Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Successful 99 throw!

It is actually possible! 20 as critical success indeed counts as any roll including 99. It gave me a small bonus during the final fight

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This is quite honestly thing that would make me leave table, if my DM would do that to me ...

They want you to do something, whole campaign everything leads to this singular deed ...
You decide to do it ... but not in the way they wanted you to ...
So they set HUUUUUUUUUUGE DC so it would be impossible to sucess ...
But based on previously established homebrew rules ... you manage to suceed anyway ...
And yet you fail anyway.

FOR SOMEONE'S SAKE WHY EVEN LET US TRY IF THERE IS ONLY ONE OUTCOME!? -_-

I knew about this, and it kind of annoyed me when i learned about it, because, as Rag said, it's not good DM behaviour to make you roll for something that you are not actually able to succeed at. It's basic DMing, if you genuinely don't want your players to do something (rare, but it happens), then don't even ask for a roll. If you let players roll for something, it creates the impression that this task can be succeeded, and finding out that you perhaps worked really hard for something that was never actually going to be possible? Makes players feel frustrated.

It's worse in BG3 than in pnp, because in pnp you don't necessarily know the DC you're aiming for unless the DM tells you, but here you can see it.

And there's the additional issue of BG3 having crit fail/success on skill checks (a rule that i don't like), because for the entire rest of this game, rolling 20 means you automatically succeed. But not in this one particular case, because we don't want you to.

I never played anything D&D other than videogames so for me it wasn't frustrating, because gamest tend to do this to their players. Like for example in Disco Elysium there is that one door that can't be opened even if you roll success on an impossible roll, they will give you something like "well, some doors are not meant to be opened lol" .
But here I was wondering, what is going to happen, and, well...
I think this is one of the places where tabletop system is harder to translate to videogaming. Looks like for seasoned D&D players this reads as breaking the rules, and I've never thought of that.

A 99 target number is just a way of saying you need a natural 20.

Which isn't terribly hard to get with advantage and all the thieves tools that've been accumulating in the character's inventory over three acts.

I got quite pissed at that first attempt to defeat what was then the Elder Brain because I just kept rolling low every time. Burnt through all of my inspiration and never rolled above about 11. But then when it was DC 30, DC 99 I realised I wasn't supposed to win there, and the second attempt is way better as a whole experience. I'm not sure how I think they should have implemented it though. Because by putting the roll up it makes it look like you do need to succeed, which is what your character should be thinking. Maybe if they just made it so that particular roll never comes up as a 20. Would anyone even notice?

That's not quite right though.

You decide to do it in EXACTLY the way they wanted you to, but you/your character didn't know that the attempt was always going to be futile.

How should a tabletop DM handle something that?

As I understand it, landing a crit does do something, but not what you were hoping for.

Its really not ...
This is only the most obvious one, but there is several other cases across the game. :-/

Larian may be great in lots of Ways, but their writing skills ... lets just say there is room for improvements.

//Edit:
Another example is Ketheric:
You beat the shit out of him ... except you didnt.
So you beat the shit out of him ... except you didnt.
So you beat the shit out of him ... and you finaly did.

There is nothing wrong with returning vilain ... or having phased combat ... but stuff like that can be done better.
If you beat the vilain to 0HP ... you expect that you just beat them ...
Once cutscene, where they run away and you are standing there looking at them smiling like an idiot plays ... you feel robed of that wictory.
> Corect way to do this is easy tho ... simply double Boss HP ... and let him run once he is beaten under 50% ... then let him start another fight with the same amount he had after previous battle.

See the difference?
> In first case DM panicked, bcs you are stronger than he expected ... and so he pulled some escape out of his ass, out of sudden. (I know this didnt happen, but it feels that way.)
> In second case, DM had prepared plan for his villain to escape ... and in your next confrontation, there are echoes of your previous battle!

-

Another example is Arabella:
That is something i was complaining about the WHOOOOLE EA ... and yes, it still bothers me ...
You have incredibly limited options to handle the situation.
Either you are smooth talker (Charisma check) ... or the kid will most likely die, and you WILL just stand there, smiling like an idiot, doing nothing, watching the most horrible tragedy happens ...

Even in cases when your character HAVE healing spells ...
Even in case when your character allready HAVE RESSURECTION SPELL !!! ...
Even in cases when your character HAVE poison neutralizing potions ...
Even in cases when your character IS fast enough to ATEMPT to catch/kill/kick/throw themselves in between the child and the snake and getting the bite instead of them ...

None of this matters ... you either do exactly what your DM prepared for, or you fail ... there is no middle ground.

-

I could give you lots of other examples ...
But they are all listed here:
https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=741085#Post741085

Exactly as it was suggested at least twice in this very topic ...
Simply dont let people roll.

The whole scene we had here could be litteraly exactly the same ... minus the roll ...
1. Dominate the brain.
> cutscene plays out.

See? Its not that hard.

If you include roll there, you are telling your player "hey, you actually CAN affect this outcome" ... they can spend spellslots, potions, inspirations and other stuff ... in order to gain that "different" outcome you just promised them BY LETTING THEM ROLL ... and all they get as reward is exactly the same shit.

There is difference between:
Player: I want to persuate King to give me his kingdom.
DM: No, you cant do that.

and

Player: I want to persuate King to give me his kingdom.
DM: Okey, roll for it.
Player: Nat 20!
DM: Yeah ... no, you didnt.

Its just like when your Boss is promising you extra fat bonus, if you take all night shifts and weekends for one of your colleagues ...
And so you do ... you working your ass off for whole month, exited about that bonus ...
And in the end of the month you get the regular paycheck ... and if you ask about the bonus, your boss simply grins at you and say "got ya" ...
How could anyone expect different outcome than anger and frustration?

In tabletop this is rightfully called toxic DMing ...
Some DMs sadly forgot that they are supposed to play "with" players .. not "against" them.

And what exactly is that?
See, thats the problem.

Or you let them try a persuasion check, because that's a normal thing for a player to attempt. Succeeding doesn't make him do what they want, but it makes him look more favorably on them and maybe not arrest them for high treason or something.



Apparently it weakens it a bit in the boss fight.

I'm not sure what the first fight you're talking about is, but I'm pretty sure I'd either already been told he was invulnerable before meeting him for the first time and that my task was to figure out how and stop that. And there was that bit where the low-level goblin tried to attack him and he healed up in the cutscene. I did get up to the roof while he was still invulnerable but I knew fighting him would be pointless.
The fight on the roof after finding Nightsong, yeah, I was looking forward to smashing him up before he fled. But the writing there is fine. In a tabletop game you probably wouldn't have any idea of how many HP he had left, the GM might at most say "he's taken a few scratches" or something before he flees. He probably just got some massive healing spell cast on him in the time it takes you to get down there - after all, it only takes 1 round to cast Heal.

Apologies if you did actually get him down to 0HP and he went unconscious, I can see that feeling worse (although again if the cutscene showed him being retrieved he could still have been healed fully by the time you get down to him). But for me, I think he was on about 33% health when he ran.

I disrespectfully disagree ...

Its normal thing for player to come up with what they would like to do ... but its also normal thing for DM to keep those things in check.

Rogue cant roll for Sleight of Hands to steal a Moon.
Commoner cant Persuate king to give him the crown and title.
Barbarian cant roll Atletic to snap grown tree in half with two fingers.
Wizard cant roll Arcana to invent spell that would instantly kill everything in the dungeon.

Those are things that simply are-not-possible ...
And its your responsibility as a DM to set bar on what is possible, and what isnt.

If that is how you want to DM ... its your choice.
All i can say is that i would walk away from such table, bcs it smells like railroading ... and i dont like railroading.

When i roll for something, its bcs i want that thing to happen ...
When you dont want that thing to happen, simply dont let me roll ... by allowing roll, you allowed the thing to happen ... that is whole purpose of that roll.

I mean ... w/e really ... do it this way, if you want to, you will learn in time ...
Just do a favor to yourself, and each time you give your players this "different" outcome ... ask them after the session end, how they felt about it ... and if they wouldnt rather preffer you to simply tell them that is not possible and move on.
You may be surprised.

Dont seem to be so "apparent" when i needed to ask, does it?

---


Thats the first fight ...

Indeed ...
But here you do ... so it should be taken under concideration.

See thats the problem with Video games ...
You DO know that he had only 2hp left, when you hit him with your 2d6+7+10+1d4+2d8 ...
You DO know that you killed him, that is how things work.
And so if writers dont want to you kill him just yet, they simply cant let you get him to 0HP ...

Luckily for them ... they have all the power they need to make it the way they want to ...
Sadly for us ... they (for some reason) refuse to use it. :-/

Honestly? That would be even more infuriating.
I mean that dude just gulped half of my spellslots and other resources ... almost beaten my tank and i dont have much to heal myself with anymore ... surely he didnt just took "a few scratches"

Another good explanation that only swap one problem with another.

I mean sure ... he could heal ... shame he forgot how to do that for rest of the fight huh?
Speaking of wich ... kinda shame that more enemies dont heal themselves, certain Necromancy spells (or arrows) feel quite pointless, when they dont. :-/
I mean ... "enemy can no longer hear in this round" ... yeah great, but they dont anyway, so what exactly does that achieve?

Anyway ...
You are missing the point ... he wouldnt be beaten bcs there is no way to heal meanwhile ... he would have missing HP in order to reflect your players effort!
They just finished fighting him, few minutes ago ... if he is now standing here in full strength, what purpose did that previous fight served? What was that for? Nothing thats what.
BUT!
If you instead get his HP from his both phases together ...
You completely change how it whole feels.

Right now you have:
You killed him (0HP, you know that) > except you didnt ... he run ... you find him > you killed him again (0HP, you know that) > except you didnt ... he transforms ... you killed him again > congratulations he is finaly dying.

Instead you would get:
You beaten him a lot ... he run ... he is beaten, since you beaten him previously > you beaten him even more ... he transforms in furtile atempt to destroy you at any cost ... you kill him (0HP, you know that).

Doesnt that feel better?
It does to me.

Hey, i can be wrong ... after all im just a human.

I have a relevant example to this discussion. I'm running a one on one campaign of pathfinder with a friend of mine. in our last session she wanted to overthrow the leader of a local theives guild andtake it over. At level two. She wanted to roll to intimidate or persuade him to back down, or failing that challenge him to single combat. Again, she's only level two at this stage. So I told her outright that this charcter was way too high-level and she could not successfully intimidate or overcome him. She would have to do other things while she levelled up before being allowed to try that. So I'm with Rag, don't allow players to roll if you don't want them to be able to succeed at all. The same goes with failure, don't ask for a roll if you're not prepared for the players to lose. Sometimes I'll bend that rule though, and have them always get the necessary outcome but maybe do better or get a complication if they roll a crit one way or the other.

I have a relevant example to this discussion. I'm running a one on one campaign of pathfinder with a friend of mine. in our last session she wanted to overthrow the leader of a local theives guild andtake it over. At level two. She wanted to roll to intimidate or persuade him to back down, or failing that challenge him to single combat. Again, she's only level two at this stage. So I told her outright that this charcter was way too high-level and she could not successfully intimidate or overcome him. She would have to do other things while she levelled up before being allowed to try that. So I'm with Rag, don't allow players to roll if you don't want them to be able to succeed at all. The same goes with failure, don't ask for a roll if you're not prepared for the players to lose. Sometimes I'll bend that rule though, and have them always get the necessary outcome but maybe do better or get a complication if they roll a crit one way or the other.

I haven't gotten to any of these fights yet, but I completely agree with RagnarokCzD and Gray Ghost.

It's almost like the Larian devs have never played D&D...

Personally, I think that if players make a plan that the DM knows will fail, it's OK to let them execute it and taste failure.
In this case, the party's expectation that they could dominate the brain with the netherstones was unworkable, because the brain had become too powerful. The party couldn't know that in advance of course, so they had to experience the failure to revise the plan. (Let the emperor revise it)

Not allowing them to fail that plan, I would consider railroading.
The rolls add some suspense and expectations that the plan could work.

I can empathize with players being upset with this, but I see a logic and reasoning behind it.
I guess you wouldn't like to have me as DM. (But then, I was raised on 1st edition AD&D and the basic-expert system, which was quite a bit rougher than the 5th ed.)

But those are not mutualy exclusive ...

If all that would be removed was that roll ... you would get exactly same experience, except you wouldnt burn all your resources in order to gain nothing. :-/

---

This is another problem i have with Larian, they dont hold on their own rules.

Whole game Crit Failures are screwing you ... and Crit Sucesses are screwing your enemies ... HERE is the only place where it become really important ... but when its important, the rule you got used to stoped working.

Same goes for Non-lethal attacks ... whole game they have no impact on litterally anything, any important NPC you knock out is simply concidered dead from story perspective ... except when you reach Minsc ... sudently, that is the only case where rule you got used started working.

Same goes for Nere ... whole game the world is patiently waiting for you until you reach the trigger, you can walk the whole rest of the map, you can long rest for days, weeks, months, and maybe even years and nothing happens ... sudently, there is time limit nobody bothered to tell you about and if you reach it, you lock yourself out of content.

I mean ... either is fine Larian, but for ANYONE SAKE make your mind! :-/

I agree that storywise there are a lot of holes in the game, and especially concerning chronology a strong effort of mentally "ignoring" inconsistencies is required.
Still I love the game.
But with repsect to the rolls of this topic, I'm not against them. The alternative would be an uninterrupted cinematic cutscene that shows the futile attempt to dominate the brain. Personally, after reflection I prefer these "fake" rolls as an immersion for the player to finally execute the plan that they fought so long and hard for. Even if it's doomed to fail.... But you can't know that until you try. And actually trying it may make the experience more immersive.
But, as I said I can totally empathize with players who don't find this cool at all.

I was reminded of some comparable situations. First, Frodo in Mount Doom. It is totally impossible for a ringbearer to harm, let alone destroy the one ring. Everyone should have known that, but we hoped for the best anyway. (Hope, such a tease!) Frodo Holding the ring over the volcano crater could only hope to roll a ciritical success, but even thatis not powerful enough for this case. And it is credible....

Another comparison that crossed my mind comes from John Milius' 1982 Conan film. (If you haven't seen this film I warmly recommend it as one of the best fantasy films in the history of filmmaking)
Conan' will infiltrate the camp of Tulsa Doom . He has obtained an amulet of the cult followers, stolen from one of Tulsa's snake towers. He shows the amulet to the guard, who examines it closely and lets Conan pass.
Deception check succeeded ! the Conan "player" rejoyces.
But, the guard actually noticed that there was someting not right with this amulet, and deceived Conan by letting him in and then warn the guard commander that something's amiss with that guy overthere.
So Conan was captured and hung on the tree of death to die from exposure while being eaten alive by vultures.
Fortunately his party members could save him just in time and the adventure could continue.

But yes, the "player" (i.e. Conan) saw that his deception roll succeeded, but the DM decided otherwise and the player was deceived instead.

I’ve not played in a long time, but when I did the thing we liked about it was the freedom to do unexpected things and sometimes ridiculous things (our first role playing game).

So a barbarian might try to snap a tree with two fingers if they were incredibly drunk, and it was in character to try to prove how strong they were. Our DM would probably let us roll to see how much of an arse they’d make of themselves. It would be obvious to the player it wouldn’t actually work because it wasn’t possible.

I don’t see how something like that is being “railroaded” more than the DM just saying no?

Anyway, that’s all a bit off topic. BG3 a video game where we don’t have infinite choices for such things, In this case it’s a roll that the story has led us to believe is possible, until we attempt it. There’s a roll to show it’s a battle of the minds, using the system we are used to, but they make it a 99 to tell us how hopelessly outmatched we are and that it was a futile effort. That seems fine to me.


Well it is the whole point of the thread, stated in the OP and shown in the video.

It’s not very apparent at the time of making the roll though.

I think this was intended as a plot twist. You think you can win, then you can't, then even if you are technically failed you are saved anyway. Just a bit of a roller-coaster for the player)

Non-lethal attacks are weird, it is a strange mechanic. First time you really need it is when you want to recruit Minthara, and the whole scenario for siding with the grove AND recruiting her was added later in the game.
During EA I was really trying everything to save the masked guys at hag's and discovered that they will disappear when you do long rest. I reached out to Larian thinking this was a bug but they answered this was intended. So I think this whole mechanic was firstly created like that, and after releasing the full game they rethought it a bit, which landed us in this weird place. To be honest I kinda like that this is so obscure, it goes well with my nostalgia for the older series with weird bugs and gameplay mechanics, but I can imagine how it can be generally annoying to many.

As for Nere I know for a fact that the game has multiple time sensitive stuff but it is connected to difficulty levels. Only when I started the honor playthrough I discovered that a lot can be missed. For example, my Florrick burned to death because I didn't went to the burning tavern right away after I found it. There is a guide on steam where most of these listed, I was surprised how many things were actually time sensitive starting act 1