The author really loved the sound of their own voice. I’m a dozen paragraphs in and there’s not an actual argument to back up the assertion that “it’s not fun” besides combat being “tedious”. I mean, look, I gave up 5e in favor of other systems after the OGL disaster and haven’t looked back, but this is a garbage tier article and I’m surprised it made it through Polygons editors, given how many of their writers and members have been espousing their joy for the game. Criticism is great, but “it’s not any good” just seems lazy and contrarian for contrarian sake.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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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)
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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:
A cantrip is a spell that can be cast at will, without using a spell slot and without being prepared in advance. Repeated practice has fixed the spell in the caster's mind and infused the caster with the magic needed to produce the effect over and over. A cantrip's spell level is 0.
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.
5e is a bad table top game
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.
To be honest I think they have a really good point, in that the game _isn't _ a dungeon master and it isn't going to have the sort of creative leeway that a real DM could give you. But.... no shit, it's not a real DM. Nobody expected it to be one. It is a video game, and a damn good one at that, and while it does its absolute damnedest to give you as much creative freedom as possible it'll never possibly be able to match up to your buddy Frankie telling you to make an athletics check to slam-dunk the goblin through his own war drum.
But this author sounds like they frequently try for... Let's say, non-standard approaches, and bothers the DM about it until they allow it. Or, alternatively, the DM is just awesome and has rule of cool take priority over nearly any other rule (I admit I am guilty of this sometimes). It's not necessarily a bad thing but the author is comparing apples and tomatoes by comparing the video game Baldur's Gate 3 with the tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons. Sure, they're just about the same color, but the similarities end there.
I don't mind the content of the review, it's a fine opinion to have. But, what boggles my mind is the "Polygon Recommends" badge. The tone of the review is so dismissive and negative, I would never have guessed the reviewer enjoyed the game. It's like the writer assumed you read all the site's positive coverage and didn't feel the need to mention the game's best qualities.
Combat is hella fun, and fucking it up has serious consequences. Perhaps this just isn't the game for them.
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.
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.
magic feels really bad in this system early on when all they canreally do is spam cantrip after missing all their spells
plus healing spells feel very weak compared to potions
Potions got Buffed in the game iirc normaly drinking one I an Action not a bonusaction
That is correct. Although many, many tables have that as a homebrew rule too.
There's also the fact that generally DND magic has every spell as a bespoke effect. There's not an underlying system you can reason about. You're not really expected to make your own spells. You don't really tweak the ones you get very much. What can you do with a 4th level slot vs 5th? You can kind of infer from the examples, and maybe there's details in the DMG somewhere , but it's not foregrounded.
They also are very, well, mechanical rather than magical. You declare you're casting, check off the spell slot, and the spell just happens. Some people might prefer this taste, but it makes it feel very mundane and bland to me . Compare like Mage (awakening, 2e) where you're always looking for ways to stretch how far your spells can go, balancing risk, and looking for thematic boosts.
The "looking for ways to stretch how far your spells can go" bit from Mage always struck me as "playing mother-may-I with the Storyteller." I really prefer it as a player when my abilities do what they say they do, and as a DM when my players' abilities don't require me to make too many judgment calls, which can lead to players who are more persuasive IRL getting their way more often than players who aren't.
I think I meant more about "I can take a -6 on the roll to affect all the guys and risk it not working" or "I'll risk three dice on paradox" for stretching your spells rather than "I can totally cure cancer with life 2, right??"
DND doesn't really have much tactical depth for the spells. They do what they say and always work (unless saved against). You never get the "I don't know if I have another spell on me!" trope.
What you meant I think shows up in DND too. Players being like "can I use mage hand to swing a sword?" or "can I use create water to drown him?" That's more an annoying player problem, but I see what you mean about some systems enable it more than others.
You'd probably really dislike Fate, then, where it's almost entirely based on what the table agrees makes sense for your free form written character traits.
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.
But if you don’t like 5e, go play something else. Maybe Pathfinder.
"We've got both kinds of music here. Country and western"
My dude if you don't like DND you probably won't like its brother Pathfinder. There are many, many, rpgs out there that aren't a close relative. Pbta is huge. Fate is old but good. Gurps has been around forever. WoD/CofD is dear to me.
Show a little fucking respect.
Lol to WOTC? Fat fucking chance. This is such a bad take.
What's crazy is the more I learn about 3.5, the more it seems perfect for a CRPG where the game is keeping track of everything for you and does the calculations in a split second.
Every single RPG in existence owes it's creation to d&d. All of them.
This is so easily disproven that I’m wondering whether this is a troll comment. There are many well known RPGs that were developed independently and contemporary to D&D, which themselves have many derivatives. GDW published Traveller in 1977. Chaosium published Runequest in 1978 and Call of Cthulhu in 1981. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone have been writing Fighting Fantasy books since 1982.
D&D itself is based partially on Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor game, which he’d been designing since 1971.
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