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Wizards of the Coast "now talking to lots of partners" about next Baldur's Gate
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this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Hahaha oh your poor soul you don't know what you risk conjuring up with a question like that.
I have to write this all out in a blog post so I can just link it one day.
The core mechanic of 1d20+stuff produces flat probability. Every outcome on the die is equally likely. That's ridiculous. Go throw some darts at a dart board. Do you get an equal distribution around the board? Just as many hit the floor as the bullseye? No. So the underlying math is kind of trash.
The entire game is predicated on its rest cadence. You're expected to have like 5-8 medium encounters and then take a long rest. This generates a ton of problems for pacing and balance. Chief among them, most people don't want to play that way. Polls show people typically do like one fight per rest. Welp. Now all your long rest classes are over performing and your short rest classes suck.
Don't even start with "not every encounter has to be a fight". Don't even fucking start. Most people can't consistently come up with interesting non combat encounters in DND that tax resources the same way fights do. There are no real social conflict rules, for example, as mentioned below.
But even if you do somehow manage to do the suggested amount of encounters per rest, that severely limits the pacing of the story. There are so many hacks and variants to try to fix this. Gritty realism, sanctuary resting, heroic mode. They're all bandaids on a poor foundation.
The magic system is trash. It's just fucking bad. It had no real internal consistency. Every spell is bespoke. What's the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level? Fuck if I know. Can you make your own spells? Not really. Can you be creative with spells? Ehh kind of but they tend to be very specific about what they do, with few inputs.
Also like the way magic works is boring. There's no real flavor. You say you cast the spell and check off the box, and it happens. Maybe you need a material component. That's about it. It's shallow as heck. It's also weird that rangers paladins wizards clerics arcane-tricksters all basically have magic that works the same way. You could do so much more.
The social system I would say it was trash if it existed. You meet a pack of bandits in the pass. You want to fight them. The rules have a lot to say here. Hit points, armor, saves, actions and reactions, equipment, etc. Ok wait, you want to scare them off with your words instead. Well get fucked, the book has some vague guidelines that quickly turn into "the dm decides".
There are very few decisions to make about your character. Species and class. Maybe a feat or two depending on how long you play, but those compete with ASIs, and most games don't even get to 8th level. Subclasses sometimes have a few things to pick, but sometimes you literally get zero choices.
The skill system is extremely basic and you can't really specialize unless you're a class with expertise, and even then your options are kind of limited.
Magic items also have no real internal consistency. Why is the flying broom a like uncommon item despite being extremely powerful? Who knows.
Low level combat tends to also be very "I move and attack once". Some DMs might give you bonuses for taking advantage of the environment, but that's not well defined. It could be. It's not. Also making a single attack that has a like 40% chance of doing absolutely nothing sucks.
The main strengths of DND are brand recognition, and it's shallow enough that you can't really fuck up a character. Every human fighter is basically the same mechanically, which means your idiot 10 year old brother can play. But that also means you don't really have much depth to explore.
Pretty much every other part of the game is bad, under baked, or not suited for general purpose RPG stuff.
As someone who's only ever played 5e, I ask, what would you say is a better? PF? That's the one I hear a lot.
Pathfinder is the "we have both kinds of music: country and western" answer. I think pf 2nd edition is probably the best bet if you want to stay in the genre. I haven't played it but I've heard good things.
One thing I didn't touch on in my rant is genre. If you are trying to do something that isn't a dungeon crawl, probably don't use DND.
I personally really like Fate. It's more in line with how I imagine RPGs should go. Very narrative, lots of creative freedom. If you want a really crunchy system with lots of rules, it's not for you.
You know how sometimes people talking about DND will be like "ah yes my character will really come online when I hit 7th level as a monk paladin bard"? That's kind of nonsense. In fate if you wanted to be a righteous rockstar with a mean left hook, you could just write down "Rocker on a mission from God" as your high concept. If everyone agrees that's cool and they get it, you're done. Character works in session 1.
DND also tends to make the players be very zoomed in on their characters. Some people like that. I prefer fate where it's a little more zoomed out, and you're expected to think about the scene and story. As a player you have input.
That said, blades in the dark is also pretty popular. I don't like it for much less severe reasons than the problems I have with DND. It's not a bad game, I don't think, but there are some choices it made that I don't enjoy.
If you want a dnd like experience Pathfinder is your bet, it's got a lot more rules to it but if you read them you'll understand why. You can read them for free on aonprd.com by the way. Pathfinder gives you far more creative freedom than 5e while still being relatively tight.
My person recommendation for newbies to the hobby is Chronicles of Darkness. It's way cheaper than 5e too, if you stick to a single splat, think something like a race expanded out into a full game; vampires, werewolves, mages, changelings, humans who hunt monsters, mutants, things like that. The games are narrative focused but don't neglect combat (like 5e neglects narrative).
it's got a more free form point buy system, instead of leveling up and all your dice rolls just get better you get to put experience into whatever skill/ability you want to be better at or perk you want to have.
it's mechanics are genuinely simple, almost everything in the game is handled with the same kind of roll; you and your dm picks a skill (let's say crafting) and an ability (like 5e's ability scores, let's say intelligence) for whatever you want to do then you roll however many d10s as points you have in those scores.
it's setting is easier to understand, it's just modern day earth with a magical underground, that makes it way easier to know how much any given thing would cost or where you gotta go to do something. There are lots of weird things going on, but a new player doesn't need all of those and has plenty of information to be grounded otherwise.
it gives you lots of things to work with (like bloodlines for vampires or groups to join as anything else) but also explicitly encourages you and your dm to create new things with the base stuff as guidelines.
A few other recommendations; world of darkness is my preferred game, so i gotta mention it. Gurps is the most open game I've ever played, you can do literally anything.
Go play Blades In The Dark or Monster Of The Week
1d20 + a modifier is how you eliminate flat probability, because you're adding the modifier. DCs are set so that you nearly always succeed at a task that you're good at.
What's the difference between a third level spell and a fourth level spell? How many times you can feasibly use it. Or if you upcast, one die. This is probably the thing I like most about 5e compared to other systems.
Giving you a move every turn keeps combat more interesting than incentivizing you to stay still by treating it as any other action, IMO.
You're not really selling me.
The modifier doesn't make the probability less flat. You have an equal chance of getting every value on the die, so the worst and best outcome are equally likely. Compare to like 3d6. There's only one way to roll a 3 [1,1,1], but a bunch of ways to roll an 8 ([4,3,1], [3,3,2], [6,1,1], etc)
Go look at https://anydice.com/ . The default should be 3d6 and you see a nice curve. Change it to 1d20 and it's flat. 5% for everything. Change it to 1d20+5 and it's still flat, just with bigger numbers.
Your odds of success change in that when you're looking to roll a 15 you're more likely to fail than when you're looking for a 12, but at all times, for any check, you're just as likely to get an extreme result as an average. That's weird.
When you are creating a spell, how do you know what level it should be? How do you know what effects it should have? There's some guidance in the DMG but it's flimsy and not actually used by many of the canon spells. If you don't care about being creative with magic then you might not care about this. To me it makes it feel very rigid and mechanical.
There are so many other ways you could do magic.
What? My complaint wasn't that you can move and attack. It's that that's typically all you do. You move 30' and make a single attack. Go read "create an advantage" in the fate-srd for a glimpse of how things could be different. Some DMs will let you interact with the environment, but that's highly DM dependent and uncodified.
At higher levels at least you tend to get more stuff you can do on your turn.
I think pf2e also changed it so you get 3 actions.
Yes, but only in a critical success and critical fail. If you're supposed to always succeed because your character should be able to do the action successfully in their sleep, the DM isn't even supposed to make you roll. The die may land on any value between 1 and 20, but if the DC is 10 and you have +7 to your roll, you've eliminated failures from 3-9 on the d20. I'm well aware of how the average chance of rolling a given number changes when rolling multiple dice, but I'm not sure why a 3d6 bell curve would be preferable to 1d20 when you're only looking for a binary success or failure.
You could raise this about any card in Magic: The Gathering as well, and I think the answer is just "balance". I don't know that I've found myself in a position where we needed a spell to be created. For me at least, some amount of rigidity is very much appreciated on my end when the fiction involves literal magic, because it breaks the rigid laws of nature by definition.
Someone described the PF2e 3 action mechanics to me, and there are parts of it that I like, but at the end of the day, it incentivizes different behaviors and isn't necessarily better or worse. What would you like to do on your turn other than move and attack (which also ignores class-specific options you get for your bonus action, as well as other types of regular actions you might take for one reason or another)? What choices do you make differently when movement is treated equally to attacking as opposed to movement being use-it-or-lose-it? It affects how it feels, and it's great that there are other systems to mix things up, but I like how 5e handles it.
I forgot to bring up in my rant that DND has no concept of "degree of success" outside of unique effects like the sprite's poison. So that sucks, too.
I would prefer rolls were weighted towards the average instead of "any result is equally likely". Imagine you have a wizard and a fighter. They are trying to figure out some arcane riddle. The wizard rolls at +5 (16 int, proficiency). The fighter at +0. They're looking to hit DC 15, a tricky but not excessive target.
The fighter has a 25% to hit that. The wizard has like a 45% to just flub it. That feels weird to me. I want the wizard to have more reliable outcomes, and less zany "I rolled a 2 lol I can't read today".
A dice pool gives you more consistent results.
I also forgot to bring up DND has no concept of fail forward or succeed at a cost.
And I forgot to bring up how insane it is to still have "16 strength is a +3 bonus".
You've never wanted to create your own spell. That's surprising. There are many spells to pick from, so I guess that could be.
Even discarding the "make your own spell effects" for the moment, the fact that they all work basically the same is boring. Declare your action, check off the spell slot box.
Off the top of my head you could do like
You could build whole classes, whole games, around that shit, and I just popped that out without any real thought. DND magic by comparison is extremely bland, safe, and mechanical. None of that is how you would typically describe magic.
I don't know what I said that has you stuck on literal movement. I must have said "move" when I meant "take your turn" at some point. Moving in space isn't that important.
Anyway. First off, making a single attack is boring. Especially when you play with slow players. Especially when you miss and nothing happens. They should probably get rid of missing as a common possibility, come to think of it.
You get like a minute of activity and then wait 10 minutes for everyone else to go. There's not really much tactical or narrative depth. You don't really get to decide much. Especially if you're not using flanking rules.
Something where you can make decisions and tradeoffs might be nice. Some sort of action point pool where you can decide how much goes into offense vs how much you keep for defense. Or something like fate's "create an advantage" where you can do something to set up someone (maybe future you) for a slam dunk. Some sort of succeed at a cost mechanic, perhaps.
Or even just giving multiple attacks earlier would help. The odds shift towards "maybe something will happen" then.
I also forgot to rant about hit points. That's a classic topic though you've probably read it before. But man, playing a game where health is constrained makes so much more sense to me. None of that "this bandit is fifth level so he can take 5 axe blows" weirdness.
Let me know if I missed replying to anything important. Doing this on my phone is hard.
But in that example, it's not that he can't read today, it's that in this case, he failed to decipher the riddle, and you or the DM role play exactly why that is.
Which is why damage works that way in 5e. It was a conscious decision. I don't see what benefit there is for a consistent bump in the middle of your dice results when you're looking for success or failure, other than the fact that d6 dice are far more common to have on hand than d20.
This is one of the few things in 5e I'd actually say I have a problem with. I understand that PF2e flattened this, which is good.
But predictable mechanics mean that I can plan tactically, and I like the tactical battle map aspect of RPGs. That goes in to your ability to miss an attack as well. You can't guarantee success, but you can influence your odds in a bunch of ways and take critical chances when they matter most.
This may vary by DM, but I'm still actively engaged in deducing HP, AC, and any other relevant values about the things we're fighting while it's not my turn, and our DM accommodates us doing that.
That's thin meat for roleplaying, and probably discouraging for the wizard who wants to be smart.
I like being consistently good at stuff. Every time I flub it on like a 5 I'm annoyed. Like, this is my character's high concept why do I still have a huge chance of beefing it. With, again, little to no mechanics to succeed at a cost or fail forward.
I don't feel the same way when a dice pool betrays me. If I roll [6, 2, 5, 4, 7] in Mage I can look at it and go "wow, I guess I fucked up". Feels different when it's just 1d20 comes out with a 3.
You can have understandable mechanics with the stuff I described. And about as predictable as regular DND, where people can pass or fail checks.
Some of what I described would open whole new tactical fronts. Like, if you have spell sequences, you'd want to consider how far to let an enemy go before you really need to deal with them. Or if you want to try to plan around your wizard using them.
Anything where the spell doesn't fire instantly also opens new fronts.
I also forgot to complain how magic doesn't get interrupted in 5e. You used to be able to interrupt casters by getting up in their face. I see why they removed it- players don't like it, too hard, losing your spell sucks- but it removed an important depth.
All of this would kind of be dragged down by spells-per-rest, but that's a separate topic .
5e has vanishingly few ways of influencing the odds. No flanking. Expensive aid-another/teamwork. No situational bonuses. Few resources to dip into. I'm assuming a party that's like levels 1-5 because that's where most people play, and without a lot of magic items because that's the default game assumption. Because the magic item rules are so thin, you can actually patch a lot of these problems with items. But that's a patch.
This is extremely metagamey, and not very interesting to me. Some DMs just tell you the numbers. And even so, that's only so much you can do until you figure it out.
Compare Fate for example. You can defend someone else on their turn. Shit, I forgot, DND doesn't even have this concept. But yeah, in Fate you're engaged when other people are going because you might need to leap in to defend them, or spend a fate point to help them out. That's engaging with the game a lot more than "I wonder what their AC is?"
I think at this point we might have to chalk this up to we want different things from games, and have different preferences. Some people like mayonnaise. That's okay.
You still get to be smart most of the time due to where you put your points and proficiencies, but you're not all-knowing.
But that makes you consistently middle of the road. The 1d20 still has that modifier to make you consistently good.
I don't like it for similar reasons. It's that thing where you said sometimes you miss, but I think it feels worse.
We play with +2 flanking rules. There are situational advantage rolls and such. Classes start with their resources quite early on.
You can ready an action to trigger under certain conditions.
A ton of people like mayonnaise. I'm really not trying to pick a fight with you, and I appreciate this discussion, but you've been trying to say how bad mayonnaise is this whole time when I like mayonnaise, haha. At other times, I'll be interested in other condiments too, but mayonnaise is good on a lot of food, and it's easy to come by.
Plot twist: I like mayonnaise. To extend this metaphor, I'm just sick of it after eating nothing but mayo for a few years.
I appreciate you being patient. I'm not the most persuasive writer (especially on my phone), but I hope at least some of what I wrote gave you stuff to think about.
Ultimately, if you're having fun with your group that's what matters most. It sounds like you are. Would you have more or less fun with a different system? Maybe. I think it's good to try different stuff, but the primary goal remains having fun with friends.
It's just that when I've seen so many problems in other systems that this one solves, it's astounding that someone can say the Larian DNA is the only thing making BG3 playable, haha.
I honestly forgot that's how this thread started.
I think I would have liked it better if it wasn't so dnd5e, but DND is definitely playable.
I mean, I enjoyed Solasta, too, and that doesn't have any of the larian magic in it.
Hold on, you've said a lot of stuff that just reads as wrong, uninformed, or overly generous, no offense, but there is one specific thing I'm zeroing in on here; you are just as likely to fail at something you are supposedly good at as you are to fail. The game is literally designed for that, the designers have gone on record as working to bake randomness in at the base level and prevent your character from being able to be genuinely good at something. The dice mechanics in 5e are terrible and indictive of why 5e is the worst game I've ever played (out of like maybe 10)
I'm currently in a Pathfinder campaign that kinda discourages specialization in skills due to going for harder combat, but there are things my character is genuinely good at. I've got a better than even chance of success in those things, hell for some of them i can remove randomness altogether and some tasks are literally impossible to fail. That feels good.
You are not just as likely to fail as you are to succeed at a DC 10 check in a skill you have proficiency in, and I have no idea what you're talking about.
If there is a dc 10 check in your game then your dm is either a bad dm or is just giving you a chance to fuck around.
Or that the thing you're trying to do doesn't require mastery of a given skill to do...
Why are you seriously doing anything that requires you to operate on the lowest level? What possible reason does a great mage have investigating a lowly flame cantrip? Why is a skilled thief trying to pick the lock on a child's toy? The things set at dc 10 are things you out grow once you reach your first class level.
I'm not sure why there would be a lock on a child's toy, but if there was, going by the table in the handbook, it would probably be closer to a 5 than a 10. A great mage would investigate something far beneath them if it helped their party advance their goals and they were the most likely to be able to do it. Just like someone who's a great liar would have a far easier time convincing a naive person of the lie. It happens. They wouldn't choose to not speak to that person just because they're too easy to convince. And it's why of course you're more likely to succeed at something you're good at, so I have no idea how you came to the conclusion you did about D&D's skill checks.
Because those aren't challenges you put towards an adventuring party. There is a level of scaling that you must implement to keep a game even vaguely interesting, if i put something so banal in front of any decent player they'd keep moving and look for the real hook.
So to be clear, if you get skill checks that your character is too good at, it's because the DM sucks, but if you play this other system where you can have skill challenges that are impossible to fail, that's because the system is better than D&D? I'm sorry, but you make no sense. I think we're done here. I think I know why you found D&D to be the worst RPG system you've ever played.
Stop being purposely obtuse, wizards isn't going to hire you