this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Baldur's Gate 3
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Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based RPG set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons, where your choices shape a tale of fellowship and betrayal, survival and sacrifice, and the lure of absolute power. (Website)
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The author really loved the sound of their own voice. I’m a dozen paragraphs in and there’s not an actual argument to back up the assertion that “it’s not fun” besides combat being “tedious”. I mean, look, I gave up 5e in favor of other systems after the OGL disaster and haven’t looked back, but this is a garbage tier article and I’m surprised it made it through Polygons editors, given how many of their writers and members have been espousing their joy for the game. Criticism is great, but “it’s not any good” just seems lazy and contrarian for contrarian sake.
5e is a bad table top game, but that's part of what's made it so successful - it's not treated as a game unto itself anymore, but just some loose guidelines to help generate setpieces, and people like that.
But also BG3 seems to recognize this and actually fills in the broken or missing game elements, just like everyone's DM does whenever they come across these gaps. It takes an opinionated approach to implementing the rules, and does so with the confidence of years of building CRPGs.
It's an impressive feat.
No it's not. Everybody loved 5e before the OGL fiasco early this year, but the hardcore old-schoolers who found it too simplified. The recent bad sentiment is about poor business moves by WotC regarding their license, and has nothing to do with the 5e system, which has been to date the most successful edition of dnd.
It really depends on what you mean by "good" and "bad" for a table top game. Clearly many people are having fun with it, so it's hard to say that it's a complete trash fire except as hyperbole.
However! I would argue that many of the people playing DND would have more fun with a different system. All those people who do one fight per day? Should play a game that supports that. All the people who do mostly social encounters with the occasional fight? That's not what dnd is good at, and would have more fun with a system that was built for that.
Unfortunately DND is mega popular and sucks most of the air out of the hobby. This has a important effects.
One, I suspect there's a huge survivorship bias in the hobby. DND is the first game most people play because it's super popular. Thus, most of the people who stick around the hobby are people who didn't hate DND enough to leave. There are probably lots of people who would like rpgs in general that don't play anything because their first experience was DND, and they hated it. Most of them won't come back to the hobby.
Second, because DND is such a janky system that's difficult to learn (don't you tell me a 15 is a +2 is an easy system), most of the people who do stick around are hesitant to try something else. Why would they want to learn another system and memorize another set of stat mappings? Some people probably don't even know there are rpgs without six stats, or character attributes like that at all.
Anyway. I digress. 5e is very good at being 5e, but it is not a general purpose RPG. It also has something I dislike in pretty much every one of its systems. As a shorthand I often say it's a bad game.
Being popular and being a good game are completely different things. Being fun and being a good game are different things. Being useful and being a good game are different things.
I'm not making a value judgement on whether 5e is likeable. I like 5e. It's just that it's not a complete and coherent experience.
Argument ad populum doesn't change that.
Right. Gladly, you're here to explain those masses of idiots who are having fun why they should not. You're just being pedantic. And for the record, no, it doesn't make you sound smart.
Right? And “a fun game doesn’t mean a good game” is just bizarrely wrong headed. Yes, definitionally a fun game is a good game. You have to be incredibly high sniffing your own farts to confidently and obstinately state otherwise.