Larian Studios underestimated just how much deep-diving into Dungeons & Dragons and its dedicated community it would need to do while designing Baldur’s Gate 3.
Speaking at PAX West during Larian’s one last “cathartic” Baldur’s Gate 3 panel, director of design Nick Pechenin reveals how involved the process that went into forming the beloved RPG and “adapting the pre-existing rules lore and mechanical parameters of Dungeons & Dragons” into it ended up being. “We thought the job of the designers was going to be easy because we have a design document that was just the printed books.”
Pechenin continues, explaining it was far less “easy” than the team expected: “It felt like it was going to be as easy as giving the books to the programmers, like ‘let’s just get it out there, very quickly.’ Before you know it, we’re deep down in community forums reading through people arguing what exactly was meant by a certain passage – and how ‘crit fishing’ on a Paladin is totally legitimate.”
It was “a really long journey” in the end: “It was great that we had a lot to draw from. D&D has a wonderful community of creators, of people who think very hard about the rules, who try them out. We literally went through forums looking for homebrew rules and thinking ‘ok, this is a rule that players very frequently change this way’ – like the rule where you cannot cast a full action spell and a bonus action spell on the same turn.”
Seeing such homebrew rules and experimental additions influenced Larian: “We were like, ‘Okay, so, we’re not crazy. Some people do it, so maybe we can try it as well.’ It was really great to see this design process in the wild, and then kind of be a part of it as well.” As a longtime D&D stan myself, I can only imagine what sorts of wild ideas and threads the studio encountered – and just how well they fit into the chaotic yet wonderful Baldur’s Gate 3.
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