BG3 seems like a great primer for D&D. I’ve only played D&D a couple times in the past but BG3 showed me I was playing pretty poorly. BG3 visualizes concepts/mechanics/systems really well, if anyone I knew wanted to get into D&D I’d suggest they play around with BG3 first. I was going to pick up a bunch of D&D materials when they went on sale recently, but a lot of people were saying the new player handbook and core rulebook and stuff were due to come out in 2024 so I decided to wait til then.
In the end, using your idea will only work if you really know your players. With an arbitrary random group, I figure the result would be either 100% success rate (they all agree with each other and coordinate perfectly) or a close to 0% success rate (they rarely cooperate). Neither situation is what you want.
Luckily, when you want a certain percentage of success, that’s exactly what dice are for! Now, my group tends to be one of those “cooperators” so I’d tend to want to balance it assuming the party will always agree on what they want the godling to do. Then, maybe use a combination of religion, arcana, and diplomacy checks across the party to determine whether their characters are able to successfully pull off coordinating themselves to control the nigh-uncontrollable thing. I’d still use the “they have to agree on the action it will take” thing but then use the dice to add uncertainty.
If, on the other hand, you expect a lot less agreement amongst your players, you can still use dice, but this time, make the skill check determine whose commands get followed, with close results or consistently low results across the whole party leading to no one’s commands being obeyed and it doing something random and chaotic instead.
In the case of a cooperative party, we’re using dice to lower the success rate. In the bickering party, we’re using dice to increase the success rate. But in both cases, we have in mind a certain target success rate, and it is dice that will get us there.
Dice are a really good choice for simplifying the interaction.
I’m going back and forth on requiring something more than dice. On one hand, I want a fun encounter with a novel mechanic that makes them think a bit differently, but on the other, I worry that it’ll be too gameable or complex.
If you want to make them think a little differently, try a blackjack-esq dc. Set a RANGE they have to hit with their collective skill checks (that add together). If they roll below the range, or above it, either way the control doesn’t quite work— maybe a different consequence for too low or too high. Let them also choose whether to increase the sum or decrease it with their skill check, in the case of overshooting.
And make a variety of skills they can use to control the godling, so that they can strategically try to use the most appropriate bonus to get them where they need. Maybe using certain skills requires doing something on the battlefield too, like standing in a certain spot relative to the godling or some such. Or perhaps doing that sort of tactical movement can let you manipulate the roll or take 10.
That’ll get them thinking different! But if you make it fiddly like this you’ll need to make the payoff for successful control powerful enough to make it worth it.
By “bad” riddles, do you mean riddles that are so blatantly obvious that they’re basically no-brainers? Or rather something like bad puns? Does the riddle itself need to end up in praise for the sphynx, in some “who is the goodest boy in the room” sytle?
A bad riddle being something stupid or overly simplistic but with a different answer or overwrought.
The creature doesn’t know it wants to be praised for the riddles it makes. It believes it is very clever and isn’t. Even if they guess the right answer it would only get angry and deny they got it.
But I also don’t want the players to waste too much time thinking of riddle answers that will never go anywhere. It’s supposed to be funny
Solasta is an incredibly faithful recreation of the 5th edition rule set. And I absolutely love it. I've played the main campaign, all the DLC, and a fan made recreation of the temple of elemental evil.
The rule implementation is fairly strict, especially when compared with BG3. Can't be casting somatic component spells with something in your off hand. Your wizard spell book is something that you can accidentally sell (oops). Need to attune those magic items. But I find it all pretty fun and I felt like I actually learned more of the D&D rules.
The cutscenes and dialogue animations are... actually comically bad. But I like the idea behind the way scenes work. Basically you set your character's personality at the start of the game and then they automatically speak according to that. Some of dialogue is hilarious. Some of it is even internally hilarious.
But what really shines are the encounters and campaign design. The encounters are all very fun and well designed, there's a fair amount of verticality and environment interaction. Each encounter feels like it could plausibly be part of an an actual tabletop adventure. And the overall story also feels like something that your friend would come up for his homebrew world. It lacks the style and polish of BG3 but makes up for it with authenticity and heart.
Assist
Solasta is the closest I've ever felt to playing dungeons and dragons in a video game and I would highly recommend checking out the base game at least.
Charisma is the most important stat for a successful Bard, but it kinda sounds like this person is unlikeable and not even a good Bard, so they would probably have bad Charisma. You can always make your character bad at what they are meant to do, but it will probably get old pretty fast when you’re useless in most situations.
I would recommend just not choosing that class. Maybe pick a background that gives you proficiency with a musical instrument, but even then, it’s probably funnier if they can’t even play. Then choose a completely unrelated class that doesn’t care about Charisma. Maybe they’re a Wizard who read about Bard spells and tries their best approximation while singing and playing poorly. Or maybe they’re just a Fighter or a Barbarian who has to learn to fight off haters while continuing to talk shit.
If you do choose to play a Bard, I would just give yourself high Charisma and role play as an insufferable asshole anyway. At least that way you can have some magic that actually works. Or you could forget Charisma and spell casting and lean into something like College of Swords Bard and focus on Dexterity and Constitution. You’d be better off just picking Fighter, but at least this way you could actually cast spells poorly for the joke. You’d just be hamstringing yourself in the long run. Maybe they are a Bard at level 1 just for the basic spells and then start taking levels in something else when the Bard stuff clearly isn’t working
I got stuck on the same spot every single time I tried to make dnd work for my group. What finally worked for us was tokens. You dont have to go out and buy expensive miniatures - we use pennies, parts from other boardgames, coasters to represent area effects like guardian of faith, extra dice etc etc. The one other thing you need is a grid board. Someone in my group had one so we lucked out but I see them online for $20 to $30. Knowing where everyone is, how far you can move, who is gonna be hit by that cone of cold etc etc took off so much of the mental load and let us go back to having fun. You may already be doing this or it might not be right for your group but it helped us immensely.
The grid we use is dry erasable so we draw the battle map on there. We also use the markers on the pennies so we know the red marked one is the fire guy and so on. If you have any questions about this style of play lmk.
I completely feel you there, and I genuinely wonder if another game system might help to practice RP via storytelling focus vs. D&D’s notorious crunch, ya know? Maybe a one-shot or short-arc in DOGS, Blades In The Dark, etc.?
Overconfident can be a lot of fun to play, especially when paired with a flaw, like mispronouncing, using words wrong or making words up. Like Dr. Teeth from the Muppets, for example.
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