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.

Counter opinion : this is a bad article written on a great videogame and a great tabletop game.

So, the main point of the author is that they don't like DnD. Well, maybe don't play a DnD game? 😂 #firstWorldProblems

DND 5e is a horrible system. Bg3 would be better if it was built on something else. The reasons they focus on in this article aren't really the reasons why.

• the adventuring day is trash. It's especially bad when there's no human dm to be like "no you JUST had a long rest you can't have another". Though apparently most tables do one fight per long rest on average anyway, which is insane. That's not how the game is balanced! Bg3 kind of sort of limits you by making you get supplies, but that doesn't really make a big impact. Also there's good berries.

• there's very little room for mechanical customization and optimization. You pick a subclass, skills to be slightly better at, and some stats that matter but not a whole lot. Pretty much every early character is going to do their main thing at +5. But that modifier is dwarfed but the comparably huge 1d20 random factor.

I didn't even notice I wasn't proficient in my weapon on a new game the other day for like an hour. I lost the +2 Prof bonus but the +1 magic bonus mostly made up for that. And since the random factor of 1d20 is so big in comparison, it doesn't make a big difference.

But character mechanics are very shallow, especially at low level. Compare pillars of eternity 2 where there are many more classes, class combinations, and the way weapons and armor work is actually interesting.

• dnd's armor system is kind of stupid. This is a dead horse. But like come on ac as avoidance, no concept of damage reduction (outside of one feat and rare sources of 50% reduction).

• no degree of success or failure. Rolling a 30 vs a target of 5 is the same as rolling 5. A human dm will probably be better here, and they could have programmed it for some of the skill checks. But for combat that's not how DND works.

• the assumed miss rate is pretty high. Whole turns can go by where everyone just misses. This is better at 5th level where you have two attacks, but low level can become a slog.

• they didn't implement take 10 (or 20) so the game has a lot of boring rolls that don't really mean anything. Mostly picking locks and searching. It's very save scummy, especially when failure is just a dead end.

• personally I vastly prefer a low random factor. I liked how new Vegas skill checks were either you had it or you didn't. No save scumming. No "why did my barbarian roll so high on arcana but my wizard at +10 rolled so poorly"

• 1d20+stuff gives flat probability, which I dislike. Every outcome on the die is equally likely. That doesn't feel good to me.

I could go on but it's late. 5e kind of sucks. Article didn't nail why.

Tbf, it screamed click bait before I went ahead and knowingly clicked the bait, but they could have at least come up with something. 90% of it boils down to "it's hard and I can't cheese my way out of it by wheedling a computer program like I wheedle my DM."

For being a *tedious, unfun system in which to play a video game," my ass has barely done anything else in four days and I have only stopped today because I find myself in a moral quandary about murdering known enemies that have already let me pass.

Since when was murder an issue for me. I'm coming to realize my approach to gaming is not my approach to tabletop for some reason and I'm not atm sure what to do about it.

Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat encounters are particularly tedious. I have taken to saving right before I enter any combat encounter so that I can start over the second things start to go sour. But no matter how much I prep, how much I plan, or how many times I load my save, something can randomly go wrong.

Once, when I was finally making headway into a goblin camp, a goblin sprang up from the bushes and kicked Astarion into a chasm to his death. My jaw dropped open in shock — I had been doing so well!

Two days ago, I was in the underdark and VERY proud of myself for successfully taking down not one but two random minotaurs above my level via luck and careful planning. Had the last one down to 19HP or so, hamstrung on a bed of spikes and more or less trapped in cloud of blades.

You know what happened? It jumped clean over all of it, landed right in the middle of the group, and soccer punted Wyll into a chasm, to my audible horror.

You know what I did? Thunderwaved it into the same fucking chasm, revived him, and moved the fuck along. And now we stay away from the edge, and now I use that spell a WHOLE lot more because it's funny and because fuck you.

I get the genuine sense that the author just needed something to write that they didn't necessarily believe in but they knew would get attention, because no gamer worth their salt would take much issue with saving often, I don't feel like any worthwhile D&D player would complain about bad dice rolls, and shit goes wrong in both of them.

If it's really hard...there's Bitch Mode for a reason. You take a hit to your pride, but pride is hollow and you get to play the game vs...not getting to play the game. Although what with me barely understanding the stats/rules myself, repeatedly and catastrophically ending my turn by accident when I least need to, and still feeling like I can likely pull this off if I remain clever enough, I suspect the difficulty part is hyperbole.

I want to know what exactly they're used to doing, if they can skate so lazily by so regularly that they're complaining about moderate strategizing. I wanna know how this happened. They sure as shit don't play turn-based games and their table must resent them.

The writer finds the combat tedious? I think it's amazing! Sometimes you stomp a horde of weak enemies, sometimes you come up with a clever strategy to face overwhelming odds, sometimes you fight a tense battle where the enemies get lucky and you use more resources than expected, and once in a while you get stomped because you made a really bad decision or the enemies got really lucky.

Unlike them, I have not found combat on Balanced difficulty to be quick-savey. I'm 90 hours in and I think the only time I've saved during combat was when I was trying to brainstorm ways to move a nonlethally knocked-out NPC out of an impending AoE without killing them. (The answer was Shove, btw, it always succeeds on unconscious targets, but be aware of cliffs. Throwing them, on the other hand, will deal 1 damage and murder them.) I have, I think, 2 combat Game Overs, and one of them was on a fight that the game telegraphs as being wildly imbalanced and tries pretty hard to discourage you from engaging in at all; I still went back and won it on the next try, once I had a better idea of what I would be dealing with. Once you are out of the early game and have a few levels under your belt, you should have all the tools you need to control the course of fights.