What’s your excuse?
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i don’t like dnd rules thats my excuse
I played Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous for a good while but I have no idea what the difference is between its system and Baldur Gate’s 3. I’ve been winging it on the story difficulty.
pathfinder = D&D 3.5 = stack every modifier under the sun to get a +1+1+1+2+4+2+1 attack bonus so you can kill monsters. multiclass seven different classes to get those bonuses.
baldur’s gate 3 = D&D 5e = i dunno be a single class and prebuff i guess
the latter has fewer idiosyncracies and i’m way more comfortable recommending it to normal people.
Pathfinder: WotR is perfectly approachable with the single class and buff your party approach, and you can make a power-gamer multiclass character in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Well, that all depends.
The key difference between a 3E style game and a later version is that the floor became higher and the ceiling somewhat lower. 3E comes with ways to cripple one’s character, or to challenge oneself with a substandard build. They aren’t presented as such because the idea of trap choices and learning about the game to the point where you avoid them was an actual design direction in 3E. Third edition also had way too many ways to power game. Selling broken powers via new subclasses with new supplements was the whole business model. And Pathfinder is nothing if not a refined, modernized version of 3.5, which means that it inherits all of that while adding idiosyncracies of its own. 5E by contrast has much more straightforward character building.
Wrath comes with it’s own set of incentives for min maxxing in the form of Mythic Paths, each of which synergize with certain character roles better than others. Sometimes that synergy is in spite of character fantasy too. Furthermore, Owlcat’s balance is harder overall than the tabletop games’. So of course, while the game is much more chill on Normal and below, if you play on Core you really do want to read up on the builds that people came up with. Hell, I tell people who want to start off with Core to pick their Mythic Path first and then pick a class that works well with them. It just saves on a lot of frustration overall.
Like, it’s not so much that WotR is fine if you just use a single class and buff. Sometimes that’s optimal and prebuffing in every way you can is a requirement, not a win more. Incidentally, multiclassing caster is a bad idea more often than not. Baldur’s Gate 3 just lacks a lot of the 3E chaff and is a better game to start with if someone’s never played D&D before. 2E was even more straightforward when it came to character building, it was just somewhat weird, opaque, and quaint in a few ways that make it a strange starter as well.
Baldur’s Gate 3 just lacks a lot of the 3E chaff
This is a very concise way of putting it, thanks. The 5e system cuts out most of the (bad/filler) character choices, and let’s the players focus on the character.
Fwiw, the Pathfinder games are very creative and interesting as well. If you’re into the fantasy of becoming an angel or conquering your own kingdom in an RPG, I’d give them a go.
Goblins in Pathfinder are their own special experience, too.
From what I understand pathfinder is based on DnD but adds their own rules on steroids.
I played the Pathfinders games as well and don’t understand the rules deep down but it felt less luck-based than DnD. My problem with DnD rules, and maybe it’s just 5e idk enough to say, is that you roll a dice for literally everything. You can be a master pickpocket and get caught trying to steal candy from a baby, it’s weird. It shouldn’t happen.
Also not enough classes and a lot of redundancy. I can’t tell the difference between a paladin and a cleric except that you’re supposed to RP them differently, which is difficult when everything is decided by the roll of a dice and you get no further input. Lots of emphasis on religion for some reason too, there’s like 30 different gods you can choose from and both paladins and clerics (and probably more classes) have to choose a deity and both had (until 5e) to stay in line with their deity’s commandments to keep their powers.
I grew up on RPGs like WoW which completely redefined the genre for MMO and PVP play, and I guess I grew accustomed to playing games that riffed off of that. DnD feels very alien, like having the advantage in most games would mean not taking critical hits or getting a guaranteed hit, but in DnD it means you roll a second dice and take the best result. It doesn’t even mean a guaranteed hit. The essential fighting class is just called the fighter, and through level ups you RP it as specializing into something that resembles an actual class. At least Pathfinder has a ton of classes lol. Speaking of leveling up, in the DnD books you normally only gain experience from fighting, when most modern RPG video games have you level up through several different actions. In BG3 at least they went around that and using skills like persuasion also give you XP, but to DnD’s credit you can just change the rules to suit whatever you like, they’re more like guidelines.
Armour class I hear was also simplified in 5e, and I find it even weirder. It’s just a vague “armour class” rating which you can achieve either through high skills, or through a heavier armour. There is no distinction between an agile rogue and a decked up paladin. They both have the same chance of evading an attack and that’s all armour class does.
Spell slots are 😩 just let me cast spells lol, it’s the only thing my character is good at. Instead you save them for when you really really need them (using terrible cantrips until then) because you have to refresh them.
I liked Larian’s previous Original Sin and I’m glad they got a break with Baldur’s Gate 3, but what I liked there was how you could absolutely break the game if you made the right build (and using environmental effects which they kinda brought back to BG3 but toned down). I’ll give that to DnD, at least it’s balanced.
Pathfinder lets you stack bonuses to the sky if you know what you’re doing, and is balanced around that possibility. 5e is much, much flatter, with a higher performance floor (i.e. fewer ways to totally fuck up) and a much lower performance ceiling. This makes 5e significantly more approachable to people who don’t know the system super well, but it also makes it somewhat less fun for people who really enjoy mastering incredibly complicated systems as part of their RPG experience.
In Pathfinder WotR, my main character had over 100 AC by the end game (that’s the number you need to beat after rolling a 20 sided die and adding in all your to-hit bonuses in order to damage someone in combat). 5e tops out at, like, 27 or so AC for demi-gods and very high level characters who are very focused on defense. It’s just a much flatter curve.
Yeah I don’t like spell slots either. Shadowheart for reason misses all cantrips like fire bolt and sacred flame all the time and I don’t like having to long rest before being able to use the good spells.
I gave astarion the illithid powers so that he gets advantage and can transform his hit to critical, then I gave him the feat that made his ranged attacks stronger but lowered his chance to hit, which is fine because you get the advantage in a sneak attack. My tactic is to find where to hide him, and sneak attack with a crossbow. At level 4 currently I can get 40 damage with a critical hit.
But my MC is the dark urge and I have abysmal hit rate suddenly and I have no idea why lol
Why is your MC the Dark Urge? That seems very complication-inducing for the first playthrough.
Do you mean because premade characters have their own quests? In my opinion it’s the only reason to choose them, I don’t particularly like them otherwise since they stick you into a specific class (except for the dark urge) and would rather make my own character. But I want to see everything 🤷
I’d say complication inducing because of the Dark Urge’s story specifically. It can make it more difficult to see everything because of… the urges.
I played the Pathfinders games as well and don’t understand the rules deep down but it felt less luck-based than DnD
5e was designed to limit how high you can get skill bonuses so that numbers don’t get ridiculous, which does mean that players tend to fail at easier tasks at higher levels because they only have a +5 instead of a +20 like they would in PF. It’s worth noting though that both games are designed around having a 60% success rate against level-appropriate threats (as D&D has been since 3e).
Re: advantage
Advantage was the replacement for the 600 situational +1 or +2 bonuses that existed in 3e/PF. So instead of adding up all the bonuses and penalties for the enemy being stunned, having the low ground, in bad lighting, while you’re on a slope made of loose gravel, you just say “Advantage”. It works out to about a +4 and works decently in actual play.
Armour class I hear was also simplified in 5e
Nah it’s the same as it’s always been. AC = Armor bonus + Dex bonus + Misc Bullshit, where the Dex bonus is limited by how heavy the armor is. 5e also has saving throws for other defenses.
Spell slots are 😩 just let me cast spells
I agree, actually, but they’re a sacred cow that will never be removed despite being awful in play. The idea makes more sense in the context of a strict dungeon crawl where you have to carefully manage limited resources, but almost nobody plays that way anymore. They also actually buff casters in IRL games because nobody ever runs the “proper” number of encounters (because D&D combat isn’t tactically interesting), which means they have more resources than they should.
It makes sense that you wouldn’t want people to keep applying stacks, especially in a pen and paper setting where (the one time I played) keeping track of all your feats, proficiencies, skill bonuses and other stuff gets complicated fast lol. But in a video game the computer can keep track of this for you and it could make really interesting plays
I notice people seem to go from edition 3 to 5 and skip over 4, why is that?
I notice people seem to go from edition 3 to 5 and skip over 4, why is that?
At the risk of setting off some 4e loyalists that are still out there (and they are, I’ve met them), 4th edition was especially alienating and offputting for both the old 3.x crowd and it’s now quaint and janky for any newcomers that started with 5th.
There were categorical issues with 4th that put those people off, and it even started with the marketing and presentation. 4th was full of “aren’t we cool dudes” ActiBlizz style edgelord attitude even in its promotional materials (such as portraying critics of the many, many unasked for changes from 3.x as literal D&D trolls and having a dragon shit on them during official ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azcn84IIDVg ). A lot of prose was purged from 4th’s lore in favor of quippy one-liners and stripped down statblocks, because the mantra was “crunch over fluff” which implied that people actually roleplaying and building up character stories and interacting with each other and the NPCs in the campaign was mere undesirable badwrongfun “fluff” instead of the super serious tryhard tactical wargamer experience or the what they called “beer and pretzels” trying-too-hard-to-be-normal aesthetic.
The quips in the books used to minimize “fluff” in favor of “crunch” were bad too. Like, the lore of a rogue being largely replaced with “You seem surprised to see me. If you had been paying attention, you would still be alive.” Who was that rogue talking to, a freshly dead body? An even worse example was Galeb Duhr lore being stripped out so severely that the only easily accessible version of the living stone creatures (that were quite interesting to read about in earlier editions) was a statblock and the line “This is how I roll.”
The focus from “fluff” to “crunch” was aggressively pushed to the point of making non tactical non combat encounters into abstracted “skill challenges” where (if the DM could be bothered), you could do a “fluff” session where the king of a kingdom can be persuaded to help the party by everyone rolling something at the same time. Like, one character charming the king with magic, another intimidating the king with threats, another seducing the king, another bluffing the king. At the same time. It got even sillier with locked doors where someone could be ramming it down and another picking the lock at the same time.
A lot of the class mechanics were stripped down to the point that a Fighter and a Wizard (because Wizards often, admittedly, had too many advantages and utility in earlier editions and Fighters did not have enough) played almost the same way except for “flavor text” if they had the same chosen role. One notorious example is the “Tide of Iron” ability that Fighters got that basically functioned like a Wizard spell with nothing but some vague blurb about how the Fighter martially did an AOE like a Wizard. And the “flavor text” of spells for actual spellcasters (who didnt function all that differently from noncasters) was usually really clumsy and awkward to visualize, especially with repeat performances, like a spell that pulls an enemy through all of the hells one after another and does moderate damage and applies a debuff on the way out.
Also, Wizards of the Coast were trying very hard to have sleazier monetization, such as “blind bags” for how they sold official minatures, trying to get people to pay for subscriptions for their janky and sloppy official online tabletop, and even pushing for the hubris-laden notion of playing without a DM by “grinding” premade mini scenarios. Basically, the Blizzard dudebros that WOTC picked up brought their MMORPG
with them.ALSO, the campaign lore in 4th Edition was laughably bad. Forgotten Realms, for example, stripped out so much of the layered complexity of the setting in favor of a “oh uh the goddess of magic died and there’s a big plague and now everything’s scattered and wrecked and the party just sort of loots it like a Diablo map” approach. It also had this bland mass-produced “EPIC DESTINY” system where instead of letting players find their endgame purpose and fate for themselves it was a pre-loaded pre-set planned in advanced set of stats with a copy-pasted “oh wow you are now a god. And so are you. And you. Except you, you chose that other thing I guess.”
The art was trying too hard to be generic MMORPG “epic” too. The vast majority of characters had Rob Liefield grimaces and glowing eyes. The art drastically improved in 5th and that was one of the first thing I noticed when I peeked back in.
There’s more, but that’s a start. 4th was such a fucking mess that it helped launch Pathfinder as a brand because WOTC tried that hard to monopolize the old Open Gaming License and bully Paizo into exclusively producing things for WOTC. Also, official gatherings for 4th Edition D&D started to have so many people playing Pathfinder instead that the suits tried to forbid those players from even attending. SAD!
EDIT: Oh and one more thing: while it was supposed to be “crunch over fluff” and a miniatures-necessary-tactical-combat-as-main-focus experience, for many players (and DMs) the actual experience of playing those “crunch” focused encounters was boring. There were way too many slog fights that simply too long, too many buff and debuff counters to keep track of (5th really cleaned that up with the advantage/disadvantage system) and way too much MMORPGness to even the name schemes and jargon used.
EDIT 2: It got so bad for the Penny Arcade people that used to be 4th Edition backers that when they did an official game with the WOTC people it was so stiff and stale and uncreative and full of “uhhh you can’t use that spell except in a combat encounter on a valid target” rigidity that Gabe and Tycho went on to play Pathfinder instead, at least for a time. I stopped paying attention to those two a long time ago, but still a bit of history I recalled.
EDIT 3: Recently, WOTC was trying to do the same old “let’s fuck over third party companies and try to force them to exclusively work for us on our terms” trick again with “D&D One” and Paizo had to slap them hard with the ORC counter-license proposal, so even though Baldur’s Gate 3 is very good and even though that recent corporate skullduggery was rolled back (for now) I still kind of fucking hate WOTC and am sick of their arrogant hubris-laden greedy bullshit.
https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2023/01/the-orc-forges-ahead-even-after-wotc-backs-off.html
4e changed a lot of things in an attempt to solve many of the problems with 3.5:
- Martials were (almost) as good as casters because they were given abilities that let them actually do things beyond saying “I full attack”
- Monster statblocks were simplified and divorced from the rules used to build PCs, instead just making sure that the numbers were right
- PCs were given more HP at low levels and the math was made less swingy so somebody didn’t get crit by a greataxe and insta-killed (something I personally have seen happen in the less than 20 sessions I’ve played of 3.5/PF)
- Modifiers were simplified to +2 for “minor” and +5 for “major” and IIRC generally didn’t stack, as a sort of proto-advantage system
- Spell slots were gone, and every class’ abilities were changed into one of 3 categories: Daily (recharges after an 8-hour long rest), Encounter (recharges after a 5-minute short rest), and At-Will (useable every turn)
- Additionally, non-combat spells/abilities were classed separately as “Utility Powers”, with the same cooldown system
- Classes were explicitly labeled with certain roles to give players an idea of what they were going to do (Strikers did damage, Controllers did CC (and damage), Leaders could heal and had support abilities, Defenders could generally lock down opponents with some sort of marking ability)
- The rules were written very technically, which stands at odds with 3.5e/PF and 5e, which are more naturalistic, resulting in fewer rules disputes
4e also had its share of problems, however, which turned many people off:
- The HP calculations were wrong in the first 2 monster manuals, resulting in long drawn-out slogs
- The amount of bookkeeping required to run combat increased by a fair bit, as now almost every PC and many NPCs could inflict status effects with varying duration
- Combat more or less required groups to use a grid (this was also largely true of 3.5, for what it’s worth)
- The Magic Item Treadmill was very much a thing, where every party member was expected to swap out almost all of their equipment every 5 levels to keep pace with the monster stats
- Healing was very gamified: you could only heal a certain number of times per day, regardless of how many potions you drank or spells were cast on you etc
- Character sheets were very complicated, and it was more or less required to use WotC’s software. It worked decently well and was easy to pirate, but it ran into another problem…
- The guy in charge of the software side of things at WotC murder-suicided his wife and the project was pretty much abandoned
The biggest issue facing 4e was that WotC’s business model during the 3e/3.5e era had been to publish dozens of books non-stop, and 4e was in no way backwards compatible. The licensing that had allowed 3rd party publishers to make stuff for 3.5e was generous enough for Paizo to make Pathfinder 1e, and an extremely large share of then-current players went to play PF instead. As for 5e’s popularity, it benefits from several things imo. First, it’s the current edition of the game, which means any new players will gravitate to it by default. Second is the effect of big-name actual plays like Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, or Dimension 20 which serve as excellent (if unrealistic) marketing. Lastly, nerd shit has gradually become more accepted in general, and so the audience for people who play D&D has increased.
The guy in charge of the software side of things at WotC murder-suicided his wife and the project was pretty much abandoned
bruh
lol thanks for the in-depth answer!
Nah it’s the same as it’s always been. AC = Armor bonus + Dex bonus + Misc Bullshit, where the Dex bonus is limited by how heavy the armor is. 5e also has saving throws for other defenses.
3e/3.5e had touch and flatfooted ACs, which were just that but missing the armor bonus or dex bonus, for situations where you just needed to hit a target at all or where they couldn’t actively get out of the way but might still be protected by their armor.
5e got rid of those (I think?) in favor of just having AC always be the same against everything and in all circumstances.
Ah, that’s true. I always forget they exist because they’ve never been relevant to me as a player.
