🔔 So, I have been playing a fair amount of Baldur's Gate 3 over the past week. I want to preface this by saying that I am enjoying the experience, mostly. When this game is firing on all cylinders, there genuinely has not been a high-fantasy romp of this caliber for a decade; it's lushly-detailed, explores its setting in great depth, has a fascinating cast of characters I enjoy spending time with, and I do in fact get to be a very sexy and cool dragon, which is always a plus for me. However, I find myself frustrated with the game frequently, not because of anything its developers have done; rather I find myself frustrated because of its decision to build upon the bog-like substrate of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons, which has shed some of its faults in the transition to digital play, but not its most pernicious ones, chief among them from a mechanical perspective the problem of the dreaded '1.'
To put this in context: I am currently near the back of Act 1 of 3 in this game. I've played for about 12 hours total, and am nearing a critical plot event that will end the act. Of that time, I've spent about a total of 1.5 hours in combat, and about 10.5 hours, effectively, performing elaborate social engineering between the feuding camps of a cult-occupied goblin stronghold and a druid grove. This is actually a very bold ratio to strike for a game of this variety, to prioritize exploration and social navigation over combat, but it has a fundamental flaw that is... really quite apparent to anyone who has played enough 5E; I daresay if you have you've likely already sussed out the problem, which is that social engineering in 5E is both boring and frustrating because it was not a mechanical priority of the system. Combat is, and combat in BG3 is FANTASTIC. But I feel as though BG3 has tried to pivot to being a heavily narrative-oriented experience while working inside a framework that is, bluntly, miserable at making the social politics layer of the game interesting, largely because no matter what you do, what information you collect, what bonuses you stack, every single flagged option you have to use your skills to get an edge has a 1 in 20 chance at failure.
'Critical failure' mechanics in RPG systems are, in my opinion, as a veteran player and GM, a mistake. Dice are meant to arbitrate player choices, not dictate them. It is frankly insulting, for example, to attempt a Difficulty Class 2 check, having stacked a total of +12 and an additional roll of 1d4 and 1d6, and fail because no matter what you did you could never negate the dreaded '1' on the d20. Any sensible RPG system by this point has adopted a threshold system, where if you'd just automatically succeed even without rolling, you're allowed to just Do That as a gimme towards your character having built or prepared specifically for a task. But Dungeons & Dragons persists in this spiteful implementation of dice mechanics, even into the year of our lord 2023.
Even keeping critical failures, there are games that have used those to better effect, particularly Disco Elysium, which would not only often make failure incredibly funny but would frequently reward you with alternate, even more rewarding paths of progression as a bonus for being a good sport. More than that, it had the checks that, if failed, could be tried again later after improving its associated skill. These systems helped encourage the player to play along, without being punitive.
But BG3... has adopted roughly half of this idea. More than that, rather than rewarding you with a very funny outcome if you blow a check, it frequently instead punishes you with a harder fight, or less resources, or less information, with no opportunity to recoup costs. This, combined with the giant red bold text stating 'FAILURE' whenever your dice beef it, does not incentivize 'being a good sport.' It incentivizes save-scumming until you get an optimal result, which is... bad? I think we can probably agree that a game that encourages you to continually warp linear time to undo trivial errors is probably doing something wrong with this system. I'm perfectly willing to eat my losses on the chin, because the character I'm choosing to play is a puffed-up noble oaf who is in over her head and deserves whatever she gets, but... that is not a universal experience.
Any actual GM, with any sense whatsoever, can throw their players a bone and fudge things behind the scenes, and to a degree, BG3 does this with the karmic dice mechanic, but it does it at random and without consideration for the weight of a given dramatic choice. It is not intelligent or reasonable, it is simply a flag for how often you've failed rolls recently. And that's... fine for combat, but obnoxious for everything else.
I think BG3, overall, is quite good. I think however that its insistence on replicating the pure mechanics of 5th Edition D&D, without the hand of an actual human GM on the other end to modulate the experience, is a major weakness, and one the game would largely be better off without.
