D&D General The longer I play Baldur's Gate 3 ...

[Burnside]

I would be astonished if print adventurers ever get playtesting like that. Would they even be still profitable?

Do I think they can playtest them at anywhere near the scale of BG3? No.

Do I think they could be playtested much better than they currently are? Very much so.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Do I think they can playtest them at anywhere near the scale of BG3? No.

Do I think they could be playtested much better than they currently are? Very much so.

How would you do it? How many tables play testing it, over what time period and are you paying them? Say you need a year to knock together a 12 level arc and 3 months to edit, revise and final lay out?

 

[Burnside]

How would you do it? How many tables play testing it, over what time period and are you paying them? Say you need a year to knock together a 12 level arc and 3 months to edit, revise and final lay out?

4 tables of 4-5 players, over a 6 week period, paying players $25/hour and DMs more. Online is fine, they don't need to be the building.

I publish adventures on DMsGuild on a budget of like $1k or less and all my stuff is play tested 3-4 times before it goes to print. I have nowhere near their resources. It's far from some insurmountable obstacle, especially considering the revenue D&D generates.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This game would have made a Better adventure than 90% of the adventures out there
Forget the party npcs and forget the magic items (although some would be good). I can’t spoil anything but there’s a lot to like

It certainly has the mother of all "strong starts," as @SlyFlourish advocates, along with a rock-solid reason for the party to stay together (personal issues notwithstanding) and a (theoretically) ticking clock driving them toward finding a solution to their main problem.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I would be astonished if print adventurers ever get playtesting like that. Would they even be still profitable?

If the content was produced in a more or less sequential fashion (which isn't really a thing for most of Frostmaiden, but which applies to most adventures), they could be playtesting as they go. It would be easy to have playtested the carnival portion of Witchlight while the rest was being written.

And they would have heard "hey, all of our characters had a level zero adventure before this one? Why isn't that included?" instead of waiting to put that out for AL later on. (I like Witchlight, but the prologue and the Domains of Delight material not making it into the book are weird decisions that I have to imagine they would have heard about from playtesters.)

 

[MockingBird]

Things to consider:

1.) I've seen a lot of suggestions for implementing BG3 elements into a product, but changing them so that they work better with 5E. We essentially already have most of it - there isn't much of anything in BG5 that doesn't equate to something in 5E that is built for the 5E design. Explosive arrows come from the Arcane Archer. Brewing potions rules are in Xanathar's and the DMG. Do you want a light emitting longsword with the finesse property that deals radiant damage ... ? Sun Blade. You want to be able to gather up a bunch of barrels of explosive material to sneak near a bad guy and then blow them up? Portable Hole.

We seem to be forgetting that Larian did the exact opposite of what you're asking to see: They took D&D and translated it into a video game - and tried to keep the essence of D&D in everything they did. Now you want to take the video game out of it - which means to translate it back to what inspired it. Some fits are better than others ... but in the end, all you're really getting if they make a BG3 supplement is the use of the BG3 names ... everything else you've essentially got in one form or another.

2.) They have been very clear in their design choices through the last several editions - and one major goal has been to reduce accounting and tracking of information. They realize that most groups do not track food or arrows. They designed 4th edition to essentially reset between encounters (outside hps and dailies). They want the game to be less intimidating to new players, and that requires them to keep it simple. We added back some complexity between 4E and 5E as they thought they went too far ... but they do not want to go overboard. There is a reason why advantage/disadvantage replaced almost all bonuses and penalties. They would not add back in a lot of +1/-1 tracking into the game ... and a surprising amount of BG3 makes use of those types of mechanics.

3.) BG3 is not a balanced game. It uses items and combos to enhance PC power at the higher levels to give you more of an epic PC feel while your characters are still 12th level. A non-optimized BG3 party will struggle in Act 3 in normal mode. An optimized one will find Act 3 fairly easy (combat wise - some puzzles can be a challenge if people do not resort to Google). When you are about to finish the game, imagine taking the 4 12th level PCs in the game and then put them up against a 5E 'by the rules' 12th level party. If you optimized your BG3 party (which is not terribly hard to do), you'll find that BG3 party is insanely more powerful.

Really good post. I was surprised by all the +1s or -1s you can get and all the status conditions. I definitely wouldn't want to have to deal with all that in a table top game. As you stated a lot of things people seem to want to carry over into 5e are already in 5e. BG3 is a really great video game. It would just be too fiddly at a table in my opinion.

As to the post suggesting it would be a good adventure. I agree, but I don't know if I could pull off some of the more epic moments in the game as well as the game did.

 

[Andvari]

Yup I think one could house BG3 stuff in.

Lots more magic items for example than typical D&D.

Yeah, and way more than other D&D-based CRPGs in general, from the old Gold Box games and all the way up to Solasta. It was quite jarring.

 

[Burnside]

And they would have heard "hey, all of our characters had a level zero adventure before this one? Why isn't that included?" instead of waiting to put that out for AL later on.

Ooooh - can you link to that?

 

[Malmuria]

Three-dimensional terrain (i.e. climbing up to the rafters for a better shot, jumping across chasms).

One thing that also strikes me in BG3 is how much movement and distance matters. This is due to the verticality of the environments, but also because of how spaced out they are. As a result, you need to make use of dashing and jumping and keep in mind spell distance more than when playing 5e, at least in my experience. I mean, I've actually used distant spell metamagic!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

... the more I'm amazed that WotC didn't put out a digital product, like Gale's Guide to the Magic of Baldur's Gate or something, collecting the dozens of new magic items, handful of variant spells, handful of new monsters, etc., from the game. The game stats are already 99% of the way to conventional 5E stats and would need basically a light editing pass to get them ready, and Larian for sure has a bunch of concept art of items that they could use to illustrate the book.

Even if they have a revenue sharing agreement with Larian on this material (which would surprise me), it's a revenue stream for Q1 2024. As far as we know, WotC isn't selling any new books between now and March, other than Book of Many Things, which only accidentally ended up in this quarter.

WotC have huge problems with their goals and direction with D&D.

They're really not seemingly clued in to their actual fans at all, and even when it looks, superficially, like they might be, they find incredible ways to screw things up (c.f. Strixhaven), or to just bring out books that relatively few people actually seem to care about. It seems like they have this weird, disconnected meta-strategy which isn't like, ruining them or anything, but I think has actually limited D&D's success pretty notably (which is quite a thing to say given how successful 5E has been, I am aware). I think this is partly down to upper management just letting the D&D team bumble along (for better or worse), because upper management is convinced that longer-term, D&D will primarily be a subscription service with a sideline as a lifestyle product, not this weird little game with books and dice and so on.

Plus, they apparently had absolutely very little faith in Larian - which is bizarre because the game had been in Early Access for like, three years? More? A long time. And it was obviously something special. Indeed for about a year it was obviously going to be something REALLY special. What's really weird is that MtG's D&D line actually had quite a lot of BG3 stuff going on, whereas D&D's own line had virtually none.

Part of it here I think is Microsoft's close links with WotC (in terms of virtually the entire upper management of WotC and Hasbro being ex-MS). MS were utterly contemptuous of BG3, for reasons unknown. They offered Larian $5m to make it a Gamepass game. $5m. To forgo a very large proportion of their PC sales, and likely Xbox sales too. Absolutely insane and insulting offer. But again it shows this pattern of being disconnected from reality. Relatively few people thought BG3 would be a $1bn+ product, sure, but it was definitely going to sell millions of copies - indeed it already had! Yet to WotC and MS? Pfffft... it's a nothingburger.

One thing that also strikes me in BG3 is how much movement and distance matters. This is due to the verticality of the environments, but also because of how spaced out they are. As a result, you need to make use of dashing and jumping and keep in mind spell distance more than when playing 5e, at least in my experience. I mean, I've actually used distant spell metamagic!

BG3 also nerfs the ranges and blast areas of a lot of D&D's spells and even weapons, note.