D&D’s lead designer says he’s changing some of the tabletop RPG’s spells because they were so annoying in Baldur’s Gate 3 – including one infamous spell that’s responsible for a good chunk of inadvertent deaths.
In a new video, D&D lead designer Jeremy Crawford explains some of the changes coming in with the game’s new 2024 Player’s Handbook. Some of those changes, he revealed, were brought about specifically because of his time with Baldur’s Gate 3.
One of those changes is to Cloud of Daggers. In D&D, this second-level spell conjures a five foot cube of spinning daggers at a point of the players’ choosing, dealing damage to any unit that walks into the cloud or starts its turn there. In Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s infamous as a spell that the RPG’s AI has struggled to deal with, leading to several NPCs killing themselves by simply running into the cloud on low health.
Crawford explains that the spell has now been changed in the TTRPG to allow players to move it around the map, similar to spells like Moonbeam, which can be cast in one spot and then adjusted on subsequent turns. Coincidentally, Moonbeam is another spell that’s caused Baldur’s Gate 3 players problems, but that’s not our concern right now.
The reasoning behind Crawford’s changes isn’t that these spells are dangerous for NPCs with poor pathfinding, but because their “action economy” can be “really painful.” Take Produce Flame, for instance, a Druid cantrip that allows a player to summon a small flame in their hand. Crawford says that this was a spell that frustrated him in the tabletop game but was “excruciating” in Baldur’s Gate 3. In fact, it was only while playing Larian’s RPG that he made the decision “to redesign Produce Flame so there will not be as much friction to cast this cantrip.” Crawford doesn’t explain exactly what changes he’s planning to make, but if I had to take a guess, it’s removing the rule that extinguishes the flame after you attack with it, forcing you to take two turns to set it back up as an offensive tool.
Sadly, the damage is already done in Baldur’s Gate 3 itself – these spells exist in the game as they did when it was created, and so any new rules won’t be ported over by Larian. They might, however, make it in as mods – full mod support is coming in September with Baldur’s Gate 3 patch 7, and I can imagine the community being pretty hot on making sure rulesets are up to date for players looking for as accurate a D&D experience as possible.
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