32
votes
The “Shove” mechanic in Baldur’s Gate 3 - What my brave warrior's death to a lowly goblin taught me about dice anarchy
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- Title
- The "Shove" mechanic in Baldur's Gate 3 can ruin an encounter, and I love it
- Authors
- Kevin Purdy
- Published
- Aug 12 2023
- Word count
- 600 words
I love this mechanic so much. Like the author, I "discovered" chasms head first after a hob goblin showed me how they work. It's really interesting how big a role the environment plays.
Absolutely loving using the environment to my advantage (when I think to, anyway!). My favorite is an encounter with a giant spider that has way too hard for me to handle. The game suggested I flee, in fact.
So what I did was wait for it to stand on the web bridges and then cast fireball at the webbing. Spider dropped and took 20-30 damage each time. Basically halved its HP with a couple of fireballs and kept it from attacking me until I'd taken care of the smaller enemies and could finish the boss off with traditional attacks.
Ohhhh, I think I know the particular terror you mean. I watched a streamer run up against it quite a few times before overcoming it. You can try to flee, but I'm not sure it will let you get that far due to its...interesting method of travel.
Quite the eater of parties if it surprises you, since it almost immediately scuttles to get friends. I'm not sure whether Spidermom, the twin chargybois or the giant angry excavator was the deadliest creature I saw him take on in that playthrough.
Yeah my first attempt I let it get friends and despite beating the boss, the friends completely wiped out the dying remnants of my group. Second attempt I mostly just got lucky and took care of it after only a single group of friends.
This is a lot of words to describe a pretty mundane occurrence.
So you are right. It's a simple mechanic, that surprised and brought joy to the reporter.
I'm still trying to assess what content is wanted here. There are a fair number of upvotes. Thanks for your feedback.
Sorry that came out a bit more glib than I intended. Shoving people into hazards just seemed like the most obvious use of a shoving move to me.
I suppose it's more that a random goblin can instantly kill your main character with a simple shove. The game doesn't pull its punches with this. If you position incorrectly, you die.
Sometimes we humans can tend to think too complex, especially in a game that gives you a bunch of different options and mechanics to play with. So much so that you can forget about the simple stuff.
It blindsided me too when a random encounter turned deadly through a simple shove, even though I use shove relatively often already.
Buuuut I do think the author is a little b for reloading his game and savescumming when he died.
Is BG3 meant to be a permadeath experience?
It could be. There's 'origin' characters you can have as party members that are premade by Larian with a full fledged story that plays out throughout the game. Losing one of those robs you of a lot of storylines. The game gives you plenty of revival mechanics if a couple of party members die, and you have to reload a save if your full party wipes anyway. In this way the game lets you choose whether or not death is permanent.
There's also an option to hire mercenaries. Those have no prewritten stories and can be anything you want. I think my next run is one where I just have mercs. Deaths will be permanent (by choice) and I'll hire a new one to replace the dead Merc. Should be interesting.
From my experience with the game, BG3 is meant to be. "whatever you want out of DND" experience. There is technically permadeath, but the game allows you to save at any time and even automatically saves before difficult boss fights or other encounters.
For instance, the game auto saved right before I encountered explosive mushrooms. My characters all failed the required nature check, so we didn't know they were explosive until one blew up and knocked my mage off a ledge, immediately killing him. The game then allows me to either reload or carry on with this hilarious experience, both options drastically changing the game. I decided that I didn't want to go to the trouble of reviving him or dealing with his death-sidequest-thing, so I just reloaded.
Personally, I think the entire notion of "save scumming" as a bad thing in a single player game to be an oddity myself. Who cares if you reload or play on easy or whatever?
The only single-player game I've played where I'd discourage save-scumming is Disco Elysium, and that's principally because some of its best scenes are when you fail a check and by save scumming to succeed on checks you rob yourself of plenty of great content. Even then I now save scum certain checks on replays since I know what I want and what the options are. Not sure if this type of thing happens in BG3 but in general I say go ahead and save scum unless you've been warned a particular game has something else up its sleeve there. People get too judgmental about single-player experiences too often.
Oh I feel that completely. BG3 has certain narrative events that require skill checks at times, and reloading those does make me feel iffy. Not like I do, I mean okay one time, it was a DC of 5! I mean, seriously!
Like I mentioned in another comment just now, I personally think that it really depends on the context of the situation and the game itself. Like BG3 for instance, my dumbass has my party dying at least every fifteen minutes, and I don't expect that the game wants or cares if I continue down that narrative path. But rerolling in a game like Disco Elysium, until I get a specific outcome, feels like I would be missing the point of the game.
I think that save scumming in a game that's meant to be played for more than 100h is a totally acceptable practice. Permadeath can be an interesting (and even integral) mechanic in games that last for at most a few hours, like roguelikes/lites.
I agree completely, and didn't have rogue-likes in mind when I posted my comment, so I'm glad you brought that up! I absolutely love the concept of permadeath in rogue-likes or certain PVP games (DAYZ for example), but as far as "save-scumming" in most single player role playing games, what-evs. I guess it's all about the time and place, or rather if the game was designed around it in the first place. Since BG3 seems to be a game centered around player freedom, it really seems to just let you have your cake and eat it to, in that it lets you play the game however you want. It really nailed it in that regard; as I write this I'm more reminded of older simulation games like Deus Ex and the like.
Makes sense. Appreciate the feedback.