35
votes
Do you think there will be a "Baldur's Gate Effect?"
There have been a lot of complaints from DMs over the years about Critical Role and the "Matt Mercer Effect" causing new players to have unrealistic expectations of tabletop RPGs. Baldur's Gate 3 has the opportunity to introduce many new players to the d20 system/5e DnD specifically. Though it's a bit different in that the game is obviously scripted and you can't do literally anything, the game provides a ton of options and fleshed out paths, including full support of niche spells like speak with animals/speak with dead. Do you think this might have a similar influence on expectations from some new players moving forward or do you think since BG3 is a video game it will have less of an impact than CR and other tabletop shows have?
Do you mean on future CRPGs? Probably. A lot of people will probably think that they quite liked BG3 and want to give some other CRPGs a try, and it won't really pan out. It is what it is, though.
For 5e? It's just too different. I think this will introduce many players into 5e, but I don't think it's going to cause any kind of expectation delta because of how different it is.
I also don't think the Matt Mercer effect is real, it's mostly just a figment of ragebait content creators minds to glue the most popular DnD content to some controversy so you have something to talk about.
The Matt mercer effect is somewhat real. Not to the degree that I've seen people rant online, but I have had a guy recently join my dnd group and he refused to read the players handbook because he watched critical roll so he basically already knows it all, in his words.
He spent the first session confused about why there were so many mechanics that we were talking about and not understanding how his own stats are relevant to gameplay. After a quick conversation things got sorted and he's fully on the 5e track now.
I guess my point is that there are people out there with unrealistic expectations of of dnd because of critical role and dimension20. I also think that effect and it's impact on the dnd community is vastly overblown. The existence of those shows has done so much more good for dnd than harm in my experience.
My own experience with the Matt Mercer effect is when we had a guy in our group (player that then wanted to DM a while) who was actually really good at the game and understanding its concepts and rules. He enjoyed doing fun voices, personalities, engaging sets. It was great - until his expectations of how the game should be played crept in.
He started demanding changes to how our established group played, and that doesn't sit right with us. We'd had an established group for 4 years meeting weekly, you can't just come in asking for changes because you think we're "doing it wrong".
I think it will have an effect on 5e due to the type of new people it will bring. People who got into DnD through Critical Role or other similar content are more likely to want a deep story rich game. New player coming from BG3 will be on average wanting a more combat focused campaign.
Divinity 2: Original Sin is pretty great though, and that's the first game I'd recommend for people to play after BG3.
The Matt Mercer affect is definitely real in my experience - I DM Adventurer's League at my FLGS and we get a fair amount of new players who have seen the YouTube videos and wanted to try it themselves. I'd say at least half never return because it's not the same as what they've seen on YT 🤷🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
Yes.
Bluntly, Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot of interactions that work the way most tables THINK they should work rather than how they actually work, and it's for the better (i'd argue the movie did this to some extent as well).
Further they have done a lot of the QOL changes that wotc should've done. As an easy example, pact of the blade makes a hell of a lot more sense in BG3 than in 5e, and that's because rather than fix their junk they just made hexblade instead, causing all sorts of issues.
I don't really think it's a bad thing though. DM's need to communicate with their players. It solves 90% of these problems on the spot. There will always be people expecting to get something out of the game that they're not going to, and figuring that out before everyone starts is important. In the scheme of things, the biggest issue for a DM is still getting enough people to reliably show up.
Agreed. Kitchen rules have always been a thing, and at my table we have a short list of agreed upon "improvements." It'll probably be fine if BG3 adds a couple rules there or inspires stuff in our future campaigns.
Off topic: where are you from because I've always heard it called house rules here in the UK and not kitchen rules.
Southwest US, but I've heard it both ways though I think house rules is the more common phrase.
Oddly enough, after almost 40 years of tabletop gaming in both the SE and PNW USA, today is the first time I've ever heard the term "kitchen rules."
Out of curiosity, would you mind sharing an example of this? I'm fairly familiar with 5e, but haven't had a chance to play BG3 yet.
Well on the simple side you have things like grease being flammable and on the more complex side, obnoxious interactions like see invisibility (you can see them but you still have disadvantage attacking them)
Not sure how they handle some of the other notorious interactions (twin fire bolt/disintegration).
Bg1 and 2 weren't perfect translations either, but they did a good enough job for Ad&D 2E
Eh, I think it's apples and oranges. "Good enough" is a nebulous judging criteria, but BG3, for better or for worse, is infinitely more faithful to 5e than BG1 or 2 was to AD&D.
True! I haven't bought baldurs gate 3 yet.
But I've put in thousands of hours over the last 15 years playing bg1 and bg2. I'm hesitant to give it a shot to be honest with you, and I've played a lot of 5E with friends before. I wasn't super impressed with Divinity OS, but everything I've seen about bg3 looks great.
I think if Baldur's Gate 3 does become the gateway to a bunch of new people trying out tabletop gaming in general and 5e in particular, they will of course bring some of their own expectations with them, much like if the initial exposure to the hobby was something like Critical Role.
In the case of BG3 if that initial expectation is that 'video game logic' will hold true or that the world will be intricately crafted and populated ahead of time, then these are false expectations that plenty of new players have grappled with anyway.
Plenty of people myself included have picked up the hobby subconsciously attempting to use a game like Skyrim or the Witcher as a rough template to what to expect, I don't know that Baldur's Gate will make that any worse.
I'll be honest, I've always seen this more as a problem with how many people equate "tabletop RPG" with "DnD", including all its quirks and little details.
I personally started with Earthdawn 1 back in the days, and only came to DnD later (and absolutely could not for the life of me understand the hype abuot that ruleset or world 😅). As a result I tried a lot of game systems pretty consistently, and it'd be a shame not to have done so because as it turns out, DnD is an amazing set of rules and settings of a specific group. But each group has their own fitting thing, and has to find that instead of trying to mangle themselves into fitting DnD.
For my group personally, nowadays its FATE, played in a manner that is more collaborative-yet-occassionally-adversarial storytelling than anything else.
Same here. My first game was a complete homebrew thing a guy I knew invented. Then I played a tom of pathfinder.
Coming to 5e is weird because pathfinder is just similar enough to make it seem like everything should transfer over but then it's all different enough to cause trouble.
Making a 5e character is wild because there's almost no choices. Pick a race and class, then like one or two other things. Not even a feat.
Level Up Advanced 5th Edition is a complete rewrite of 5e, and it is what I am currently playing. It fixes a lot of what I do not like about 5e. Lots of choices.
Do you think so? I've always considered those complaints as crappy r/dndmemes material. I don't think too many people realistically expect every session to reach professional voice-actor level of quality.
I don't think most players think you will be as good at voices, but it seems like there is a subconscious expectation that you'll at least try. More pressingly I think is the expectation that you'll be as good as all the other parts of the game - and that it'll be you, the DM, who handles them. Everything from the recap at the beginning of the session to beautiful set-piece combats to flawless improv skills in dialogue.
I don't blame Mr Mercer for any of this, of course. And I think most people get over it, for lack of a better term - but the "professional DnD show" effect is definitely a real thing for many new players.