After playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I can say with absolute conviction that D&D should only be played as a video game. There is no reason to try and struggle through it on the tabletop. Everything good about it is made better by automating the mechanics. A BG3 combat that takes 20 minutes might take hours if you played it on the table, and you’d inevitably screw up or forget a bunch of the mechanics, not to mention that balancing encounters takes a lot of work.

Outside of combat, the difference is even bigger. Making D&D a video game shows that the role playing elements are either nonexistent or bad. If you have fun role playing in D&D, it’s because you and your friends are good at role playing. The system itself is doing little for you aside from providing some high-level consistency between characters (something that literally every TTRPG does).

In short, D&D should be a video game, and the only reason it wasn’t from the start is because it was created before video games existed. The role playing elements are basically optional, and decided almost entirely by GM fiat. If you like TTRPGs, you are better off playing any number of other systems.

This is not meant to be a criticism of D&D overall. The thing that’s made very clear by adapting it into a video game is that it’s actually a really excellent system for what it does. As much as I might criticize it as a tabletop game, it excels as a turn-based tactical game, with a crazy amount of optinality in how you approach any given situation. It’s not that it’s a terrible tabletop game, it’s that it’s so good as a video game that I can’t imagine playing it as a tabletop game.