Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Bad DM

If Baldurs Gate was a DM i would have left the table and probably slapped their food/drink out of their hands and wipe all their dice to the floor as i left.

I become so annoyed with the Medium difficulty and the almost necessity to Save scum or die at the hands of monsters that are a lower level that i started doing Min\max meta builds and eventually started Recording the scores.

So let me first start by stating that Ive played Table top D&D since i was like 12 and played All of the D&D games, even the crappy ones. I am a HUGE D&D fan and really do enjoy the dice rolling aspect to add a level of variance.

The Second thing id like to point out is the strategy and Tactics in game do not take a genius to figure out and exploit, please DO NOT comment about this as it will prove to me that you're not comprehending the point i'm going to make.

Third and last premise here, each individual roll is a percentage in and of itself and is not affected by save scumming nor other rolls. 70% chance to hit could result in 12+ save scum attempts to actually hit because each individual roll has a 30% failure rate which is not enforced.

The average chance to actually hit (attack roll) is actually about 13% lower than shown on average. I started to run save scum and found that a 65% chance is actually closer to 45% when i reload the same sequence 100 times. (i really did reload exactly 100 times to make sure i wasn't getting frustrated for no reason.)

The Average Damage that players can produce is only about 50% of the Total damage your character CAN produce, so a 4d8 will hit for 27 or below, and out of 100 reloads never reached maximum damage of 38; with average damage being around 16.
While the Average damage for an enemy NPC is about 70% of the total damage; an enemy casting the same 4d8 spell will have an average damage of 25, and can max damage at 38 about 5% of the time, with a critical rating i will discuss below. Its not lost on me that a 3d8 spell could do just 3 damage... yup i got that and its VERY rare to do that low of a damaging strike (somewhere around 3%) but the NPCs, performing the same spell as the same class, will produce more damage on average which is the problem. I want to have the Big D*ck energy, not the NPC.

The chance to crit as a player is something like 1% as out of 5000+ reloads, i NEVER critically hit. I have seen only 1 critical hit from Lae'zel near the beginning of the game but did not save the log and therefore couldn't add it to my stats; i have however seen the enemy combatants crit with an average of about 12%. Again, i bought this game and expect to feel like im Powerful and strong and instead it a LOT of "oh better stealth the entire party in to the fight other wise my Fighter and Barbarian are going to just get WRECKED". i want my fighter and Barbarian to walk in like the Bad asses i built them to be, not skulk around like scared and sheepish weaklings. even the rouges stealth is more defensive than assassin like.. its pathetic.

This is the reason people are Save Scumming... the game has a Garbage DM and the game creators probably thinks they are making the game more fun with difficulty, which as a DM myself i do as well to make sure the players feel that fear of death with the EVER PRESENT RELIEF OF VICTORY...... BG3 does not have the second part.

The NPC's do more damage on average with no real pendulum back to the players favor, outside of game mechanic competency. All Players like to feel powerful and strong, but REALLY enjoy the struggle in Boss fights! no one wants an easy win; having said that, a goblin trash mob that's half my level should NOT be able to KO any of my characters in the first round of combat. Or Worse my characters suddenly go limp noodle constantly rolling in the low 25% of whatever my damage dice happens to be: Player 1d6 AVG damage: 2; Player 1d8 AVG dmg: 3; Player 2d8 AVG Dmg: 5 while the SAME Dice roles for NPCs are closer to 3, 5, 7 respectively. That needs to be switched at least for Trash NPC fights. Maybe for boss fights i could understand buffing the NPC "for the struggle" affect, but not for low level patrolling NPC's.

Again i have about 200 hours / 5000 Save scum reloads and i KNOW i cant be the only one getting numbers like this with the amount of posts on Steam, this forums, and even the D&D discussion boards all complaining about the same thing. Players are Sand-bagged, NPC seems to naturally roll higher and there is NO SKILL IN RANDOM DICE ROLLING; with the constancy of my numbers it doesn't seem to "just be a luck thing". My log suggests the enemy NPC's rolls are far too consistent in higher damage against the player UNLESS you save scum, which really sucks the fun out of the game, but its better than getting a party wipe.


I am not sure if this is an attempt to be like dark souls which is annoying and sadistic. That game genre completely ignored basic martial prowess and although it was extremely satisfying to beat the game and had an excellent story... the creator was insulting the idea of martial discipline and its art. i don't expect to maneuver like the Devil My Cry game mechanics either but Dark Souls characters wouldn't be able to make a sandwich without loosing all of their stamina. Neither of these Games should be considered when creating D&D games nor should they even be considered as a comparison.

Equally Dragon age is also a poor comparison despite the combat and game feel being very similar, the entire Random Number generator of the "dice rolls" in D&D completely ignore forced stats. Dragon Age you can Force Accuracy and Crits with some respect to the Enemy NPC's states, where as D&D its entirely Chance with some mod buffs to dice role depending on the class, specialization, and thankfully some of the equipment. Otherwise it doesnt matter, this is gambling without money.

The only saving grace in this game seems to be entirely GEAR which gives you some actually ability to start feeling powerful around level 5 but very little to do with your character and feats until about level 12 only to fall back into that same pattern around level 15.

Buff the player roles by a point or three... debuff the NPCs by a point or three.... make the players feel strong. in boss fights sure makes sense, otherwise stop making every single fight a set of super sayian NPCs versus my completely weak but tactically and strategically focused group.

BG3 completely and utterly encourages CHEESE. Because cheesing things is FUN in Larian's eyes and many gamers/youtubers nowdays.

aka, Its not how to have fun a solidly designed game system and rules, thats BORING. its how to BREAK apart that system and do silly stuff in the game to win.
Larian's Baldur's Gate is the Monty Python of D&D games. And people seem to love it.
To Larian's credit, its an original take on the genre.

I dislike it, but what can you do? It is what gamers like now.

BG3 is definitely a sweaty DM that most real people would not want to play with in a real situation, but not really for the reasons you're focused on here - these are their own problem though, don't worry!

You probably know this, but just for clarity and background: Video games don't have the ability to actually roll random dice - they use maths; specifically, algorithms with a variable amount of chaos-sourcing inputs, in order to generate a string of numbers that can seem to mimic, or simulate, actual random rolls.

A lot of players put in a lot of time and effort to gather rolling data during the EA, and to assess the game's RNG, and what was found back then was that Larian's RNG was not very good; it was lacking in adequate sources of chaos, and produced a noticeable wave pattern indicative of the algorithm it was using to generate its numbers. Many people claimed to have no problem, or noted the prevalence of confirmation bias in individual cases, but most of the people who took substantial samples and seriously looked at it found the results to be unsatisfactory.

Larian's response was to introduce 'loaded dice' - which is basically the game putting its fingers on the scale to fudge the results, all the while using language that functionally calls the player a cheater for using it - it's turned ON by default, and you have to turn it off in your settings before you play.

The intent of the loaded dice was to break up failure streaks and prevent players from being crit too often, and so on... the result, however, was that it fudged the dice for everyone, including enemies. Just as an example: If you have a particularly high Ac, and most enemies miss you most of the time (or should do), you'll frequently see enemies rolling in the 16-19 bracket, just to hit you, so that it can 'break up' that streak of repeat misses from the enemy: high AC = you get hit MORE, because the enemy rolls better against you. They'll also crit you more often. That's just one example of ho it ends up working in practice. The same theoretically applies to you, the player, but there are always far more enemies than players, so you will almost always be on the receiving end of the loaded dice fudge.

So, the first question is, were loaded dice turned on or off when you did your tests?

I don't believe anyone has tested the averages of damage rolls specifically, in our past collations; we were mostly focused on the d20 rolls, so that might be interesting data to see.

What are you talking about?

i am stating that the Dice system drastically favors the enemy NPCs and youre talking about Cheese which wouldn't be affected by a slight change...

@niara, Yes Karmic dice was turned off, but i am actually in favor of slightly fudging the numbers in favor of the Player. i mean i want to have a fun fight but i don't want to almost be killed by a create thats half my level. that makes it feel like my characters are under powered. I honestly think a 1-3 point favor of the player and 1-3 point disfavor of the NPCs may be enough to keep the game within "oh shit i might die" feel without completely undermining the feeling of strength and competency; that dopamine drip we all crave.

Other games of the genre have difficulty adjustment settings that allow you to tweak things like that (pathfinder and solasta both have a level of granularity in this regard, with pathfinder having more overall, though both let you nudge dice rolls for or against players at a general/universal level if you want). Larian's game does not have this in any decent way, sadly - it has its three difficulty modes that are fixed packages locked out of adjustment, and to a certain extent the game mocks and insults you for choosing a difficulty that favours you. It's like the sweaty dm that says "Oh, you'd like the dice to favour you a bit more? Oh, I guess you need the easy game for babies then, baby, here you go, here's the easy baby game, where everything falls over in one hit and the enemies are dumb and have no weapons! Oh, but because you're such a baby who can't play the game well, I'll lock out a bunch of your customisation options too, wouldn't want to confuse the little baby now would we? can't have you trying to customise your character and maybe messing up! ha, ha, ha, ha! That's the game you want right?" Sorry if that seems cynical - that was my impression of how the game acted when I changed difficulty settings and saw what it did.

You can work around that because you cna change difficulty on the fly at any time, so, you can turn the difficulty up when you want to, for example, multiclass your level up (something locked out by being on the lower difficulty), and then put it back to story mode when you've done your customising... but the fact remains that you've got to *work around* this 'design choice'...

Are you okay? did someone say that to you once?


You and i BOTH know that's not a solution. This is a feedback Page not a Work around page.
The feedback is to not Slob on the NPCs so much; its frustratingly unfunny and kind of shows a piss poor understanding of the D&D game mechanics. Further this is why People started to TORRENT the game instead of Paying for it. Why pay for a game that insults its player base? not advocating im just pointing out that if you piss off the players they WILL retaliate. Look at Diablo. . . . Fallout 76 . . . . Star Citizen . . . No Mans Sky. . . . Elite Dangerous. . . . Battle Front. . . . Seriously i could go on.

Enemy NPCs do an average of 60% of their Max damage and regularly reach well into the 70% range; While players are only able to get about 50% and will reach about 60% of max damage about 10% of the time. Redesign the NPC's if they are such garbage they need a handicap.

Enemy NPC's have, on average a 12% chance to crit, while ive only seen one of my characters crit ever and it was so early in the game i didnt record it in my tracker. Again, if the NPC's are too weak then redesign them dont f*ck with the Rolls to make the poor design "better".

Enemy NPC's have a 13% advantage over AC, again, poor design; fudging the numbers doesn't make the game more fun its just painting over bad design

Put all of this together and it shows the Company and the game disrespects my Time as a player.

No, not at all. most of my in person D&D has been very positive ^.^ That's literally just how a lot of Larian's presumptuous game design feels to me a lot of the time, backed up by a lot of their media presence and responses during the EA period. When overwhelming player feedback tells Larian something they don't like, they have a tendency to respond to it in maliciously compliant ways - they still believe that they know better, so go out of their way to do the thing that was asked and make it really bad, seemingly deliberately so... and yes, I know, academically, that that cannot be what actually goes on, of course it isn't, but that is often how it comes away feeling, and they way they behave in their public facing media does not dissuade this impression. They also have a tendency to make assumptions about player behaviour or player requests, and bundle things up together in moderately tone-deaf ways, and what they do often comes off feeling like they're backhandedly blaming the player base for compelling them to change something. This has been my experience with them, as a company, throughout the Ea process. The fact that choosing a lower difficulty setting forcefully locks you out of systems and prevents you from engaging with them - such as the ability to multiclass your character - is just one example of that.

I've said it elsewhere, but what really puzzles me is why Larian continue to get free passes on so many terrible things that would see other companies torn a new one over. I don't get it, perhaps because the shiny PR gloss and hype, thin as it is, went away for me two years ago.

one more thing, The Character selection in interaction screen STILL doesnt work... fix that too

Snaps so this is on par with them then? well another torrent seed then

I should caveat that, as far as reviewers and feedback participants go, I've become very jaded and quite cynical about the game; I started from a place of great excitement and high hopes, put a great deal of time and effort into giving feedback and trying to help the game be the best it could be, and the results over time made me bitter - I'm probably more cynical and unforgiving about this game's weak points (and there are many of them) than most other posters on this forum, so please do take my personal opinions with a grain of salt. Most do not judge the game, or Larian, as harshly as I do.

@Niara
ROFL, this was to good! Truthfully though how I seen Explorer Mode was like playing as a premade character. Some people just want to get in and go, my cousin was like that, just wanted to do the story and move on. Personally always stayed away from first difficulty for this reason as several games will remove features. I can't remember off the top of my head but I do know I ran into that before.

For OP, I've played Balanced up to probably a quarter into act 2 and tactician just a quarter in. I've been party wiped first round twice if I remember correctly, both in act 1. An actually reloaded cause I didn't like a scenario in act 2. So yeah I save scummed once, still feels bad even doing it the one time.

act 1
act 2
For the damage part, I can agree especially on my not so great companion Gale and probably my questionable build for my main lol (Lightfoot Halfling Lore Bard multiclassed into Arcane Trickster Rogue). My companions are not min maxed and they all were one class.

I would say no on crap rolls, I know Karlach hits like a truck and has three attacks as a Frenzied Barb (two main plus bonus attack). An Shadowheart being a cleric was able to main tank act 1 from start, there was a few times where it was just her still standing, so sad but true.

A few fun features, pretty sure there are different ways to increase crit chance, probably a feat is one way, Halflings reroll ones, & there is also a feat to reroll damage which my Karlach has Savage attacker. You can respec your companions an min/max there attributes.

Final thoughts though is if it really really bothers you, just get a mod and make your characters invincible or whatever.

Edit*Oh I turned off Karmic Dice also.

While I'm not going to comment on the difficulty of the game, I totally agree about your comment on the inconsistency of the displayed "percent chance to hit" and the chance to hit in practice.

During my past tactician run, even with advantage and a displayed 80% chance to hit, I would consistently miss, sometimes even two times in a row. I'm not sure whether that is due to the nature of the difficulty possibly adjusting dice rolls or just pure unluckiness. Since I have powerful team compositions in tactician, I don't need to save scum when I miss, but it's still jarring how much I do miss considering there is such a high chance to hit. Please do note that I play with karmic dice off, which certainly aids in the totally incoherent nature of the dice rolls. That being said, I do wish the percentage would at least feel accurate.

Would it be possible for someone to make a data collection mod? A mod that doesn't change the gameplay at all, but just records all die rolls in a CSV data file? It would be nice to have raw data available regarding suspected bad die behaviour.

I disagree.

OP is right, that said, I've noticed that it's not always in your disadvantage.
I've noticed, for whatever reason, during Act 2, I had Karlach use Great Weapon Master, as well as Reckless Attack, and despite the percentage against some enemies claiming I had a 34% hit chance, It felt more at about the 66% mark, I did no explicit testing, but I could confidently send her in with her almost always hitting the enemy at least one of the two attacks per turn, more often both times than neither, too. - I believe this was specifically at the bossfight

Larian's RNG is a mess, and the numbers are definitely wrong, though I'm not sure if all of it is intended to give the enemies a boost.

PS: Tactician Difficulty, Karmic Dice off.