While BG3 was a better game, the combat in Divinity was more fun. Not only was cheese encouraged, it was almost required at higher difficulty levels. Summoning a lava worm to shoot a laser beam at some tossed out fire traps to cause a million damage? Sure, why not?
5e is a great system for a “Rule of Cool” style of DMing. That’s amazing for a decent DM and inexperienced/less technical players.
But it is not a good CRPG system or a good system for experienced and technical players. There’s a lot of “can I…” and “I want to…” that slows down combat even when you know the rules.
Plus, there’s stuff like “can a centaur ride a horse?” where 5e is inconsistent. Or the infamous peasant rail gun.
5e is a great system for a “Rule of Cool” style of DMing. That’s amazing for a decent DM and inexperienced/less technical players.
It’s not even that good at that. Fate, for example, is a much lighter and better system for that. Aspects are a very simple system for setting expectations and letting players do wacky things based on them.
If I was going to run a game for new players I would absolutely not reach for 5e. It provides too much fertilizer for “can I move that far?” and “if he’s flying 30’ up can I still shoot him?” minutia.
I probably had fewer “can I…?” questions in BG3 than any other CRPG, if for no other reason than that all of the enemy attributes are exposed at all times, and your spells tell you which attributes they interact with. It’s that same quality that allows the technical design of Larian’s engine to shine, and it made large swaths of the genre feel dated immediately. Either in the video game or the tabletop, my combats don’t have many questions to bog them down.
It’s among my favorites, and I’m nervous for whatever Divinity’s got in its place.
That’s a controversial opinion but I agree with you. Going by the Original Sin games I prefer 5e over the rules Larian made for Divinity.
The surfaces system was superior in Divinity OS2 but I felt the physical/magical armor system was kind of awkward.
While BG3 was a better game, the combat in Divinity was more fun. Not only was cheese encouraged, it was almost required at higher difficulty levels. Summoning a lava worm to shoot a laser beam at some tossed out fire traps to cause a million damage? Sure, why not?
Given how much more likely one is to have played 5e than any other system, it’s probably not all that controversial.
5e is a great system for a “Rule of Cool” style of DMing. That’s amazing for a decent DM and inexperienced/less technical players.
But it is not a good CRPG system or a good system for experienced and technical players. There’s a lot of “can I…” and “I want to…” that slows down combat even when you know the rules.
Plus, there’s stuff like “can a centaur ride a horse?” where 5e is inconsistent. Or the infamous peasant rail gun.
It’s not even that good at that. Fate, for example, is a much lighter and better system for that. Aspects are a very simple system for setting expectations and letting players do wacky things based on them.
If I was going to run a game for new players I would absolutely not reach for 5e. It provides too much fertilizer for “can I move that far?” and “if he’s flying 30’ up can I still shoot him?” minutia.
I probably had fewer “can I…?” questions in BG3 than any other CRPG, if for no other reason than that all of the enemy attributes are exposed at all times, and your spells tell you which attributes they interact with. It’s that same quality that allows the technical design of Larian’s engine to shine, and it made large swaths of the genre feel dated immediately. Either in the video game or the tabletop, my combats don’t have many questions to bog them down.