This was also true when BG1 and BG2 were made, and yet ...

That means that the BGs are, at best, only sort of dnd.

That means Infinity used the same turns and rounds, but internally. Resulting in messy and convoluted start-stop battles.

No, they're D&D through and through - all three of them. :)

Houserules are a thing. I've seen DND bent and twisted into pretzels that wound up VERY different.

Honestly, the entire d20-era did that a lot. Mutants and Masterminds is a D&D derivative. So is, of course, d20 Modern. And then there's Starfinder. Star Wars d20. Officially-licensed d20 adaptations of Diablo II. Call of Cthulhu d20. Rokugan d20. Stargate SG-1 d20. Swashbuckling Adventures d20. Penumbra. Blue Rose (a.k.a. True20). An adaptation of Traveller to the d20 system. Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars: Shadows of a Dying World.

All were, on one level or another, "D&D" in the sense of their mechanics .... but changed, altered, modified, to suit the desired game type (and genre).

...

ANY translation from one medium (TableTop multiplayer paper-and-pencil) to another medium (single-player CRPG) is GOING to involve some tweaks to the mechanics, no exceptions.

And do you know what happened after that? D&D community was divided between "computer game rules" and "table-top rules". Bioware HAD TO change so many things that they were not even close anymore. That got even worse with the Neverwinter series.

Yes, homebrew or house rules are a thing in D&D but not that much one sounds like French, and the other sounds Japanese.

And we all know what happened with the Real-time with Pause in Neverwinter Nights 2. All characters rushing into a pool of chaos where you can't see what the hell is going on. It was a total mess.

I love Baldur's Gate 1&2 and Neverwinter Nights 1&2 and all 4 of them are permanently installed in all my systems. But Larian went with the safe and logical approach here.



I agree. When jumping from 2e to 5e, it can not possibly feel like Baldur's Gate anymore even without the turn-based system. If you want to change it so much, why bother with the licence anyways? Do it like Pillars of Eternity and create your own system and go with it.

I've been playing one or another kind of D&D for about forty years now - since I was nine or ten years old, in 1980 or 1981. And I do not recall any such "division" of the D&D community over BG1. Sure, there were people who said "it doesn't play the same" .... but, DUH, it didn't, because it was translated to computer-manageable format.

The old SSI Gold Box series games were the same; they were not exactly the wat the TTRPG rules worked, but they were more than close enough, given the change in media. Yes, that much.

For example, d20 Modern was published by WotC. They took the skeleton of 3E, stripped off the fantasy stuff, and added in new classes, equipment, and "magic items" (high-tech devices).

Another example: Rokugan d20 was an adaptation of the Legend of the Five Rings RPG rules to the mechanics of 3E. Speaking as someone who was (and is) a fan of the L5R-RPG? Rokugan d20 was a damned sight closer to D&D, than it was to "proper" Rokugan.

Third, the Diablo II adaptation? Was published by WOTC - they licensed D2, not the other way around. Hey, I'm not in favor of RTWP myself. I prefer to keep things turn-based.

However ... TB or RTWP, neither of those is a make-or-break affair for whether the game is D&D or not. A game doesn't have to be turn-based, to be "a D&D game". That was a bad claim to make, so I spoke up against it.

There isn't really anything I can disagree with you here :)