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Bards are Baldur's Gate 3's best class and I can't imagine playing it as anything else
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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I'm skeptical of any article like this on its face. The whole beauty of a well done RPG, especially a CRPG, is that you get choices on how to build your character and how you handle encounters and can be successful with many of them.
If bard is the most fun for you, awesome. If it's "objectively better", the game is flawed.
I really think one of the essential parts of a well-made rpg is that it can make you feel like whichever class you've picked is the best one
Arguably, that's the whole point. I never played the original Fallout thinking I could play every option. I've seen people complaining about "you have to use savescumming or you miss half the dialogue." No, that's called "replayability" so when you go back and try as a different type of character, there will be paths you'll be locked out of, but there will also be paths that were previously closed now open.
that's something I've noticed about bg3 (only 1-2h in) vs the old ones and even ps:torment.
in most of those you can continue the dialog and usually circle back to the other choices.
in bg3 its seems much more like, you say one option you're stuck with it - which seems much better.
i'll be interested to see on the replay - but i guess itll be up to me to play it differently.
Bg3 makes you feel like your choices matter. I havnt progressed very far (10 hours in and mostly exploring) and there have been points in dialog or exploring the open world when I pass a "point of no return". This is where I can tell there will be a consequence (good or bad) to my choices, but perhaps it's not immediately seen. I havnt had most of these choices pay off yet, but it builds anticipation and makes me want to see how this will play out and wonder if it will come up further down the line when I least expect.
That's actually my biggest criticism of D&D. Bards are better choices than rogues or fighters or wizards. Same goes with clerics or druids. sprinkle on a bit of paladin, a couple feats, and some magic gauntlets, and they can invalidate whole swathes of staple fantasy archetypes entirely.
if by better you mean, more fun, i think that's slightly up to you.
you can have just as much fun with a more constrained character who keeps losing dice rolls - it might be harder work though.
no, i mean more empowered to interact with the game world. They have more agency in more arenas of play. You can play a goober of any class and have fun, i agree, but a goober who picks a "better" class will be able to create more comedies of errors beyond "Player fails to hit thing with a big stick".
That's the issue with how combat oriented D&D is. While there is a wide assortment of abilities between classes and their roles in combat, a lot of non-combat situations are reduced to just roling high on a skill check, not many choices and approaches to be made. There might be the odd utility spell, but even that isn't a choice for martial classes. Because of that, Bards dominate non-combat encounters, with Jack of all Trades and Expertise.
It's not a problem for a videogame, but D&D5e (actually most D&D editions) is not a balanced game at all. In fact the only RPG that I've played and would call balanced is Pathfinder 2e.
So I was not expecting Baldur's Gate to be balanced at all given it's based on D&D5e.