Holy $%^&! Baldur's Gate 3 news 2018 !

Games
41

Sort of. 5e’s design concept was to make a game that didn’t get in the way of the players and let them play.

The numbers don’t scale out of control like 3.5/Pathfinder and you don’t feel like you’re restricted to just pushing buttons like 4e. It’s a elegant and fairly simple system. I prefer 3.5/PF at this point. Something in me just enjoys the idea of death being a thing and high level magic vaporizing people and altering the world.

5e goes too far in the “players can’t die” direction for me. The only way a player can really die is if the DM literally pounds on their downed body most of the time. Of course everyone everywhere house rules 5e since it’s very flexible about that sort of thing.

42

That’s interesting.

I’ve only played AD&D 2nd edition and 3rd edition. In both cases, most of the party usually died before we ever leveled up our starting characters more than once. So I guess that’s a roundabout way of saying we usually died around level 2. There was one campaign in which I was still alive at level 3, but we got distracted by Halo and Ninja Gaiden.

43

To tag onto Shiva’s comment, I think my issue with 5E is this:

It feels a lot like someone started to turn D&D into a low-crunch, high-adaptability, fast-to-play “story game” style RPG. . . and then halfway through remembered that, oh, shit, no, this is D&D and our players like rolling piles of dice and poring over obscure tomes for powers and spells to slay monsters in the most statistically efficient manner possible, and added some of that stuff back into the mix.

What you get is this weird “in the middle” beast that lacks both 3.5/PF’s hyper optimization arms race between GM and players and 4E’s absurdly deep tactical richness, yet nonetheless still asks you to memorize bonuses and Feats and convoluted spells each with their own unique mini rulesets and attack calculations and ability prerequisites. . .

Like, I’m not sure I save enough time building and playing a 5E character over a Pathfinder character to justify the loss of richness and depth in the system. . . and at the same time, I don’t know if the system is quite smooth and fast enough to enable the kind of loose, improv-heavy storytelling I like most in my GMing compared to something like Powered by the Apocalypse or Fate.

Don’t get me wrong, 5E isn’t bad, and it’s about the only d20 based fantasy RPG I’m interested in playing right now (except maybe 13th Age, or 4E if someone gets the full online character builder working again somewhere), but it’s definitely not perfect, either.

Honestly, I’m not sure if some of the streamlining decisions it makes would translate super well to a computer game. It pulls out some of the most fiddly tactical bits, or simplifies them, and that’s the stuff that having a computer “GM” for you is best for!

44

Yeah, that’s the history of the game.

5e’s death rules are as follows:

If you get hit an drop below zero, you don’t die as long as the extra damage doesn’t exceed your max hit points.

So… unlikely past level like 2 or 3 with a bad crit. Add in the following problem: any damage healed when you’re at zero heals from zero and there are no side effects.

Example:

You’re a 15th level wizard with say 86 hit points. You get meteor swarmed for 100 damage. You fall unconscious and will maybe die in 3 rounds if you roll poorly on death saves.

Your cleric casts a Healing word, healing you for 16 hit points. You are awake and fine now.
You get hit by another meteor swarm for 100.
He casts healing word next turn for 7. You’re fine.

To die you need to go down and then fail 3 death saves (roll under 10 on d20). If you make 3, you stabilize. If you roll a 20, you wake up and get a hit point.

If someone beats you with a club while you’re dying, you lose 2 death saves. Any other damage does 1 death save to you. They don’t carry over or anything. So you can be cut down, stabbed in the head and get back up and repeat forever. A first level cleric can keep up a level 20 character against basically anything that doesn’t have 3 or more attacks by healing 1 point of damage. Paladins can in theory do it… for like hours by healing 1 point with lay on hands each round.

Meanwhile in the old days, -10 meant you were dead at level 20 and in the old, old days 0 meant you were dead at level 36.

Also stuff like Orb of Annihilation does like… nothing. Its like 2d10 damage per round you let it molest you (it moves slightly slower than you can crawl). Instead of, you know, instantly annihilating you as per the name.

I kind of agree with Armando, though it’s a HELL of a lot easier to make a character in 5e. There are just a lot less options. And they do some great stuff with multiclassing casters and the like. It just feels… like all the corners are rounded and everything is kind of made of foam wrt RAW. Of course almost no one plays RAW, everyone houserules things to be deadlier and more interesting. Critical Role is the biggest D&D push in decades and they houserule ressing with rituals and whatnot so that it matters. And Matt has no problems beating downed players. His monsters tend to commit. His dragon is mad at you, he’s full attacking you. Bad news is his bite dropped you, so now you’re getting 2 claws with advantage… you’re gonna die.

45

I haven’t read the 5E (or even 4E) rules so I can’t speak from anything but listening to actual plays, but the big rule change I have an issue with in 5E is that it exchanges a lot of admittedly fiddly individual bonuses and penalties that have a clear and guaranteed benefit or penalty to your roll for Advantage and Disadvantage. Which mean that you roll 2d20 instead of 1d20 and take the higher or lower roll depending. Which is a) a single catch-all for a lot of really different things and b) doesn’t actually guarantee you will do better or worse. I have a problem with both of those things.

46

The one thing I really like about 5 edition is how it handles spellcasting. Not scaling spells, and being able to use high level slots means more interesting multiclass options.

The rest, well, I really like Pathfinder.

47

I think you’re all crazy. I love 5e! It feels like all the best parts of the old school revival games with (mostly) my favorite parts of other D&D editions. What I love most is how easy it is to add house-rules to (a thing I particularly love about OSR games). It’s a very flexible system, built with tons of variants that show you how easy it is to add or remove whatever rules work best at your table in a way that I think is way more approachable than most games.

It’s my favorite campaign system. If we’re playing a one-off, or maybe only a couple sessions, I think I’d rather a system like the Powered by the Apocalypse games (or maybe Beyond The Wall or Numenera). But if we’re hunkering down into some characters for the long-haul, I think 5e is the best engine for this by far. It’s my favorite D&D since 2nd Edition. Somewhat unfortunately, it’s killed a few of my forays into other systems because 5e is so much easier to teach and fun to play, but fortunately it’s also really easy to adapt the best ideas from other games into 5e.

All that said, I have no interest in playing a 5e CRPG at all. Pathfinder is great for that. I loathe Pathfinder at the table as both a DM and a player, but I love min-maxing and experimenting with silly parties by myself. My favorite parts of 5e don’t make sense as strengths in a computer game. I’d play a 5e game and hope to be proven wrong, but agree with the general sentiment that it wouldn’t be great (in spite of it being by far my favorite RPG at the table for the moment).

48

I love this rule change in part because I think it gets at one of my biggest dislikes of D&D: rolling two dice is ALWAYS more fun then rolling one. And in D&D you often only roll one die. I think rolling 3 dice is only slightly better than rolling 2, but rolling two is way better than rolling one. My friends who are Pathfinder fans share you feelings towards it, but it’s never been an issue for me, at least in part because now I get to roll two dice!

49

I agree!

I love doing silly (and sometimes powerful) things with 3.5/PF rules by myself as in a CRPG. But in a group setting I hate the fact that those systems force everyone (including the GM) to play at the same level of min/maxed efficiency.

50

Interesting, interesting - thanks to everybody weighing in. So it sounds like I was mostly right, but underestimated the 5e rule set a bit.

4e is by far and away my favorite set, but I rarely to never get to actually play D&D outside of crpgs and just reading the rule books.

51

D&D in general, is another one of those systems where the base hit points don’t play very nicely with the RNG. Some editions are better than others etc, but a lot of the min/max complaints stem from this. The number of hit points that characters have are ultimately very susceptible to small variations in RNG, unless you absolutely min/max your characters, and even then in some rulesets you can easily get one rounded.

There are some really interesting grognard/rabbit hole discussions in this thread, and it’s pretty awesome to follow. I played D&D with an awesome group of people in the 70s, and have only revisited it via computer games since then. I think it’s a long running theme for me, especially in MMO threads, but there has been a general trend to make everything “single player” viable. I get that from many angles, I understand economic reality, but it tends to steer people into game modes that are ultimately so much less satisfying, and the reason that any of these games were ever actually good in the first place.

Rolling an 18 out of 20 gets you foozle power in 3.4883ES…eh…ok. My friend being drunk and running up to a dragon as a monk in an encounter, and then rolling a 20 and one shotting it, much to the DM’s dismay? Priceless.

52

Yes! Randomness is a fantastic story generating feature at the table! It can feel like a bug in a single-player RPG.

53

And that may be the ultimate point of trying to transfer these systems to PC. Take Baldur’s Gate for example (any version), the one thing the computer never compensates for, is the horrible pathing. While you are trying to get a character in position…and it takes 10 turns to do it instead of 2, the computer is wailing on you with ranged attacks from mages doing obscene damage. I’m surprised this doesn’t come up more in discussion. BG2 et al, are horrible fucking games from a mechanical standpoint, because the AI never takes into account these failures for it to resolve pathing. I can’t even count how many encounters I failed, because a melee character was trying to path and failing, while being bombarded by ranged attacks.

/anger.