I had been doing so well!
Two days ago, I was in the underdark and VERY proud of myself for successfully taking down not one but two random minotaurs above my level via luck and careful planning. Had the last one down to 19HP or so, hamstrung on a bed of spikes and more or less trapped in cloud of blades.
You know what happened? It jumped clean over all of it, landed right in the middle of the group, and soccer punted Wyll into a chasm, to my audible horror.
You know what I did? Thunderwaved it into the same fucking chasm, revived him, and moved the fuck along. And now we stay away from the edge, and now I use that spell a WHOLE lot more because it’s funny and because fuck you.
I get the genuine sense that the author just needed something to write that they didn’t necessarily believe in but they knew would get attention, because no gamer worth their salt would take much issue with saving often, I don’t feel like any worthwhile D&D player would complain about bad dice rolls, and shit goes wrong in both of them.
If it’s really hard…there’s Bitch Mode for a reason. You take a hit to your pride, but pride is hollow and you get to play the game vs…not getting to play the game. Although what with me barely understanding the stats/rules myself, repeatedly and catastrophically ending my turn by accident when I least need to, and still feeling like I can likely pull this off if I remain clever enough, I suspect the difficulty part is hyperbole.
I want to know what exactly they’re used to doing, if they can skate so lazily by so regularly that they’re complaining about moderate strategizing. I wanna know how this happened. They sure as shit don’t play turn-based games and their table must resent them.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat encounters are particularly tedious. I have taken to saving right before I enter any combat encounter so that I can start over the second things start to go sour.
Tell me you’re young without telling me you’re young.
Saving before every corner used to be SOP
Yea this reeks of the writer only ever knowing games that pander to the player so you stay happy and more likely to spend money on mtx. Games used to kick you in the balls repeatedly and laugh as you cried, some people didn’t grow up on that
It still would be if developers would let us fucking quick save anymore. Why that power got ripped from our hands I’ll never know
I clicked the wrong dialog option and ended up having to fight an entire camp of <no spoilers>. First I panicked when I realized my mistake. Then, knowing I’d saved recently I decided to give it a try. Mid battle I find myself hunched forward anticipating the next move. I pull off some epic shit with water and lightning, they counter with acid puddles, I almost lose to a giant bouncer but I save myself last minute. Somehow, through my panic and adrenaline, I managed to wipe out the entire camp and I am fucking elated.
Not a single person who plays this game walks away without stories to tell. Stories that are completely unique to them, either by choice or mistake. This is what gaming is all about. I don’t understand what sort of horseshit this article is spouting. This game is phenomenal.
Days later, and I am still cracking the eff up at “soccer punted Wyll into a chasm”.
I think their biggest problem is this
so that I can start over the second things start to go sour.
It’s something I too struggled with at first. I tried to win every fight cleanly. But BG3 is super forgiving when a fight gets messy. Death isn’t nearly as much of a deal. You just use a scroll or head to camp and revive them for a small fee.
Once you accept that, reloading becomes less common. There are just a few fights so far that are near impossible unless you do everything right. And that’s my only combat-related complaint, some fights require you to initiate them in a certain way but due to cut scenes you can be in a starting position that’s nearly impossible to win from.
The bigger issue is that 5E is just extremely unbalanced and certain builds are so much better than others. On Tactician you are forced to go down that route. But no-one forced you to play on Tactician. I don’t know how optimized you need to be on Balanced.
The new version of DnD is apparently fixing a lot of this imbalance. And would make for a better rule set.
The writer finds the combat tedious? I think it’s amazing! Sometimes you stomp a horde of weak enemies, sometimes you come up with a clever strategy to face overwhelming odds, sometimes you fight a tense battle where the enemies get lucky and you use more resources than expected, and once in a while you get stomped because you made a really bad decision or the enemies got really lucky.
Unlike them, I have not found combat on Balanced difficulty to be quick-savey. I’m 90 hours in and I think the only time I’ve saved during combat was when I was trying to brainstorm ways to move a nonlethally knocked-out NPC out of an impending AoE without killing them. (The answer was Shove, btw, it always succeeds on unconscious targets, but be aware of cliffs. Throwing them, on the other hand, will deal 1 damage and murder them.) I have, I think, 2 combat Game Overs, and one of them was on a fight that the game telegraphs as being wildly imbalanced and tries pretty hard to discourage you from engaging in at all; I still went back and won it on the next try, once I had a better idea of what I would be dealing with. Once you are out of the early game and have a few levels under your belt, you should have all the tools you need to control the course of fights.
Honestly, when I was reading the article, I found myself thinking it sounded like the writer would be happier playing a visual novel or a dating sim.
I’m pretty terrible at the combat (never played D&D, never played CRPGs before and terrible at strategy games), but I’m still having fun figuring it out.
Especially compared to DOS2, the combat is really engaging IMO.
Yeah DOS was brutal, especially early on. I was ready for that same experience but was quite surprised how easy/forgiving things are in comparison. I will be upping the difficulty for my next run for sure
I definitely don’t disagree with the author here. Combat does feel tedious. I spent 2 days trying to kill the owlbear on balanced. I had to quick save every turn to avoid my entire party being 1-shot in the same turn. I think I had 15-20 game over scenarios when attempting to fight it.
I never much enjoyed dnd combat either, so that’s probably a major focus. Combat feels almost entirely random with next to no consistent hit rules. Honestly it’s on me for not researching the game more before buying it. It’s a great game but I have a 0% chance of ever finishing it due to how frustrating the combat is.
Gonna be honest, I have never attempted the owlbear fight; I have Examined the owlbear and I don’t need that kind of heat at level 3, lol. All the obvious ways I can think of to do it either involve getting lucky (for example I’m pretty sure you win if it fails its save against Blindness, but it is strong in Constitution saves so it probably won’t) or respeccing your companions into cheesier classes (for example, everyone is Gloomstalker rangers and you blow it up from stealth on turn 1).
I have some ideas for approaching it with a balanced party (grease bottles to hopefully keep it prone?) but I’d definitely be sweating if I had to fight it that way!
I didn’t even try the owlbear fight because I had Talk with Animals on and the Ranger dialogue option was basically, “my bad my bad sorry didn’t mean to come in here please don’t eat us,” so I figured she knew better than me what we would be up against, so I peaced out immediately upon passing that roll check.
I ended up restarting (had made some decisions that were less than great) and was able to beat it pretty easy once I had someone able to output real dps (15-20 damage)
But yeah, I got lucky when I finally did win. I found it a lot easier than some of the other larger fights in the area.
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DND 5e is a horrible system. Bg3 would be better if it was built on something else. The reasons they focus on in this article aren’t really the reasons why.
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the adventuring day is trash. It’s especially bad when there’s no human dm to be like “no you JUST had a long rest you can’t have another”. Though apparently most tables do one fight per long rest on average anyway, which is insane. That’s not how the game is balanced! Bg3 kind of sort of limits you by making you get supplies, but that doesn’t really make a big impact. Also there’s good berries.
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there’s very little room for mechanical customization and optimization. You pick a subclass, skills to be slightly better at, and some stats that matter but not a whole lot. Pretty much every early character is going to do their main thing at +5. But that modifier is dwarfed but the comparably huge 1d20 random factor.
I didn’t even notice I wasn’t proficient in my weapon on a new game the other day for like an hour. I lost the +2 Prof bonus but the +1 magic bonus mostly made up for that. And since the random factor of 1d20 is so big in comparison, it doesn’t make a big difference.
But character mechanics are very shallow, especially at low level. Compare pillars of eternity 2 where there are many more classes, class combinations, and the way weapons and armor work is actually interesting.
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dnd’s armor system is kind of stupid. This is a dead horse. But like come on ac as avoidance, no concept of damage reduction (outside of one feat and rare sources of 50% reduction).
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no degree of success or failure. Rolling a 30 vs a target of 5 is the same as rolling 5. A human dm will probably be better here, and they could have programmed it for some of the skill checks. But for combat that’s not how DND works.
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the assumed miss rate is pretty high. Whole turns can go by where everyone just misses. This is better at 5th level where you have two attacks, but low level can become a slog.
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they didn’t implement take 10 (or 20) so the game has a lot of boring rolls that don’t really mean anything. Mostly picking locks and searching. It’s very save scummy, especially when failure is just a dead end.
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personally I vastly prefer a low random factor. I liked how new Vegas skill checks were either you had it or you didn’t. No save scumming. No “why did my barbarian roll so high on arcana but my wizard at +10 rolled so poorly”
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1d20+stuff gives flat probability, which I dislike. Every outcome on the die is equally likely. That doesn’t feel good to me.
I could go on but it’s late. 5e kind of sucks. Article didn’t nail why.
5e is fine. It’s an overcorrection from the disaster of 4e. 3.5 was really good but it did suffer from classic slow combat and overload of bonuses/penalties at mid-high level. But if you don’t like 5e, go play something else. Maybe Pathfinder.
But if you just hate d&d in general but like rpgs in general, then not have I got some bad news for you. Every single RPG in existence owes it’s creation to d&d. All of them. Show a little fucking respect.
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