Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Why I think dice rolls seem to not work in PC games

The only way a dice roll makes sense in a game is; if you cannot take it back, also known as saving and loading a game.

If, actually when, it is the case that you can indeed save and load it stops making sense and just becomes a time sink. Now you could argue just stick with your dice rolls however, specially in the highest difficulty setting, it is often simply impossible to do that. For example there are many ambushes which if all your party members fail perception checks and if you walk into them you simply cannot win that fight. It can often be over before you get a turn. So it becomes; either at least one of your party members succeed the check, which is often the case, or you have to reload a previous save. What was the point of that dice roll then?

I am not sure how that could be tweaked, or if it could be tweaked in a way that it is played in a way the rolls make sense? Also there is the fact that as human beings you do not want to roll dice and keep losing. If you can take it back 90% of the time you will because, well, why exactly do you want to lose? OK maybe for a different experience.. But that quick load button is just looking at you.. Do you really wanna lose? Do you?

then dont save scum.

As i said in my OP, sometimes it is simply impossible. I guess it could make sense if the game somehow never put you in impossible situations. But it sometimes does, like you can find yourself in a fight you will lose 999 times out of a 1000.

You can make it work by adding interesting consequences for failure. If you don't then save scumming is heavily encouraged by the design. Disco Elysium makes dice rolls work, Baldurs Gate 3 fails more often than it succeeds.

I think Larian did a good job with the dice rolls. Could it be that your actual problem is running in to ambushes too often? I'm sure there are ways to remedy that.

I'm not sure the situations are impossible. Can you give some examples?

Maybe if you're having trouble, it's worth lowering the difficulty level to something more manageable?

It is not that they did a bad job with them, but they are just inherently flawed when you can load back to 5 minutes ago and when you can end up in impossible fights. First off, for it to work no fight should be impossible and i am not sure how that could be set up. Second, maybe if some dice rolls/ decisions made their actual result known way later it could be more fun. One good example of story unfolding later is The Witcher 3, when i realized i messed up a romance the first time my previous save i could return to, to fix it would cost me 10 hours of playtime. Same is true with pretty much every decision in TW3. I am not gonna let the story derail completely if i can load up a save from 2 minutes ago.

You can easily find yourself in impossible fights if you fail to detect many of the ambushes in the game. One example i can think of was the Shar trial ambush by your own party. If you fail the perception checks, your party will pretty much end you before you get a turn. I am not saying it is impossible in the sense that it is hard to progress, you can load up a save from 5 minutes ago and most of the time at least one party member will succeed the perception check. I am saying, that kind of dice roll is pointless where it can pretty much go one meaningful way.

i love the rolls in this and the inspiration push system
if the problem is you can cheat then A. don't or B. cheat its sp who cares, remove the feature for everyone isn't necessary when A and B are right there

There are different options to this depending on how hard or lenient you want the game to be.
A harder experience would be an ironman mode: If your party wipes, the entire save directory of that character is being deleted. Have fun starting from scratch.
A more lenient experience would be to try and incorporate the idea of "failing forward", which might be difficult to achieve in specific cases. For combat scenarios the easiest way to make it work would be to make a party wipe not the end of the experience, by having the characters captured instead of killed, and the characters could then either try to break out of their predicament on their own, or get rescued by the remaining characters in camp. Offering basically the same amount of XP that you'd get for finishing the fight as for losing and breaking out then potentially enables you to get back with a higher level than before.
With traps it's a bit more difficult to achieve, depending on how you approach the idea of traps in the first place. Larian uses a pretty traditional approach to traps as a HP tax, which basically doesn't work with a failing forward approach, because the entire premise of the trap is to just have the players lose resources on them. For a failing forward system you'd need to essentially remove every type of environmental hazzard and area denial trap and instead make traps based on the need of their builder. If the builder wants to deny access to a certain area, they tend to deny access for unauthorised people, but allow access for those why can prove that they're authorised to enter - which generally also includes a failsave like a reset button the authorised person can push in order to try again. And the design of the trap should in this case also inform you about who it was that created it, which in turn should provide you with a hint of how to circumvent the trap, so that if you trigger it, you also gain a hint on how you can beat the trap on your next attempt.
Area denial traps that work like trip mines and are placed out in the wild have to be rather obvious in an approach like this. (Essentially none should have a higher difficulty than 10 for the perception check DC) They have to be easily circumventable (for example by jumping over them - and that means that they also need to be more lenient with their trigger) and they need to be not only possible to disable rather easily but also to be picked up and reused if they didn't trigger - and no I'm not suggesting that this is possible with modern trip mines, but I'm suggesting that this should be possible in a game. Traps that aren't built into the location need to be able to be relocated.

Some people lack the mental discipline to not ruin their fun by circumventing the system. I don't think that it would be a bad thing to have an option in the settings menu that overwrites all saves from within a certain number of minutes as soon as you fail a check, in order to force you to live with the consequences. Red Dead Redemption 2 does this with autosaves and it drives me nuts, but for some people it might be exactly what they need.

I do think that OP makes a valid point with regard to combat and ambush rolls. It's one thing to say go with the rolls when it's story and dialogue stuff and passive checks (though I think people overstate how interesting failures are in this game) but with ambushes and the combats they lead to, the only options are you win or you reload until you win.

I was telling it for ages, to pl who rages about not having "roll for attributes"
"Are you trying to convince me you not going to save-scum if you didn't get good roll?"
"i would never... i... screw you and your comment, i want my rolls for score anyway!"
"So.... you just want to cheat? I mean... that's your right as a product owner. Just don't expect cheating capabilities be ship with the game... made by devs themselves. Go on Nexus - there ae shit tons of cheating mods"
"How dare you call me a cheater?! I wouldn't... you... arghhhh!"

It'll never not be be ridiculous to me how hard it is for some people to admit that save scumming until you get the result you want is the exact same thing as cheating/modding/hacking to force the result you want.
Like, if they really did add rolling for stats, they should also add the option to just set every stat to 18 to save the rerollers the time they would have spent brute forcing that result.
And the people save scumming all their perception checks should just install a mod that forces them to pass.
Etc.

This. One great example of this in BG3 is with Priestess Gut, if you fail to persuade her you get a different but still interesting result that isn't just failure.

One issue is how powerful ambushes are in 5e, with the enemy getting an entire (Larian-homebrew buffed) turn before you even get a chance to go, and poor initiative rolls could mean the enemy gets 2 turns before you. This is especially egregious in areas with instant-death pits. If the enemy shoves 2 of my characters into lava before I even get a chance to go, you bet your ass I'm going to immediately reload. Why bother fighting through 2-3 additional turns where I'm almost certain to TPK and have to reload anyway?

What makes you think games that don't show you dicerolls explicitly don't have such issues?
(for example people who drop into bossfights in early biohazard games without enough ammo/knife to actually beat the boss)

As long as you have one party member run away and return to camp, you can use the power of money to buy back party members who died.

Hell you can even just keep one party member in camp at all times, and when fight begins(pausing on your turn) - walk that party member from camp to the fight.

In no way was that Shar trial even close to difficult to see. Are you not hiding as you move in a room that's marked dangerous? Are you not showing enemy sight lines as you walk around enemy camps? It's almost impossible to get ambushed in this game. You can actually look ahead and see things in line of sight. I don't think I have ever been ambushed outside of clicking something and it spawning mobs on top of us and those encounters aren't that hard. Use the tools at your disposal and these impossible fights you talk about don't exist.

My main problem with ambushes is that while my party might spot them, it's not always obvious where they are (enemies don't necessarily appear on the map) so I have no idea what they're referring to and blunder into it anyway while trying to avoid it.

There was a very difficult ambush fight I remember from Act 2 with a bunch of those corrupted tree things (don't remember what they're called); my party spotted the enemies but I still couldn't see them hiding in the bushes so thought they must have meant the ruins further ahead, which kind of defeated the point. Those in particular are also very difficult enemies, especially if initiative goes against you, as they can deal a lot of damage very quickly.

That said, my bigger issue is with good outcomes being gated behind skill checks so often; for example, also in Act 2 there are several boss encounters you can get into, but they are all avoidable with the right skill checks. But with the exception of one of them (which involves multiple saving throws, but you don't have to pass them all) you get one, and only one, chance to properly avoid the fight, otherwise you get launched into one of the hardest battles in the game, against fully custom bosses with unique abilities you have no way to predict.

This comes from the fact that we don't actually have a real DM who can adapt to situations; if I were presenting a similar scenario in actual D&D I would only ask for a skill check if they went in unprepared, i.e- just met someone and tried to convince them to do something extreme. But if they learned who they were dealing with first, got some clues as to what to expect, and then used those they might not need a check at all, or it'd be a lot easier etc. But we often don't have that level of flexibility in BG3, because everything needs to be designed from the DM side of the equation, whereas in actual D&D things are more collaborative because players will suggest ideas you didn't think of, and a good DM adapts. Maybe there weren't clues originally, but you drop something on them in the moment.

A lot of these are things that can maybe be improved upon with some of the full patches. For ambushes in particular it'd be nice to see ambushers highlighted more like traps are when they're spotted, or if they already are, make the effect more visible because I definitely didn't see it.

I didn't see it happen ONCE.
And I played the game in Tactician.
The only scenario where I can see this being a possibility is if players go out of their way to rush ahead in more advanced/challenging areas and skip content along the way.

For dialogues dice rolls are bad. But for combat it could work. The damage rolls are a huge problem in this game. The amount of damage depends on your rolls too so if you are unlucky you do next to nothing damage and your foe can kill you in his turn. To fix this in BG3 is very complicated Larian would have to change the combat system completly. The gap between min damage and max damage seems way to high for the enemies Larian placed in the game. On tactician they almost always hit. Even on the lower difficult settings you can lose a fight within the first round because of bad luck. But dice rolls are still the best mechanic for crpg fights. What would be the alternative?