it's very funny that there is this deeply crunchy, historically important, widely popular tabletop RPG system that has recently received a lavish digital adaptation with an astonishing level of attention to detail, really everything a tabletop player could possibly dream of coming out of a videogamification process... but the system itself just kind of sucks
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in reply to @nex3's post:
tbqh I think 5e D&D is probably the best iteration of D&D as a rules system. I think one can make an argument for 4e as a better game in some senses. And as far as tabletop games of this lineage I think 13th Age might be better... but 5e is, IMO, miles ahead of Pathfinder 1e or D&D 3rd Ed as a rules system. It has flaws but none as big as the fact that level-1 combat in 3rd ed works out to <50% accuracy, or the crit confirmation rule, or this entirely out of whack scaling between martial and caster classes.
I will take your word for it! I'm not actually much of a tabletop gamer myself, I'm just going on what other people say
I mean I'm comparing it to:
- Other editions of D&D
- For purposes of being the backbone of a CRPG
Where 5e REALLY excels, I went back and played some Wrath of the Righteous and it's comical how much worse Pathfinder is. People will certainly have different perspectives! And I think people generally dislike D&D because it's 1. very oversaturated, obviously, to a frustrating degree; 2. a game geared towards modes of play that a lot of tabletop players don't care for or even think are kind of insidious
I just think that d20 is a horrible die to use. It's flat, and the one advantage of flat is that every + or - is just 5% to the success rate. But it doesn't produce the outcomes players want: what players want is to not waste their turns, and d20 systems are the worst at wasting turns. Being a video game exacerbates this to the absolute limit: better optimize right!
I've yet to feel like I've wasted a turn in Pathfinder 2e and I haven't played Lancer as a player but my players seem to enjoy it and I haven't heard the usual grumblings of wasted turns either. I think part of it is actual multiple actions per turn, not an action and usually a garbage bonus action. I find BG3 actually feels more fun than actual 5e because you have actually useful bonus actions. The other part is making it is crits aren't just 1s and 20s. PF2e's +/-10 crit rule makes every +/-1 feel powerful and Lancer's 20+ is a crit definitely makes the accuracy system feel worth it. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's perfect for every system but for things on the crunchier side its definitely a good choice.
DnD is absolutely an awful game that people will bend over backwards to justify. It's not intuitive, it's not newbie friendly, it's heavily slanted towards magical classes, the systems for anything outside combat might as well not be there, etc, etc, etc.
The only upside to it as Your First RPG is its ubiquity.
It's even worse than all that because it feels intuitive but really isn't. I've found it really poisons people wanting to try other systems since they think all of them will be as hard to learn as 5e. Once you get them into another system they're usually up for trying others but it can be a real pain to get them to try that second system.
Yeah, I've heard the same. Even had a person decline trying PF2E because it's a lot of reading when it's nearly the same ruleset.
Personally I feel as though D&D 5e isn't the greatest, it's the most accessible but it's lacking in any sort of meaningful depth, but with a good DM it can still be quite a lot of fun! Yet I think it doesn't adapt that well to the format of that of a videogame at all, like the entirety of the 5e system is specifically designed with a DM in presence, it's designed to ease people into creating stories but not really to go through pre-existing ones.
There's clear a lot of care and effort put into BG3, but due to the underlying mechanics, it never gyved that well to me, it all felt really janky and not thought-out? It's a shame that having D&D 5e's systems was a mandatory decision by Wizards of The Coast, because otherwise it could've been a (in my opinion) stellar game, DOS2 by Larian was great!
You can also adapt the feeling of tabletop in a videogame, games like Disco Elysium or the Classic Fallouts did, but you need to design the underlying systems to support the format of that of a videogame.
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