I've heard complaints about Tainted Grails difficulty but maybe that was before their recent patch. The game is not hyper easy but as long as you're not insanely stupid you should be fine. If you spec out into magic the game becomes almost a joke. I am mage boy zapping everything near me mwahahaha get fucked Gallahad.

To be fair if you don't make it clear to the party that they can't take the creature or some other kind of warning there's no way for them to know if they can handle it without metagaming. I the player know a level 2 can take on a giant, but does my character know that

When you stand next to water for too long and mud crabs converge on your location.

If you're playing a character that foolhardy to see a creature anywhere from 2x to 10x their size and think tbey can fight it, then let them die. It's not metagaming to see something large and make the reasonable assumption that it could crush you. Can you beat an orca in a fight? How can you assume that without metagame knowledge of its stats?

Kinda hard to stay fat when you're on the move all the time, both marching around and fighting for your life. It'd take a conscious effort to overeat (and/or a relatively sedentary work situation) to stay fat.

If you're really fat, it takes quite a while to get the weight off. In BG3 specifically, you're not an adventurer before the game, but get picked up randomly in a city. I see no issue with a fat level 1 wizard, and even for martials you can just say they trained for a couple of years and then stopped training once they got a job in the city. They probably *should* get some kind of penalty, but on the other hand you should also get a penalty for being small (i.e. gnome or halfling) and BG3 just threw that out completely. If a gnome can wield a standard two-handed sword without penalties, a fat dude can have the same stamina as a thin dude.

I played the demo a year ago or so and it seemed promising. Would you say it’s more Skyrim or Oblivion in terms of character stats/skills and “crunchiness?” Is there a dedicated speed stat?

Older editions had stuff like "small characters are harder to hit, so they get +1 AC. But then it's weird they have a hard time hitting each other, so they get a +1 to-hit, too". Trying to simulate reality gets wacky real fast, and quickly becomes more work than it's worth.

Ah, the ol' Skyrim Space Program.

To be fair humans did take down wooly mammoths at some point

I don't know many I can cast fire from my hands. That's pretty over powered

>Can you beat an orca in a fight? If I could throw fireballs or kill something by simply touching it IRL, probably.

Yeah, but you're not that at level 2.

Well, not fireball; but being a Warforged isn't level dependent, it's a race and Touch of Death is a level 2 spell for a Death Domain cleric.

Again, if you want to play a character that doesn't think well, that's fine. But 6% (or even 17%) is not a majority of people and when a person sees something taller than most houses looming over them, I assume the average person would correctly adjust their chances of success. This is about the need for a GM to establish for PCs that they can't engage a giant in combat. Most people don't do a year of BJJ and think they and 3 mates can wrestle down an elephant. I just have a higher opinion of people's self-preservation instincts, especially when they haven't been as far removed from nature as most people on the internet are. People used to be afraid of forests and the wilds, and I think that level of society is closer to RPGs than we are.

Wasn't familiar with "Touch of Death"; I don't play clerics often. But it's just a smite. Assuming average HP on level up and +3 CON mod: Barb: 25; Fighter: 22; Cleric: 19. And Touch of Death does +9 damage at level 2. I'm only breaking out numbers to get a better idea of what the users of the ability would be seeing, and what level of lethality they would come to expect from repeated usage. And that's not killing anyone with a touch except commoners, and level 1 wizards and sorcerers. My only point is: people who have had to risk their life to even get to level 2 (unless they're reckless or an idiot) probably wouldn't have an overly big head over middling magical abilities. They might be feeling themselves and think they can fight a group of thugs at 4 to 1 odds but it's bonkers to pretend a normal adventurer would need some _ex machina_ explanation to warn them off fighting something like a giant or a dragon at level 2.

i do enjoy walking around with a big ol crowd of skellies tho. by mid-act 2 i have so many godsdamned summons

You missed the point those 6 to 17 percent are just regular people. They don't shoot fire from their hands. Remember even a level two adventure is a very very small percentage of the world's population. Most people are way weaker in DND. Being a level 2 adventurer is way beyond a year of BJJ

>real DM wouldn't allow that This is an actual military doctrine used by the people of Afghanistan to kick the shit out of most of the biggest imperial powers of the world, by TE Lawrence to take out the ottomans, and by one part of the Vietnamese resistance during the american invasion. It has an extremely good record for doing exactly what it does in the game, and for ruining morale of the big guy getting shoot-twice-then-run'd.

Small characters in older edition used different equipment; a small sized weapon used smaller dice, rules for number of hands between sizes were pretty much what you'd expect, which lead to crazy shit like feats that let you use a larger size category weapon, a small size suit of armor wouldn't fit a medium character, carrying capacity multipliers, +/- to hit, and all kinds of shit. Pathfinder still has them. It requires extra design consideration and doesn't add much. Plus, fat sits differently on different bodies, jiggles when running, adds complexity to animations like holding yourself against wall or getting stabbed, and have you ever been camping for more than a week without modern gear or tasted hard tack+pemmican?