Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems Wild Magic Barbarian- are the rolls truly random?

I've been playing Wild Magic Barbarian, generally enjoying it, but I can't help but feel the 'random' wild magic rolls are leaning heavily toward one option - Magic Infusion. I feel like two out of every three rolls ends up landing on this.

I'm nearing level 6- and I've seen the "difficult terrain vines" effect once, and the 'teleport' effect twice- and meanwhile I've seen Magic Infusion what I would estimate to be around 25 times. The rest of the effects between 5-8 times each. Again these are all guesses but this has what the experience has felt like.

Is anyone else having this experience or am I just that unlucky? Could the weighted system be affecting this? Problem is, I can't test this too much because I'm playing the barb in a multiplayer campaign that I am not hosting.

I have Karlach specced as a Wild Magic Barbarian in my playthrough and haven't particularly noticed any one effect coming up more frequently than any other. Though now you say it, I might have only got the teleport one once early on - I can't even remember exactly what it does. And if the Wild Magic table is the same as per 5e RAW, I don't recall having got the necrotic damage one even once. All the others feel like they've popped up reasonably frequently, and not magic infusion more than any other. I'll pay more attention going forward though!

By truly random you mean uniformly distributed (distributions other than uniform are just as random as the uniform distribution). Does it say somewhere in the description that the wild magic options are uniform? There's no reason that one wouldn't be more probable than the others. Even if they are uniformly distributed, you still expect some player's sample distributions to look like they were drawn from a non-uniform population, since there are many players playing. That's how randomness (whether uniform or otherwise) works.

I assumed the OP just meant that is there an equal chance of each effect cropping up each time we rage (ie, is it a roll of a fair d8, as per RAW, or is the die weighted, either with karmic dice on or off). As you say, even with a fair die we're not necessarily going to see the effects coming up an equal number of times, which is why it's hard to know just from observation in the game whether the die used is a fair one or not.

Yeah, that's what the uniform distribution is - all outcomes are equally likely. Just clarifying the terminology and pointing out fact that rare events, like 25 Magic Infusions, do indeed happen under processes that are 'truly random' - it's deterministic processes that don't do that.

Also to put it out there, since these discussions do tend to go down the path of blatant misuse of statistics by enthusiasts who have just googled up their maths degrees... if you don't know the difference between an attack roll and a saving throw, it's possible that you're not the best judge of the implementation of the DnD rules. Similarly, if you don't know the difference between random and uniformly distributed, you might not be the best judge of the implementation of dice rolls.