this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Of course they are. They'd be mad not to.
I am interested to see what they do, as they've said before the BG3 engine sorta breaks down after level 12 so they might not go any higher. Presumably that means it's another 'start at level 1' type campaign.
A return to Icewind Dale or Spelljammer perhaps??
Was it the engine or the ruleset? It's widely accepted that D&D 5E is sorta hot garbage at higher levels so I was assuming that's what Larian was referring to.
I've heard that high level D&D sucks ever since I got into D&D back in 2e, so I don't know if 5e truly sucks, or it's just continued player sentiment toward something that's always been, IMO, misunderstood.
Personally, I fucking love epic level shit. Starting at 20 and using the epic level book to go further is awesome. The problem I see, though, is DMs quite often don't think epic enough. They think too small scale and it sucks for everyone because
5e at high level sucks because WOTC didn't bother to actually test any of it. They admitted they didn't test past level 10 and their inclusion of magic items is so bad that the recommendations for how many to include show the devs are terrified of them; you get so very few by official recommendations.
Save or Suck spells make higher level 5e (and 5e in general) a huge PITA to plan encounters for when players can just get lucky and end things outright. Magic items don't have a power level listing, just a rarity doing double duty that is wildly inaccurate. Class balance is shit: martials are boring. All they do is swing the weapon most of the time and very few class abilities really alleviate that. Spellcasters are so vastly more powerful and fun that multiclassing is way more popular than it should be.
Monsters in 5e are boring. Most of them are just bags of hit points that swing. Very few have bonus actions or reactions and the ones that do are often just "parry: increase AC once". They came out with gem dragons 2yr ago and they gave them all the SAME bonus actions: shapeshift and misty step. It's like they don't even bother to try, which is evident in recent releases.
/rant. But seriously, I love high level D&D. You can really raise the stakes. I'm DMing a level 12 5e campaign now and my primary way to make encounters interesting is two-fold: firstly is 3rd party content to get monsters that are actually interesting. Secondly I create objectives that aren't just "murder monster". I just had a bunch of literal street children hit my party with a net trap and arrow that makes them drop their items that said children tried to steal and run away with. 2 got away but they were able to find the hideout and defeat the boss. Actual stakes besides just getting killed.
Epic narratives have their place, but if you follow the 5E rules they don't work well mechanically.
Fighting actual Gods in D&D should be fairly comfortable for a party of level 20 characters, which is part of the problem. The way the scaling of character power compared to enemy power works, fighting a group of goblins on the dirt road as a level 1 party is magnitudes more challenging than fighting an actual God as a level 20 party.
Is that not the point? To go from struggling against the lowest foes to being equal to the toughest? Sometimes I wonder if the disconnect is between the game and the narrative. I'm in the, seemingly, minority camp of favoring the game side. The narrative is merely the vessel allows the game to flow and not the other way around. I construct sandboxes rather than linear stories. The stories come from the players and how they want to interact with the world, the consequences of their actions, and so on. As a DM, I provide the world at large, what's currently happening in that world, and the moderation of the rules to facilitate the players telling their own stories, instead of having one I am merely telling them. I personally think this brings more life to the game. Players can become immersed more easily when they are thinking about what they are trying to do, and the dynamics of multiple players pulling the story this way and that just makes for a more compelling narrative.
It sounds like 5e is also just not balanced on the game side. Which was my problem with 4e, too and why I haven't really tried 5.
Usually it is the vast variance in magic items from one DM to the next that makes it very hard the rules set. Then of course the DM must work out what to do about the magic items they gave out. And of course the variance in skill and style of the players...
Min/Max players are crap at higher level. Role Players are great at any level. DMing at low level is fairly easy. DMing at high level is a bitch at best.
It sounded like a mix of the rule set plus the insanity of some higher level spells making coding some things just not possible.
Just like tabletop!
The traditional answer to this is to just not let players cast spells that would be costly to implement, in the same way that we can't currently cast Reincarnate or Magic Jar. There are still high level combat spells to look forward to, like Meteor Swarm.
Yeah that's exactly it, now imagine trying to build that as a computer game.
Yeah, side campaigns are probably the way to go.
It's almost impossible to implement high level magic. Just the interactions between spells is insane. Basic interactions like Force Cage+any AoE (Sickening Radiance) to build the microwave of death... would be so hard to implement. They'd honestly have to veer off 5e and implement their own spells instead, tailored to the video game medium.
I do think the framework of the game would be a great place to start for additional campaigns. They could take this game and put a Candlekeep Mysteries style sequential dungeon crawl add-on and people would love it just to play multiplayer short campaigns.
It's not impossible cause any thing that has specific rules laid out can be implemented. And table top rule are turn based(no time sensitive action, ie, physics simulation), fixed permutations/outcomes(dice rolls for everything), programming is just "rules" for moving numbers, even for deep learning networks.
The harder to implement are the conversations, cause there are pretty much infinite way depending on who initiate the conversation(background/race/stats/class/proficiency/+whatever player thinks that's possible and DM assign a check value), with potential plots lines, the writer has to limit what can be chosen and remove other options even though it's legit on table top.
I mean, spells like Wish are going to be basically impossible outside of going the AI route (which is an entire can of worms).
Wish can duplicate any other spell, or it can have your own effect (with a chance of it being monkey-pawed plus you never being able to cast Wish ever again).
Also bear in mind that it's not "just" rules for moving numbers. You have to have particles, animations, etc. You can't just have conversations, you have to also have SFX from impacts, camera shake, UI elements, etc. When you start to get into the world of "anything is possible" you kind of have to go back to basics, text-based adventures.
With AI stuff, maybe some of that can be done - but AI is just so incredibly slow in its current form. It won't stay that way forever, mind - I think the best comparison is graphics in the 1990s. Graphics were incredibly basic because anything complex would take ages to render and couldn't be used in games. Over the next decade, things were built to specifically speed up that process, and now modern GPUs can easily keep up with the highest-quality CGI without much fuss (there's a reason why Disney has the Volume, which is essentially just running CGI in the Unreal Engine alongside the actors in real-time).
But until that, we're going to be pretty limited. It's going to be impossible for any kind of free-form rules to be implemented, unless options were restricted to such a point that it's basically a completely different spell.
Even low level magic is sometimes too flexible for a computer based game. BG3 basically ignores Magic Mouth as implemented in 5e because arbitrary "trigger conditions" is just something that cannot be handled in a truly open ended way. Nevermind trying to implement Contingency properly -- a spell that forms the core of high level magical shenanigans.
That's basically what the expansion for the first Baldurs Gate was so they could call it "MORE Tales of the Sword Coast"
I'd be perfectly happy to see content at the same levels as BG3 campaign. Ideally a new campaign entirely, but if it's just DLC then an extra Act or a side campaign with new characters as a prequel or sequel or something would be neat.
How the heck does the engine break down after level 12? What the fuck even is this engine?
The engine they're talking about is the D&D 5e ruleset.
Lmao
I still haven't played 5e on paper. Just BG3. I am a 3.5/Pathfinder lover. I know those rules and lore way more since I've played it for years. Feels weird to stop now.
If you're a 3.5/pf1e player, I'm sure you can imagine how high level spells can get really complicated to program in a game engine. And more importantly, how impossible to balance for them it can be. BG3 does a decent job of adapting spells to not be annoying or broken to use in a video game, but some high level 5e spells are way more ridiculous and open ended.
Don't even need to be a specific rule player to know that. The actual PnP games are limitless. You literally can do anything you can imagine. You can easily make a new rule to handle stuff the books don't cover. Video games can't. Not with the same fluidity, anyway. I would expect the simple mathematics to be handled, along with spells and abilities that work in a CRPG. It's amazing they even have Speak to Animals. I mean, it's a simple concept, but you have to then also write dialogue for every animal you place in the game. Otherwise, the spell becomes worthless. That's a lot of work I don't usually expect from video games, despite it being something I love to see.
As you get further from spells and abilities which have a limited and defined effect on the world (I hit him with a sword, this spell sets that on fire) and towards reality-bending superpowers (wish spells, divine intervention) the 5e ruleset becomes increasingly difficult to deliver within a CRPG framework.
In that respect I get it. I wouldn't even expect Wish it many other spells to be in a CRPG or if it was, it would be way more limited (as they would obviously only program so many actions you could even make). The rules always break down in a CRPG when the PnP game has next to no limits with imagination. A computer game has to be thought about in advance, with limited ability to flex on things that might make sense in the moment that can be ruled on the fly. Not to mention different interpretations of vaguer/not well written rules.
There’s a short I saw mentioned level 7 spells getting pretty crazy and the rule set makes it hard to accommodate.
Not really knowledgeable about DND but some YouTube short popped up and I clicked on it 🤠
It is an TTRPG rules set not a video game RPG rule set. See the changes DDO made to 3.5 edition for details.
That is just the point where the exponential effects of leveling and introduction of 5e spells that require more DM adjudication are introduced. Together they make coding encounters extremely difficult in tabletop and a complete nightmare to code.
I have no interest in going over level 10 on tabletop as a DM, and can't imagine even trying to write code logic for it.
Probably made by FIAT
Maybe they could force multi-classing. There are mods already that take it up to level 20, you just can't have any one class above 12.
Some form of prestige class system would be perfect for allowing more content and additional levels with of the game breaking spells.
Icewind Dale plz.