>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?

You are making the mistake of setting your fantasy character up against a normal animal. You as a real life human would be fighting the orka, not your fantasy character. They would be fighting a Chimera. Which can do all those things you mentioned as well. And if you think your fantasy character can beat a Chimera with their weapons and magic, that would be the same as you thinking you can beat an orka with your bare hands. Unless you are some elite high level special ops in the military, you will not win against an orka.

Oh, I do agree that it's tedious, especially when it's tabletop instead of a video game. My point is pretty much that I want consistency - if you (the game) don't care about adventurers who are very short, it doesn't make sense to care about adventurers who are very fat. Though I think it's pretty clear that the main issue for the BG3 devs was that animating fat characters is a lot of extra work that most players won't appreciate. > and have you ever been camping for more than a week without modern gear or tasted hard tack+pemmican? Have you ever tried losing a lot of weight? Takes a pretty long time, even if you basically don't eat anything. The main character in BG3 basically spring into existence at the beginning of the game (with a very good excuse for why someone who never did any adventuring is suddenly on the road), and the game takes places over a couple of weeks or a few months, depending on how often you rest.

But also all but one of them are kind of wizards. And there is an amount of selection. And they do get stabbed and set on fire a lot. And they are all kind of infested with parasites.

While that is fascinating and worth considering, I think the way it's implemented in the video games is kind of unsatisfying. Specifically, how the NPCs just go back to their idle routine even if that means standing casually on the bodies of their friends. For days. The "for days" part is also particular to DnD. You can sleep for days while the world remains static. The rite of thorns never completes. The prisoners are never executed. Not even if you kill half the guards and take a snooze. I think the Batman video games did a better job of NPCs freaking out and not just calming back down, but most games don't invest in that. Also bg3 specifically let's you teleport to safety once you're 30 meters away, which is extra cheesy.

You're complaining that the game where the wizard who fucked a god and the vampire with an ancient alien brain parasite from the future are just table stakes *is unrealistic*? I don't know what to say. Are you trying to say it clashes with the design? Are you saying every game should have every feature and 'StarCraft' should have the nemesis system from the 'shadow of' games? I don't get it. The whole thing is an abstraction. Doing everything is a lot of developer hours and this one in particular aas shackled to a system made for tabletop play with a human gm, and not even one of the good systems fit that. Here's another way to think about it: what would you have cut to include that?

Yeah but what about the remaining 94 to 83% of regular people who rightly judged their ability to judo-chop a bear to death? Or does having the self-awareness to know you probably can't win against a bear make you abnormal? I didn't miss the point, I scaled the challenge. Because a bear is much less threatening and dangerous than a 20 ft giant. Listing that stat is just assuming that adventurers are mainly pulled from the 6% group who, once they get their hand on a bit more power, would try something even dumber. I don't think that is reasonable. And the backgrounds in most RPGs are so varied that you can't map it on to any amount of training. A background as a soldier might mean you spent years fighting and then you start as a level 1 fighter, so it took you decades to reach level 2. Or you could be a farmhand and then, after a couple weeks of travel later, you're now a level 2 sorcerer. A year of serious BJJ training is rather generous.

Let's say as a party you've taken down a few monsters already. Without knowing the proportional strength of a chimera to the monsters you've already faced how would you know? Like let's say I did kill an Orca on my own. Then I see a polar bear, the Orca was a lot bigger so seems reasonable. Now living in the age of technology, not a fantasy setting, I personally know that a polar bear would be a lot harder to beat. But how's an adventurer supposed to know that? They don't have wikipedia and national geographic in most fantasy settings. It's not unreasonable to believe when encountering a creature that no one in the party is familiar with it at all.

I didn't use the word realistic. I called it unsatisfying. Also, it's kind of tired to be like "oh you want rEaLiSm in your game about elf magic??". You know what people mean when they say that. Given the premises presented, nothing is contradictory enough to break suspension of disbelief. People use "realistic" as a shorthand. Sometimes people use "Verisimilitude" for this. Having NPCs react reasonably in some cases (eg: scripted encounters, some law breaking) and not in others is *jarring*. You see the NPCs standing around the tavern having a chat and you go, "That's a reasonable scene. I can imagine this." Then you explode one of them, and they all run around in a panic. Still pretty reasonable. Follows from the premises given. But then you run away and come back, and all of them are back to drinking and chatting. All of them except the one you exploded, who's still a bloody mess on the floor. For some people, such as myself, this is too much. It's too high a contrast, and it foregrounds the limits of the game too much to easily suspend disbelief. > I don’t know what to say. Are you trying to say it clashes with the design? Are you saying every game should have every feature and ‘StarCraft’ should have the nemesis system from the ‘shadow of’ games? I don’t get it. I don't feel like you tried very hard to "get it". The game has a stealth and murder system you're encouraged to use. I'd like for them to have gone a little further with it. The NPCs sometimes look for you if you fire from stealth, but it's janky. The rest of the game is generally pretty immersive-sim, but the wheels fall off if you play one of the main playstyles. Unsatisfying. I'm not a game developer and I expect you aren't either, so I don't know how complex it would be to make the responses to stealth more robust. Maybe add a "There's been a murder!" state to scenes. But they did a lot of other stuff to cover more niche scenarios, so it wouldn't be out of character.

An orca *on land* wouldn't be too difficult, and knowing what a whale is wouldn't be metagaming unless being uneducated is part of your backstory/character.


But what would you have cut to inude that?

I'm not a product manager and certainly don't work at larian. I have no insight into the level of effort required with their tooling and skill sets. I don't know what they prototyped already. I can't answer that question meaningfully. You also didn't really engage with anything else I wrote.

>didnt engage with Yeah it seemed boring and didn't spark joy. >I'm not a What would you consider though? A couple idle animations? A s>mple-behavior spell? Some other behavior? A complex behavior or type of spells? A quest? Playable characters? An entire chapter of game? Remember this is fir something that mostly only works for one specific SUBclass.