this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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The action economy is about to wreck that player.
My biggest complaint with BG3. So many act 1 battles feel like if you can't take out at least one enemy each turn you just get ankle bit to death.
i do enjoy walking around with a big ol crowd of skellies tho. by mid-act 2 i have so many godsdamned summons
Yeah dnd has quirks that aggravate that problem. Fighting at full capacity until you drop dead, for one. Limited options for fighting defensively (bg3 took out the dodge action).
Some stuff you can win by being really tedious. Assassin sneak attack, then run until you reset the fight and repeat. Real Dm wouldnt allow that.
real DM wouldn't allow that
This is an actual military doctrine used by the people of Afghanistan to kick the shit out of most of the biggest imperial powers of the world with a staggering win rate since basically forever, by TE Lawrence (kinda) to take out the ottoman empire, something similar by horse nomads since bows were invented, and by one part of the Vietnamese resistance during the american invasion(also I think to kick the French in the dick).
It has an extremely good record for doing exactly what it does in the game, and for ruining morale of the big guy getting shoot-twice-then-run'd in addition.
I have spoken to people who fought against it, and even a decade later they're still pissed. It is absolutely bullshit and it absolutely works. Ask an afghan war vet about their nightmares.
While that is fascinating and worth considering, I think the way it's implemented in the video games is kind of unsatisfying. Specifically, how the NPCs just go back to their idle routine even if that means standing casually on the bodies of their friends. For days.
The "for days" part is also particular to DnD. You can sleep for days while the world remains static. The rite of thorns never completes. The prisoners are never executed. Not even if you kill half the guards and take a snooze.
I think the Batman video games did a better job of NPCs freaking out and not just calming back down, but most games don't invest in that.
Also bg3 specifically let's you teleport to safety once you're 30 meters away, which is extra cheesy.
You're complaining that the game where the wizard who fucked a god and the vampire with an ancient alien brain parasite from the future are just table stakes is unrealistic?
I don't know what to say. Are you trying to say it clashes with the design? Are you saying every game should have every feature and 'StarCraft' should have the nemesis system from the 'shadow of' games? I don't get it.
The whole thing is an abstraction. Doing everything is a lot of developer hours and this one in particular aas shackled to a system made for tabletop play with a human gm, and not even one of the good systems fit that.
Here's another way to think about it: what would you have cut to include that?
I didn't use the word realistic. I called it unsatisfying.
Also, it's kind of tired to be like "oh you want rEaLiSm in your game about elf magic??". You know what people mean when they say that. Given the premises presented, nothing is contradictory enough to break suspension of disbelief. People use "realistic" as a shorthand. Sometimes people use "Verisimilitude" for this.
Having NPCs react reasonably in some cases (eg: scripted encounters, some law breaking) and not in others is jarring. You see the NPCs standing around the tavern having a chat and you go, "That's a reasonable scene. I can imagine this." Then you explode one of them, and they all run around in a panic. Still pretty reasonable. Follows from the premises given. But then you run away and come back, and all of them are back to drinking and chatting. All of them except the one you exploded, who's still a bloody mess on the floor. For some people, such as myself, this is too much. It's too high a contrast, and it foregrounds the limits of the game too much to easily suspend disbelief.
I don’t know what to say. Are you trying to say it clashes with the design? Are you saying every game should have every feature and ‘StarCraft’ should have the nemesis system from the ‘shadow of’ games? I don’t get it.
I don't feel like you tried very hard to "get it".
The game has a stealth and murder system you're encouraged to use. I'd like for them to have gone a little further with it. The NPCs sometimes look for you if you fire from stealth, but it's janky. The rest of the game is generally pretty immersive-sim, but the wheels fall off if you play one of the main playstyles. Unsatisfying.
I'm not a game developer and I expect you aren't either, so I don't know how complex it would be to make the responses to stealth more robust. Maybe add a "There's been a murder!" state to scenes. But they did a lot of other stuff to cover more niche scenarios, so it wouldn't be out of character.
Part of that is that most of the fights are way beyond what a low-level party should be dealing with in standard tabletop D&D, which makes the gameplay weird in some ways. The player characters and friendly NPCs get power-ups, too, but it's definitely expected that players reload often, which is obviously not a thing in tabletop.
I just wish I could make fat characters.
Kinda hard to stay fat when you're on the move all the time, both marching around and fighting for your life. It'd take a conscious effort to overeat (and/or a relatively sedentary work situation) to stay fat.
If you're really fat, it takes quite a while to get the weight off. In BG3 specifically, you're not (necessarily) an adventurer before the game, but get picked up randomly in a city. I see no issue with a fat level 1 wizard, and even for martials you can just say they trained for a couple of years and then stopped training once they got a job in the city. They probably should get some kind of penalty, but on the other hand you should also get a penalty for being small (i.e. gnome or halfling) and BG3 just threw that out completely. If a gnome can wield a two-handed sword made for adult humans without penalties, a fat dude can have the same stamina as a thin dude.
Small characters in older edition used different equipment; a small sized weapon used smaller dice, rules for number of hands between sizes were pretty much what you'd expect, which lead to crazy shit like feats that let you use a larger size category weapon, a small size suit of armor wouldn't fit a medium character, carrying capacity multipliers, +/- to hit, and all kinds of shit.
Pathfinder still has them.
It requires extra design consideration (how do we balance loot across character sizes, which many players would never deal with and all would feel at least a bit of fomo about; your small size tank can't use the best heavy armor, your medium rogue can't wear the best light armor) and doesn't add much. Plus, fat sits differently on different bodies, jiggles when running, adds complexity to animations like holding yourself against wall or getting stabbed, and have you ever been camping for more than a week without modern gear or tasted hard tack+pemmican?
I can see why they dropped it, but you may enjoy a more rules heavy system.
Oh, I do agree that it's tedious, especially when it's tabletop instead of a video game.
My point is pretty much that I want consistency - if you (the game) don't care about adventurers who are very short, it doesn't make sense to care about adventurers who are very fat. Though I think it's pretty clear that the main issue for the BG3 devs was that animating fat characters is a lot of extra work that most players won't appreciate.
and have you ever been camping for more than a week without modern gear or tasted hard tack+pemmican?
Have you ever tried losing a lot of weight? Takes a pretty long time, even if you basically don't eat anything. The main character in BG3 basically springs into existence at the beginning of the game (with a very good excuse for why someone who never did any adventuring is suddenly on the road), and the game takes places over a couple of weeks or a few months, depending on how often you rest.
But also all but one of them are kind of wizards.
And there is an amount of selection.
And they do get stabbed and set on fire a lot.
And they are all kind of infested with parasites.
And a more rules-heavy system might be for you.
Older editions had stuff like "small characters are harder to hit, so they get +1 AC. But then it's weird they have a hard time hitting each other, so they get a +1 to-hit, too".
Trying to simulate reality gets wacky real fast, and quickly becomes more work than it's worth.
Me playing Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon recently.
Sidenote, that game is FUCKING AWESOME. Holy shit. It's Skyrim but at home but if it were darker and just as enthralling. Also King Arthur. Hnng.
I really need to look into that. I liked the setting in the original Tainted Grail board game but hated the difficulty level. If I remember correctly, you fail a skill check that's relevant to the story, the board game punishes you by sending you back to the beginning of the chapter with an additional debuff which of course makes it even harder to get a success on the check the next time around.
I've heard complaints about Tainted Grails difficulty but maybe that was before their recent patch. The game is not hyper easy but as long as you're not insanely stupid you should be fine. If you spec out into magic the game becomes almost a joke. I am mage boy zapping everything near me mwahahaha get fucked Gallahad.
I played the demo a year ago or so and it seemed promising. Would you say it’s more Skyrim or Oblivion in terms of character stats/skills and “crunchiness?” Is there a dedicated speed stat?
When you stand next to water for too long and mud crabs converge on your location.
Ah, the ol' Skyrim Space Program.
Ya know, once had a level 3 party (DND 3.5) lasso a death giant and drag him behind their horses till he died. Was there more to it than that? Yes, did it matter? No. Is that cuz it was cool AF? F YEA!
I might add that thanks to poor understanding of politics this party of badasses, badasses their way into the collapse of their home country cuz they couldn't resist showing off. I love hubris
To be fair if you don't make it clear to the party that they can't take the creature or some other kind of warning there's no way for them to know if they can handle it without metagaming.
I the player know a level 2 can't take on a giant, but does my character know that
If you're playing a character that foolhardy to see a creature anywhere from 2x to 10x their size and think tbey can fight it, then let them die. It's not metagaming to see something large and make the reasonable assumption that it could crush you.
Can you beat an orca in a fight? How can you assume that without metagame knowledge of its stats?
Edit: quite a few people have very low opinions of a reasonable person's self-preservation instincts. Or assume every PC is the type of internet person that says they could fight a lion mano-a-mano.
An orca on land wouldn't be too difficult, and knowing what a whale is wouldn't be metagaming unless being uneducated is part of your backstory/character.
I don't know man I can cast fire from my hands. That's pretty over powered. Plus Steve over there can channel divine energy into their weapon. I think we can take a giant. It's just like a really big human right? And there's 4 of us.
That's not an unreasonable viewpoint for inexperienced adventurers.
Now if your character is a little more familiar with monsters and other adventures they would know better.
To your Orca example I'm just a guy. I have no abilities. A commoner wouldn't try to fight a giant. Now if you give me the ability to shoot lighting from my hands and 3 other people with similar abilities, I could reasonably believe I could fight an Orca.
Friendly reminder that 6% of Americans think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. A shocking 17% think they could beat a chimpanzee. These are just regular people without special skills.
https://www.newsweek.com/surprising-americans-beat-wild-animals-fight-experts-1691793
Again, if you want to play a character that doesn't think well, that's fine. But 6% (or even 17%) is not a majority of people and when a person sees something taller than most houses looming over them, I assume the average person would correctly adjust their chances of success.
This is about the need for a GM to establish for PCs that they can't engage a giant in combat. Most people don't do a year of BJJ and think they and 3 mates can wrestle down an elephant. I just have a higher opinion of people's self-preservation instincts, especially when they haven't been as far removed from nature as most people on the internet are. People used to be afraid of forests and the wilds, and I think that level of society is closer to RPGs than we are.
You missed the point those 6 to 17 percent are just regular people. They don't shoot fire from their hands.
Remember even a level two adventure is a very very small percentage of the world's population. Most people are way weaker in DND. Being a level 2 adventurer is way beyond a year of BJJ
Yeah but what about the remaining 94 to 83% of regular people who rightly judged their ability to judo-chop a bear to death? Or does having the self-awareness to know you probably can't win against a bear make you abnormal? I didn't miss the point, I scaled the challenge. Because a bear is much less threatening and dangerous than a 20 ft giant.
Listing that stat is just assuming that adventurers are mainly pulled from the 6% group who, once they get their hand on a bit more power, would try something even dumber. I don't think that is reasonable.
And the backgrounds in most RPGs are so varied that you can't map it on to any amount of training. A background as a soldier might mean you spent years fighting and then you start as a level 1 fighter, so it took you decades to reach level 2. Or you could be a farmhand and then, after a couple weeks of travel later, you're now a level 2 sorcerer. A year of serious BJJ training is rather generous.
To be fair humans did take down wooly mammoths at some point
Can you beat an orca in a fight?
If I was a magic robot that could throw fireballs or kill something by simply touching it IRL, probably.
You are making the mistake of setting your fantasy character up against a normal animal.
You as a real life human would be fighting the orka, not your fantasy character. They would be fighting a Chimera. Which can do all those things you mentioned as well.
And if you think your fantasy character can beat a Chimera with their weapons and magic, that would be the same as you thinking you can beat an orka with your bare hands.
Unless you are some elite high level special ops in the military, you will not win against an orka.
Let's say as a party you've taken down a few monsters already. Without knowing the proportional strength of a chimera to the monsters you've already faced how would you know?
Like let's say I did kill an Orca on my own. Then I see a polar bear, the Orca was a lot bigger so seems reasonable.
Now living in the age of technology, not a fantasy setting, I personally know that a polar bear would be a lot harder to beat. But how's an adventurer supposed to know that? They don't have wikipedia and national geographic in most fantasy settings. It's not unreasonable to believe when encountering a creature that no one in the party is familiar with it at all.
Yeah, but you're not that at level 2.
Well, not fireball; but being a Warforged isn't level dependent, it's a race, and Touch of Death is a level 2 spell for a Death Domain cleric.
Wasn't familiar with "Touch of Death"; I don't play clerics often. But it's just a smite.
Assuming average HP on level up and +3 CON mod: Barb: 25; Fighter: 22; Cleric: 19.
And Touch of Death does +9 damage at level 2.
I'm only breaking out numbers to get a better idea of what the users of the ability would be seeing, and what level of lethality they would come to expect from repeated usage. And that's not killing anyone with a touch except commoners, and level 1 wizards and sorcerers.
My only point is: people who have had to risk their life to even get to level 2 (unless they're reckless or an idiot) probably wouldn't have an overly big head over middling magical abilities. They might be feeling themselves and think they can fight a group of thugs at 4 to 1 odds but it's bonkers to pretend a normal adventurer would need some ex machina explanation to warn them off fighting something like a giant or a dragon at level 2.