This game has made me hate D&D 5e more than anything else has.

[Nyaria]

The characters in this game are just straight up garbage/weak. The caps on attributes is garbage, the lack of ability to personalize your skills at all outside of just picking a few proficiency and having a background, it's all just annoying.

Earlier versions of D&D let you specialize much better, and made it feel like you actually had some freedom with what you wanted your character to be good at, and gave you the ability to actually have them be GOOD at them rather early on.

Also the fact I know we're not going to level 20, means nothing is actually going to ever get to a point it's good. Your characters are going to be mediocre at best the entire way through.

D&D 5e was a terrible choice IMHO for this entry of Baldur's gate.

[tmg]

ok cya imma go have fun

[The Ghost Pyro From Outerspace!!]

Yep, but they weren't gonna ever get that license if they wanted to use a good version of the game.

[Steppenrazor]

yea.. not a fan of 5e.. 4e was way better.. way more customization.. but was a bit over powered

[GrugIsRock]

Originally posted by Nyaria:

The characters in this game are just straight up garbage/weak. The caps on attributes is garbage, the lack of ability to personalize your skills at all outside of just picking a few proficiency and having a background, it's all just annoying.

Earlier versions of D&D let you specialize much better, and made it feel like you actually had some freedom with what you wanted your character to be good at, and gave you the ability to actually have them be GOOD at them rather early on.

Also the fact I know we're not going to level 20, means nothing is actually going to ever get to a point it's good. Your characters are going to be mediocre at best the entire way through.

D&D 5e was a terrible choice IMHO for this entry of Baldur's gate.

I really wish race had more impact on stats. Half orcs shouldn't be able to be wizards

[Nifty]

pathfinder: kingmaker
pathfinder: wrath of the righteous

[Dallaen]

Compared the Divinity 2 it's certainly more constrained. that doesn't mean it's bad it just means it's different and you have to adjust your expectations.

[GrugIsRock]

Originally posted by Nifty:

pathfinder: kingmaker
pathfinder: wrath of the righteous

I miss being a half mutt sorcerer with two bloodlines in WOTR.

[Stoibs]

I was wondering why I couldn't start with an 18 in my primary stat..
Thought it was some weird race limitation thing but this is by design?

Hell I remember in BG2 re-rolling for that sweet 18/00 Strength

[kojak]

5e sucks and everyone knows this
but its true WOTC would never allow them to use the DND license without peddling 5e

[Nyaria]

Originally posted by Nifty:

pathfinder: kingmaker
pathfinder: wrath of the righteous

Played both games. Enjoyed both.

Was looking for more D&D stuff, since Baldur's gate 1 and 2 were based off the really old versions of the game.

Instead it's based off the bloody awful and horribly gimped 5e where the creators were afraid of double digit numbers apparently.

[The Ghost Pyro From Outerspace!!]

Originally posted by Dallaen:

Compared the Divinity 2 it's certainly more constrained. that doesn't mean it's bad it just means it's different and you have to adjust your expectations.

Well Larian was trying to make it better (ie more like Divinity), but the fanbase is exhausting and cried about how it wasn't pure D&D. As if 5e ever was.

[Nyaria]

Originally posted by Dallaen:

Compared the Divinity 2 it's certainly more constrained. that doesn't mean it's bad it just means it's different and you have to adjust your expectations.

DivinityOS2 was far more diverse in abilities and skills than this game is. After DOS1 and DOS2 I expected more out of a game made by Larian. I don't necessarily dislike the story, it feels like they did a good job with parts of it, but the gameplay is just unfun. I'm convinced the game only rolls a d6 for initiatives as well.

I shouldn't have to lower my expectations to enjoy a game.

[Vizual]

Originally posted by Stoibs:

I was wondering why I couldn't start with an 18 in my primary stat..
Thought it was some weird race limitation thing but this is by design?

Hell I remember in BG2 re-rolling for that sweet 18/00 Strength

Yeah I'm not a fan of only having the point buy system. I wish we could roll for stats. I know the argument of "people will just keep re-rolling to make OP characters", yeah that will happen, but it's mostly a solo game so who really cares?

Alot of people want some randomness in their math rock game.

[Ragnaman]

Originally posted by The Ghost Pyro From Outerspace!!:

Originally posted by Dallaen:

Compared the Divinity 2 it's certainly more constrained. that doesn't mean it's bad it just means it's different and you have to adjust your expectations.

Well Larian was trying to make it better (ie more like Divinity), but the fanbase is exhausting and cried about how it wasn't pure D&D. As if 5e ever was.

Holy cow, all Larian had to do was hire decent people with a bit of brain instead of gender study majors.
Its 2023, making a good game is not hard these days, there are only about 20 other good games from past decades that can show how good games are made. But nooooo, Nr1 thing and most important thing is to make le heckin epic and all-inclusive gender blender during char creation. And then censor anyone who looks at the result with a raised eyebrow and criticizes it.

Larian can burn.
So can the wizards of the coast for that matter.

[Thorley23]

Originally posted by Nyaria:

The characters in this game are just straight up garbage/weak. The caps on attributes is garbage, the lack of ability to personalize your skills at all outside of just picking a few proficiency and having a background, it's all just annoying.

Earlier versions of D&D let you specialize much better, and made it feel like you actually had some freedom with what you wanted your character to be good at, and gave you the ability to actually have them be GOOD at them rather early on.

Also the fact I know we're not going to level 20, means nothing is actually going to ever get to a point it's good. Your characters are going to be mediocre at best the entire way through.

D&D 5e was a terrible choice IMHO for this entry of Baldur's gate.

My opinions of 5E D&D are mixed. To be fair I have not done a lot with it because my group prefers 1E Pathfinder. At some point I would like to play around with it more as either a player or a GM though.

My impression of 5E D&D is that it was designed as a sort of "introductory RPG" with the idea that it would be easy to use by people who weren't all that particularly bright. This way they could get away from the whole intellectual elitism associated with RPGs, and bring more, and younger, people into the hobby. This worked to a great extent but had a variety of negative effects on the game itself and the community as a whole.

5E had a sort of simplicity and balance beyond all things attitude, and as a result it's very difficult to create powerful characters by design, which also means it's easy to GM as there really aren't all that many crazy options for players or ways to build characters. In practice it's very difficult to make a bad character unless your intentionally trying to do it, but at the same time there is no real skill in being able to make an extremely skilled, specialized, or unique character. There is very little actual "power gaming" or "concept characters" in 5E as the kinds of options you find in things like AD&D2 (the full version), 3.5E, or Pathfinder 1E don't really exist. Which does to be fair cut down on a lot of the crazy but also removes a lot of the creativity and a lot of the art of skill of character building. You can pretty much have say a Bard of X level, of X type and assume it's going to pretty much be pretty much the same as anything else using those variables as there aren't many other variables.

If I played more I might have a different opinion, but that's my take on it from my limited experiences with it so far. I feel this is not a bad idea for an introduction to role-playing, but it's probably about time that WOTC considered bringing back the old "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" label and restoring the options, complexity, and insanity that long defined it for those that want that sort of thing. There would be nothing wrong with just playing D&D, but a more classic approach would also be there for those that want that. There is really no reason not to target both audiences like they used to do as that worked fine. Like many people I started with the old "Red Box" and then moved on to "AD&D". Many people I knew stayed with "basic" D&D and they even had a sort of refined edition of that version of the rules via the D&D "Rules Cyclopedia" which a lot of people enjoyed, and I will say the "Basic" D&D world of Mystara was actually pretty decent.

As far as this game itself, I will be honest in saying that I think the problem it has is that Larian decided it wanted to imitate Owlbear really. It's using a basic rules set and seems to on top of that be inflating stats with the expectation of save scumming and stuff to increase play time. The thing was the "Pathfinder" games in part got away with that despite most people (like me) preferring it would have been a more accurate rules translation, because they also included enough variables that it was possible to really break the game if you put in the time to figure out what you were doing. While BG-3 doesn't go as far as Owlcat did, I think it suffers from both trying to use a very basic and introductory type of RPG and capture the spirit of that while also sort of trying to do the "beat the sadist game designer" thing that the Pathfinder games did to some degree. I think it's a decent game (which is why I bought it) but I think this was a bad approach and if they used 5E they should have been a little more reasonable with the encounters and stats in a lot of places. You just don't have the options to go "well sadistic game designer, I have ways of making a lot of this sort of stat inflation sort of irrelevant", I mean if you look you can find formulas to make characters that utterly cheeze the Pathfinder games which was part of the fun.

At any rate while my opinion might change at some point, where I sit now, I probably won't get heavily into "Dungeons and Dragons" again unless WoTC changes course massively on a lot of things, apologizes to the fans for some of the things it's been doing from a business direction, and also releases a more advanced version of the D&D rules
set.